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Chapter Two Poetic Genius Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it. —William Butler Yeats SEPARATENESS AND INSEPARABILITY—these are the contradictory principles that fuel Bely’s writings, not in turn, but simultaneously . As we have seen, Bely conceived of existence in these terms: there is a higher or alternate realm of being that is in some sense radically separate from the world of appearances yet suffuses it completely. And while Bely (like any other mortal) is incapable of collapsing the logical disjunction, he does create images in Petersburg that encapsulate the paradox: Russia, you are like a steed! Your two front hooves have leaped far off into the darkness, into the void, while your two rear hooves are firmly implanted in the granite soil. (64) This apostrophe to Russia, near the end of Petersburg’s second chapter, gives iconic or imagistic form to the novel’s central tension. The horse’s front legs, extending beyond the visible, strain for transcendence or freedom, while the hind legs, planted firmly in the material world, tug (strangely) back toward empiricism, immanence, and necessity. The two pairs of legs, front and back, are both separate and fused. This steed—and, by Bely’s simile, Russia itself, and especially St. Petersburg—is the universal pineal gland, the mechanism (or at least the image) of exchange between body and spirit. Bely goes on to consider several resolutions to this unstable pose: the horse may jump and fall into chaos, or disappear into the clouds, or fall into deep thought, or return to normal daily life. He seems to settle on an apocalyptic vision: “there will be a leap across history. Great shall be the turmoil” (65). This apparent solution solves very little: apocalypse is the end of time, it is beyond our horizon and unavailable to us as experience. It is thus merely a name for the reuniting of orders of existence; not a way to understand, or 24 even, really, to imagine such reunion. If we wish to describe or explain, we must fall back on dualities and separation: “the earth shall be cleft. The very mountains shall be thrown down by the cataclysmic earthquake, and because of that earthquake our native plains will everywhere come forth humped” (65). The high will be low, the low will be high: oscillation, once again, but not fusion. Yet in a strange way, this particular horse itself is a solution to the problem , a solution more satisfying than Bely’s conception of apocalypse or Descartes’s conception of the pineal gland—more satisfying, in fact, than any conception. Bely has in mind Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great, which is to say, a work of art, a made thing. The proper unity of separate worlds may not be a concept at all, nor a proposition to be contemplated, but a thing to be made. In his “Emblematics of Meaning,” Bely writes: Any judgment is an emblem of symbolic unity (Let it be), of duality (WordFlesh ), of triplicity (The Word will be Flesh), and of quadruplicity (Yes: the Word will be Flesh). In the last judgment the copula to be connects unity (Yes) with duality (Word-Flesh). To be relates at once to “Yes” (Yes, it is) and to “Word—Flesh” (the Word is Flesh).1 The argument is somewhat obscure and forced, and its rhetorical force depends on the fact that the Russian word da functions both as “yes” and as a component of “let there be.” We will return to this passage in the next chapter ; for now, what it demonstrates clearly is that when Bely wants to offer a coherent model of simultaneous oneness and twoness (let alone threeness, fourness, etc.), he appeals not to transcendent categories, but to Creation itself. While Petersburg contains many invitations to contemplate the mysteries of spirit and flesh, pure contemplation is not really Bely’s way. He was, after all, a poet, in more than one sense of the word—but most fundamentally and indisputably in the etymological sense: one who makes.2 THE RUSSIAN SYMBOLISTS In 1894, a shrewd literary entrepreneur by the name of Valery Briusov published an anthology of poetry called The Russian Symbolists—an odd title, since at the time there were no Russian symbolists. It was “an extraordinarily original tactical move,” a “deliberately scandalous debut not as a young poet but as a young school of poetry.”3 The first volume was quickly followed by a second, and then a third...

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