SOURCE: "A Search among Symbolists," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4013, February 22, 1980, p. 213.

In the following essay, France offers a favorable review of The First Encounter.

[The First Encounter] is the autobiographical evocation of the world of the mystically inclined Moscow symbolists in the years round 1900—a world also evoked, at greater length, and often more acrimoniously, in Bely's memoirs, which have not yet appeared in English. We see the young poet, shortly to form his ill-fated alliance with Alexander Blok, befriended by the Solovyov family and searching for the true way in the contradictory currents of natural science, Nietzscheanism and a complicated blend of mystical beliefs; he attends a symphony concert where he worships an incarnation of Sophia, the Eternal Feminine, and as he wanders home through the snow he encounters the spirit of the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. The evocation is by turns rapturous and prosaic or...