7 - Notes of an Eccentric

Summary

Notes of an Eccentric occupies an ambiguous position in Bely's work. He began writing it in 1918, but abandoned it incomplete before the end of the year, and did not resume work on it until he arrived in Berlin in December 1921. The Baptized Chinaman was one of several works he completed in the meantime. Thematically it shows important links with both the novels of childhood, but in style and genre it is a maverick, possessing no real connection with anything else that Bely wrote, and it has to be admitted that in most respects the book is a failure. There exists only one complete edition, published by Helikon, Moscow–Berlin 1922, although several extensive extracts were published elsewhere; in particular thirty-seven chapters, corresponding to the first thirty-nine of the Helikon edition's sixty-three, were published with some significant variations in the almanac Notes of Dreamers in 1919 and 1921.

The present tense action of the book concerns a journey from Dornach, in Switzerland, by way of France,yy England, Norway and Sweden, to Russia. It is a journey that Bely himself undertook in the summer of 1916; he left Dornach, where he had been living and working in the anthroposophical colony, on 26 July and arrived in Petrograd on 23 August (old style). The narrator, like Bely himself, has been summoned for military service, and believes he is kept under surveillance by allied counter-espionage agents.