The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Kotik Letaev by Andrei Bely
Michael Pinker

Andrei Bely. Kotik Letaev. Trans. Gerald Janecek. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999. 268 pp. $17.95.

Life begins as a descent from greater to lesser capability; what passes before the mind’s eye distinguishes one state from another. Initially the situation seems fluid. But young Kotik Letaev would as soon dispose of this world he never sought to enter. He alludes to another state of being, now receding, that he would recover. Fitfully, his strongly registered desire passes, is past; the boy is here, now. In Bely’s stylistically daring novel the surge and withdrawal of sensual imagery, semiconscious reflection, and emotional tides which form a child’s consciousness emerge in language suggesting something indeterminate becoming human in spite of itself.

Bely suggests the emergence of childhood experience in startling imagery. Ellipses and allusions display the machinery of thought sorting and disposing of a flurry of sense impressions, transforming them into recognizable shapes and patterns. The rhythmic profusion of these events is the “noise” of space and time, emotionally charged episodes individuating and precipitating the child Kotik. As the world places limitations on his growing self-awareness, each buffet of sense gives rise to new names and forms, all demanding that Kotik accept and be one with them. Now there is no going back; life stands expectantly.

Orchestrating a symphony of repeated strains and variations to portray the delicate, imaginative Kotik aging from three to five, Bely ranges with enormous freedom. He suggestively limns the clamorous murk of sensations felt by someone of considerable gifts accommodating to a cacophony of babble and resistance. If at first rather intimidating, Kotik Letaev’s playful, musical style rewards a reader’s patience. Bely’s more famous Petersburg, written first, might be read first. Yet here appears a panoply of feelings unknown to the earlier novel. The author claimed an uncommonly good recall of early childhood; this novel renders that judgment in breathtakingly sensuous detail. [Michael Pinker]