Utopias and Dystopia in Andrei Bely’s Novel Moscow (1926-1932)
Abstract
The essay analyzes Moscow, the cycle of novels published between 1926 and 1932 in the USSR by the symbolist writer Andrei Bely. The cycle retrospectively recounts the transformations that would lead to the birth of the new Soviet socialist state.
Three different utopias in the struggle against the capitalist and bourgeois order identifiable in the cycle of novels are examined: that of the young Lizasha, daughter of the Western businessman and spy Mandro, who dreams of the existence of a “world beyond”, that of the socialist Kierko and that of professor Korobkin, i.e. the utopia of free science and universal order, as well as the inner transfiguration of humanity.
The essay intends to show how the first two utopias, which in the course of the narration merge into a single one, are overcome in Bielian narration by the third: spiritual regeneration, and not the achievement of socialism, whose flaws Bely covertly highlights, is the only true evolutionary condition of the spiral of history.
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References
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