SOURCE: "Melancholy Biely," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXXIII, No. 5, February 2, 1988, pp. 62, 64.

In the following essay, Pekar offers a negative review of The Dramatic Symphony.

Andrei Biely is one of the most important 20th-century literary figures, a great novelist, excellent poet, and stimulating essayist. Once he was a powerful literary influence, the major figure in the Russian symbolist movement. Since the 1930s, however, Soviet authorities have considered him a decadent modernist, and many of his works have been extremely difficult to obtain there and in the West.

Biely was marked by the impressionism of the French symbolists and was one of the first writers to use the stream-of-consciousness technique. He contributed to the development of a style called "ornamentalism," which involves synthesizing poetry, prose, and documents, and using different language levels from vulgar to refined, unusual print layouts, and various typefaces.

Biely's earliest significant publications were four long...