THE SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW Volume8i, Number2-April 2003 The Symbolic Structure of Belyi's Pervoe svidanie: Echoes of Wagner and Steiner DAVID N. WELLS BELYI'S 192I long poem Pervoesvidanie(First Meeting) has often been lauded as one of his most successful and accessible works in verse. In it the mystical insights which inform all of Belyi's work are located within a detailed and convincing historical setting and social milieu, while the obscurity into which Belyi's imagination often leads him is to a large degree tempered by the poem's rigorous commitment to form.' The poem clearly has deeply serious purposes in relation to the spiritual education of its hero, and is explicitly connected in both Prologue and Epilogue with the revelatory symbolism of Pentecost, yet at the same time it retains a lightness of touch and a humour which prevent it from becoming a dry philosophical or religious tract. Pervoesvidaniehas been the subject of several critical articles, and many of its numerous difficulties have been elucidated by Nina Berberova's commentary on the text.2 Nevertheless, there are aspects of this highly complex work which remain to be substantively addressed. Two main approaches can be identified in the existing David N. Wells is a Librarian at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia. 1 G. S. Smith, 'Bely's Poetry and Verse Theory', in John E. Malmstad (ed.), Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism,Ithaca, NY, 1987, pp. 272--73. Smith refers to Pervoesvidanieas the Apollonian pole of Bely's ceuvre. 2 Andrey Bely, 7he First Encounter,trans. and introd. by Gerald Janecek, preliminary remarks, notes and comments by Nina Berberova, Princeton, NJ, I979 (hereafter, FE). This edition reproduces the I92 I Alkonost edition of Pervoe svidanie.In-text references are to line numbers in this edition, and Janecek's translations are given where appropriate, with minor amendments to conform to British spelling. 202 DAVID N. WELLS literature.First,criticshave been inclinedto explorethe autobiographical sources of the poem: the self-portrait of Belyi the student, his relationshipwith the Solov'evfamily,hisinitiationinto the complementary worlds of science and mysticism, the sublimation of Belyi's friendship with Margarita Morozova into the portrait of Nadezhda Zarina.Belyi'sevocation of the materialand spiritualworld of the prerevolutionaryMoscow of I900 wasparticularlyattractiveto commentators writing nostalgicallyin emigration, who found in it a compelling vision and perhaps a vindication of their own youth.3 Parallelshave also been drawn between Pervoe svidanie and other autobiographicalor semi-autobiographicalworksof Belyi, notably his second Symphony and his trilogy of memoirs NJachalo veka,Narubezhe dvukh stoletiiand Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii (T7he Beginning oftheCentugy, OntheBorder of TwoCenturies and BetweenTwo Revolutions), which in many respects cover similar ground, though at considerablygreaterlength and in stylisticallyvery differentterms.Discrepanciesbetween the chronology of Pervoe svidanie and Belyi's known life, on the other hand, are one factor that has led L. K. Chursina to characterizeBelyi's poem as 'memuaryv stikhakh' ('memoirsin verse')in emulation of Pushkin'sEvgenii Onegin.4 The other major focus of critical attention has been on formal aspects of Belyi's writing in the poem, and in particular musical parallels with its compositional structures. Simon Karlinsky, for example, has made a good case, in the light of Belyi'sknown interestin music and musicaltheorythat, likethe fourearlyproseworksexplicitly labelled 'symphony', Pervoe svidanie is underpinned by a conception of symphonic form.5The transposedmusical device of counterpoint has also been identified in the patterns of repetition contained in Belyi's poem.6 Other writers have paid particular attention to questions of rhythmand rhyme, alwaysnoteworthyin Belyi'swritingbecause of his theoretical interest in this area and his particular urge to creative improvisation.7Beyond fairly superficial attempts to elucidate Pervoe svidaniein the context of its textual relationship to Solov'ev's 'Tri svidaniia' ('Three Meetings') and the theme of Sophia, however, very 'See K. Mochul'skii, AndreiBelyi,Paris, I955, pp. 228-32; 0. Il'inskii, 'O poeme Andreia Belogo "Pervoe svidanie"', Novyizhurnal,go, I968 (hereafter, Jl'inskii), pp. 99-IOO, Io8; FE, passim. 4 L. K. Chursina, 'O khudozhestvennoi strukture poemy Andreia Belogo "Pervoe svidanie"', Russkaia literatura,I992, 4, pp. 4I-45 (hereafter, Chursina). Parallels with Pushkin have also been noted by others: see Il'inskii, p. i io; Boris Christa, 7he...