Андрей Белый: автобиографизм и биографические практики

The parallel between Kotik and animals mainly shows the succession of generations and the transmission of the feral heritage. The mother either complains that his son grows like a fly (BC 83), i.e. fragile among the clutches of the father, unknowingly comparing her son with herself, or she compares it to her husband (BC 96). Kotik feels as though he is an insignificant animal. His mother does not accept him and lets him escape like a mouse (BC 109). The monstrous nature, in her eyes, which the child has inherited from his father, can not be hidden by the feminine clothes which she dresses him up in: the large forehead betrays him and makes him look like an orangutan (BC 184). The attempt to escape this inheritance and, paraphrasing Samé, the projection of himself to the outside, is the cause of the «crime» which is the focal point of the book and gave it its first title («Prestuplenie Nikolaja Letaeva»), i.e. the attempt to distance himself from the sick family dynamics. This interior turmoil – produced by the fracture created by his parents – is shown as a process. Kotik first «wriggles like a worm», thus revealing the condition of a small creature oppressed by his parents; he slowly becomes a gorilla, whose body expands until his skin explodes and the circumference of his head, out of which an unexplored past falls out, enlarges (BC 168). The overcoming of the dependence from them and of the relationship between the parents which affected the child, have in Kotik the effect of being a hopeless man, with no escape, a death omen. The child’s crime is realized by the appearance of his conscience (BC 168), which is here described with devices already used in «Kotik Letaev» where the formation of conscience is described, i.e. through a series of phantasmagoric images on which Belyj’s antroposophic beliefs exert a fundamental influence.

On a poetic level these beliefs are amplified in the dreamlike delirium of the disease. When Kotik falls ill with scarlet fever, fantastic figures and hallucinations crowd his mind. He sees Pfukinstvo, the Scythian with the large gorilla head (BC 172), pass through himself concealed in the body of his father. With this reference to the monkey, which is referred to both father and son, the height of anguish is reached. The gorilla, whose attitude Kotik has inherited from his father, is the ultimate denial of humanity. To deny this, to cancel the fatal gorilla that is about to seize him, causes Kotik such a great suffering, that he feels tormented by lions like the Christians had (BC 214), closed in the mute studio of his father as if he was in a cage. There within, like in a dreadful cave, he forges the strength of his own self-awareness only thanks to the images of his Chinese-like father, baptized and transformed into a samurai warrior with fiery eyes (BC 214).

The animals themselves undergo metamorphosis. In the final chapter, «Om», real or imaginary animals disappear and in their place a mythological animal appears, the elusive bird of paradise, which bears celestial symbolism (BC 216). The threat that remains in the background is that which has torn apart Kotik’s body and in the later novels of the «Moscow» novel series will expand and involve the entire city of Moscow. The bird of paradise, the sirin and the alkonost of Slavic mythology, does not emit the song of death as tradition wants, but roars sinisterly like a tiger, which announces the fatal beasts of «The Moscow Eccentric» and «Moscow in Jeopardy».

In «The Baptized Chinaman» the value attributed to the animal realm, in which man is embodied is not as positive as that evoked by Samé on the basis of ancient Cynicism. Belyj attributes negative meaning to the men-animals, which recalls rather the opinions of Socrates on the devaluation of the body and the soul. The concept of transmission from father to son, and the motive of the generational continuity had for centuries been the center of thought and poetry for the ancient Greeks. Belyj seems to base his analysis on these ideas, however maintaining his own views. He does not show the concept of fatherhood in terms of social, legal and institutional recognition, but as a bond of blood which, as we have seen, is presented in terms of inherited similarities of the body.