The place where the two currents of my recent reading about Rasputin and the Russian Symbolists converge is a book called The Silver Dove by Andrey Biely. It’s the story of a young Russian intellectual at the turn of the century who falls under the spell of a peasant carpenter and his wife/disciple and becomes a member of a sectarian cult. Harrison Salisbury (selected, I suppose, for his experience as an old Russia hand) points out in his brief introduction that the book, written in 1909, is an astonishing act of clairvoyance, both of the rise in influence of Rasputin and, indeed the Russian revolution itself. Tolstoy’s idea of the peasant as being the "real" soul of Russia and somehow more authentic than other Russians (you know, like the way Ypsilanti is more authentic than Ann Arbor because of the crack whores) is exposed in all its tragic foolishness. Ironically, hindsight allows us to see how the seemingly contrary idea of Westernization through the adoption of foreign ideas like, say, Marxism, led to a barbarism undreamt of by the Tartars, as the intellectual Lenin was superceded by the epitome of the crafty, brutal peasant, Stalin.

But while Salisbury downplays the literary qualities of the book in favor of the prophetic ones, in his introduction the translator George Reavey quite rightly argues for the centrality of Biely not only to Russian modernism but to world literature at large, comparing him to James Joyce in his brilliant wordplay and wide erudition. Biely’s St. Petersburg is one of those widely acknowledged but little read masterpieces and the rest of his work is even less available. The Silver Dove is fairly scarce but not expensive, a real shame because it’s a brilliant work, as you can perhaps see from the following passages:

The pock-marked woman, a hawk with browless eyes, was no tender flower germinating in the depths of his soul, no dream this, no rosy dawn, no honeyed grass, but a storm cloud, a female tiger, and she entered him like a werewolf and called him imperiously; her soft smiling lips intoxicated and confused him with a languorous sense of sadness and joy that banished all shame; and thus, revealed for an instant, the gaping jaws of a millennium now resurrected, the memory of what had never been part of his personal experience, awakening the unknown face which was terrifying familiar only in dreams; and that face was now embodied in the image of an incredible and yet existent childhood.

And I waited always: and out of the dark people defined themselves; and I waited always for the appearance out of the dark of a terrifying, languorous call, summoning me into the distance…

How she stood there, his own, his bride, who only yesterday had flown away from him to return to him today – how she stood there wreathed in green intoxication and in dripping drops of rain! O feast-filled moment!

Greedily their greedy lips opened; hands of steel, molding a slender body, stretched out impulsively, a red hot lava of breathing poured into her breast; already her lips met with lips in a long, lingering voluptuous breath; her blue dress, like her blue sky, was against the red sunset of his clothes: and above this sunset of two lives now mingled, the airy ash, the cloud of expostulations, the pink bunches of rosebay danced all around them.

And she looked him over, and how! From her eyes out of that pock-marked face blue seas began to move; the abyss yawned in her eyes and he was already swept away into a cold whirlpool of passion.

Was it dream or no dream? A body woven of gold detached itself from Matryona and covered Pyotr: their flesh vanished, burnt out: only a gold woven cloud of smoke filled the hollow oak. Was it dream or no dream?

It lasted only a brief instant; but during that instant there was nothing: no world, no space, no time. And then again their bodies defined themselves, it was as though from above, from the opening to the sky, out of the dark heaven, bright purple threads had been poured, sparkling threads, like bright Christmas gold or silver thread to make the children happy.

And out of those bright gold and silver threads a human image formed itself again; dark-woven, floating, dumb, they glowed there, settling down in their places.

The village had become a new earth; it was no longer just air, but a sweet honeyed herb; breathing it, you became intoxicated; but what would it be when it was time to sober up? Or from now on no sobering up; you will drink until you see the green serpent, but what afterwards – death?