Conclusion

Summary

Between the completion of Masks in late 1930 and his death in January 1934 Bely devised plans for a number of further novels that were destined to remain unwritten. The Moscow cycle itself was intended to run to a further two volumes; according to Bely's preface to Masks the first of these was to cover the period of revolution and civil war, while the second would carry on through NEP to the subsequent period of reconstruction. K.N. Bugayeva has left in her memoirs an account in different terms of these novels' intended content. The professor was to suffer a relapse after the explosion and wander around Moscow making speeches to such as might listen; he was to be adopted by a group of anarchists and eventually rescued from them by Kierko, who would take him, along with Serafima Sergeyevna, to the Caucasus. There he would once more recover his health, and begin to establish around himself a new community of local people. This plot carries echoes both of the story ‘The Yogi’, and also of events from Bely's own life in his later years, when the Caucasus acquired great importance for him as a source of fresh stimulus and a place where he was able to establish new relationships. The plot as Bugayeva outlines it sounds perilously close to a repetition of what has gone before, though a further relapse and recovery would presumably have been presented as a higher cycle of development.