Andrei Bely was a noted Russian symbolist, so it’s probably unsurprising, given that movement’s penchant for mysticism and reexamining the everyday that The Symphonies is a dense, often cryptic work. It’s also probably unsurprising that – even though there’s a lot of very helpful footnotes throughout the text – this book is best consumed by people with a decent grasp of Russian culture and history from the time when Bely was writing. 

The work is musical, as you would expect from the title. It collects four novellas – or Symphonies – and presents them, occasionally with prefaces, though these do not provide much of a guide to the terrain. The stories slide between the everyday and a sort of fairytale land, suggesting a semipermeable membrane between realities, with transitions between the two a distinct possibility. But nothing is certain: the giants galumphing about the place could be metaphors, or they could just be really fucking big dudes. 

It’s easy to latch on to the musical nature of the work: lines are numbered, as in a score, and figures and images run throughout the stories, though their repetition is often more graspable than is their meaning. 

Look. I’m a literature grad. I’m someone who has read my share of Russian literature, including some of the other entries in this brilliant series, released by Columbia University Press. I like odd fiction. But for almost the entirety of this work, I wore a rather confused face.

The notes I took as I read began to take more cryptic forms as I continued. “Someone fucks a nun and then there’s diamond snow (again)!” was a typical line. I probably should’ve just let go and enjoyed the book as a flow of imagery, but the belief that it would all make sense at some pointgoaded me into looking for a through-line, which was probably my downfall. I mean, this is one of the more comprehensible passages in the work: 

Not for me, sadly. I made it through but spent a lot of time wondering why.