things that have probably never been achieved with the aid of
anything like his instruments. The first of the series of his big
novels appeared in 1909: it is the _Silver Dove_, a story of Russian
mystical sectarians and of an intellectual who gets entangled in
their meshes. At its appearance it sold only five hundred copies. His
next novel _Petersburg_ (1913) had not a much greater success. The
third of the series is _Kotik Letaev_ (1917). The three novels form a
series unique in its way. Those who can get over the initial
difficulties and accustom themselves to the very peculiar proceedings
of the author will not fail to be irresistibly fascinated by his
strange genius. The first novel, the _Silver Dove_, is in my opinion
the most powerful of the three. It combines a daring realism, which
is akin to Gogol both in its exaggerations and in its broad humour,
with a wonderful power of suggestion and of "atmosphere." One of its
most memorable passages is the vast and elemental picture of the Wind
driving over the Russian plain; a passage familiarised to satiety by
numerous more or less clever imitations. _Petersburg_ is a
"political" novel. It is intended to symbolise the Nihilism, the
geometrical irreality of Petersburg and Petersburg bureaucracy. The
cold spirit of system of the Revolutionary Terrorists is presented as
the natural and legitimate outcome of bureaucratic formalism.

A cunningly produced atmosphere of weird irreality pervades the whole
book. It is in many ways a descendant of Dostoyevsky--and has in its
turn again produced a numerous family of imitations, including
Pilniak's most characteristic tales of the Revolution. _Kotik
Letaev_, the last and up to the present the least imitated of Bely's
novels, is the story of a child in his very first years. In it the
"poetical" methods of the author reach their full development; but at
the same time he achieves miracles of vividness and illusion in the