 For
the author of Petersburg (1913), one of the 20th century
prose masterpieces, Berlin was a dream first. It then
soon become the place to escape from. Few Russian intellectuals
émigré experienced the Berlin dream with
feelings so intense and contradictory at the same time.
After his return from Germany, Bely wrote a short and
lively report of this brief and intense emigration experience
entitled In the kingdom of shadows (Odna iz obitelei tsarstva
tenei, Petrograd 1924). In the book, the German capital
had been depicted with the colors of Greek Hades and of
"the gloomy place of the underworld of Egypt, where
the strict Osiris carried out his horrible judgment on
the deceased." In this unforgivable and repulsive
Western Inferno, "the organized nightmare systematically
introduced into your life," Bely had seen himself
as one of many others nekto (someone), and into this undefined
pronoun he translated the obsessive Ia (I) that dominated
his narrative. "Night! Tauentzin! Cocain! This is
Berlin!"-wrote Bely, to whom the laughable essence
of the Russian Berlin in the 20s-the magnificent dream
of Russian intellectuals-appeared to be celebrated in
the cabarets of the Charlottengrad's Tauentzinstrasse,
"the center of Russian bon vivants in Berlin."
 Andrey
Bely was the pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev.
Born in Moscow in 1880, Bely was the son of the illustrious
professor of mathematics, Nikolay Bugaev, owned a degree
in natural science and was going to obtain a second
one in philosophy when in 1892 he met Mikhail Solovev,
brother of the philosopher Vladimir Solovev, who initiated
him to symbolist poetry. As a symbolist poet he entered
the literary world, becoming a leading figure among
the Russian "young" symbolists, together with
poets Aleksander Blok and Viacheslav Ivanov. Bely produced
an extraordinary corpus of poetry, prose and literary
criticism. He wrote a three volume memoir and several
theoretical and philological works. His personality
was a voluble and contradictory one: after having welcomed
enthusiastically the ideas of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer,
Solovev, he then later dismissed them in the name of
Rudolf Steiner's doctrine of anthroposophy, which he
embraced passionately and that influenced many of his
works. His first important experience in Europe was,
in fact, related to Steiner, whom he helped to build
and initiate the Goethenaum, the first temple and school
of anthroposophy in the city of Dornach in Switzerland,
from 1914 to His second was Berlin. Bely lived in the
German city from October 1921 until October 1923, a
year that was one of the most tormented and yet the
most prolific in his life. When he arrived in Berlin,
the city had already become the Promised Land of Russian
intellectuals. Still grieving for the death of his colleague
and friend Aleksander Blok, suffering from what he claimed
was a general indifference towards his work in the Russian
literary community, Bely went to Germany to heal his
personal life and reinvigorate his public role of intellectual.
He arrived searching for both personal and cultural
reconciliation but experienced loss, solitude and exceptional
literary fervor.
 Berlin
became a turning point in his life. He put to an end
his marriage with Asia Turgeneva, who had preferred
to him the mediocre imagist poet Kusikov. He had to
put a final closure to his relationship to Steiner,
who had been his spiritual father for years and who
would show indifference to Bely's enthusiasm for the
grandiose events of Russia: to Marina Tsvetaeva, during
a casual meeting at the Pragerdiele, the favorite café
among the Russian intellectuals, he confessed his dream
of going to Dornach and "scream to the Doctor like
a hooligan - Herr Doktor, Sie sind ein alter Affe!"
Curiously enough, in Berlin Bely publishes the first
edition of Zapiski chudaka (Notes of an Eccentric),
the autobiographical account of the years he spent in
Europe with Asia and Steiner. Berlin was the end of
this journey through anthroposophy and also the ominous
extra-textual resolution to the plot of his memoir.
 Nevertheless,
in the midst of so many personal tragedies, Bely produced
an extraordinary number of works. Despite objective
adversities and usual complaints, Bely published nine
original new works, several reprints of older works
and the reviewed version of Petersburg. He fully immersed
into a whirlwind of intellectual activities, taking
part also to the meetings of the Berlin sections of
two main Moscow literary groups, the Free Philosophical
Society (Vol'fila) and the House of Arts. And yet, for
an ironic turn of destiny, if there was a relationship
that in Berlin was actually reconstituted, this was
the tormented one Bely had with the Russian literary
culture and establishment of the Twenties: contrarily
to his expectations, in Berlin he could witness the
apex of the Russsian dream, but also foresee its coming
decay. Disappointed and deceived, he then renounced
emigration and returned to Russia, where after years
of uninterrupted and fervent writing activity, he died
in 1934. The image of Bely's suffering and restless
soul, of his mysterious dances and delirious monologues
in the German cafes, remains in the memoirs of Vladislav
Khodasevich, Nina Berberova and, most of all, in Marina
Tsvetaeva's A Captive Spirit. That image in the seemingly
unfriendly Berlin topography of the Twenties, will be
reconstructed in the following pages. [M. R.]
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