Literary Criticism forth misinterprets Bely’s usage of the symbol of the sun, which he claims is the very image of Bely’s pure “The Last Judgment” relies more heavily than any othRussia. If read in isolation, this interpretation remains er passage in Petersburg on the theme of the Oriental, valid, but coupled with Five: “The Last Judgment,” but in a philosophical capacity. This is unsurprising as it is the culmination—and the explanation—of Bamforth’s theory falls apart. In Five: “The Last Judgment” Bely com- his own opinion of Russia’s reconciliation with itself pletes his theory of Russia’s historical association which first appears in Two: “Escape.” Bely exposes with the Orient and defines it as the “Mongol cause” the façade that “the existence of a planned, ‘European’ Russia’s essential alliance with the through the medium of Nikolai’s dream. Nikolai’s city demonstrated 20 West, ” which he relates formally when he expresses dream is a theosophical experience: his soul sets “off on a distant astral journey, or sleep (which, let us not in the Prologue, that “if Petersburg is not the capital, then there is no Petersburg. It only forget, is the same thing).”12 Here, to exist.”21 This philosophiBely invokes a fantastical story in“‘EITHER ALL appears cal remark draws out the fragility of volving Buddhist incarnation and St. Petersburg as Russia’s Western the Ableukhovs13 to characterize OF MODERN mask and Russia in turn as Europe’s the relationship between East and 22 West—between Asia and Rus- HISTORY MUST red domino, and notes that Russia’s capital exists just for this fragsia—as one of intertwined desile purpose, a remark true to the REMAIN SILENT tiny. For example, Apollon names city’s foundation and developed the “Mongol cause” as “not the OR RUSSIAN throughout the novel. Bely was not destruction of Europe but its imthe first to stress the importance 14 mutability.” This refutes Nikolai’s HISTORY HAS of Russia’s historical allegiance to assertion that the Mongol cause is the East, however. Nikolai Karato bring about the collapse of the THE RIGHT TO mzin (1766-1826)—the Russian “Aryan world,”15 meaning Europe. contemporary and counterpart to BE HEARD’” In light of Five: “The Last JudgBritain’s Edward Gibbon (1737ment”, the Sun of Two: “Escape” 1794)—simultaneously promay not be interpreted as a comclaimed “Either all of Modern History must remain pletely new Russia free of geographical inclination 23 either East or West, as Bamforth suggests. Apollon’s silent or Russian history has the right to be heard,” that “Moscow owes “Last Judgment”16 is the immutability of Europe and while in the same work asserting 24 its greatness to the Khans. ” Likewise, Two: “Escape” that, “instead of a new order, the record of the circumakes use of the historical conflicts between Russia 17 lation of the citizens of the Prospect” will continue. and the East, framing the future of Russia in terms of What Bamforth calls a “paradoxical”18 geopolitical vision is not that at all, but is an expressly logical and past battles to be relived. In a progression from the factual and historoptimistic vision of Russia’s future. Bely asserts the ical to the metaphysical and theosophical, Bely uses Mongols (and the Orient) as the West’s enemies, recalling the Yellow Peril or Panmongolism fear of a the image of the Orient to conceptualize the constant few decades prior,19 citing Russia’s historical place as historical dilemma faced by Russia. For Bely, the Last the bastion between East and West. Bely’s Kulikovo Judgment of Russia will be whether or not it recogField and the rising Sun are not representative of a nizes and accepts its Oriental legacy, for better or for new Russia, but of a Russian experience as defenders worse. Russia will either “sink to the depths of the 25 of the West upheld by Russia’s reconciliation with its oceans, into chaos, primordial and long-forgotten” or it will rise anew like the Sun and accept the Mongol historical relationship to the East. Bely’s intense philosophical treatise in Five: cause.
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