Singing Along with the Social Rhythms: Andrei Bely’s Attempts at Soviet Travel Writing

In the canon of Soviet travel writings of the 1920s–30s, Andrei Bely’s lesser-known book Veter s Kavkaza (1928, not reprinted since its first publication) and the essay Armenia (1929) are something of an oddity. They are generally seen аs an active attempt on his part to become a Soviet writer. This attempt by all accounts had very limited success, but the intention was genuine, and it enters into a most intriguing constellation with the more successful travel writings of the same period that ostensibly are based on the same practice of participatory observation as was practiced by members of LEF and other literary groups. Bely’s writings are more about observation itself than they are about anything else. His entire approach to the subject matter of his travel narratives is based on an obsessive mapping of the topography of his journey in an attempt to learn (by his own account) the Goethean art of seeing—not just the physical topography but also the past and the future of the human landscape in its revolutionary transformation. Ultimately, Bely’s spatially focused narrative seeks to see and represent time, and for this reason suffers the most spectacular failure, which Bely the Kantian and Bely the Symbolist wants to celebrate, but Bely the Soviet writer desperately tries to overcome. The article examines this failure in the broader political and artistic context of the time.