SOURCE: "Aural History," in The New York Times Book Review, October 4, 1987, p. 22.

In the following favorable review, Woronzoff offers a thematic and stylistic overview of Bely's The Dramatic Symphony.

From the early Symphonies to his masterpiece, Petersburg, the critical and imaginative output of Andrei Bely (the pseudonym of Boris Bugaev, 1880-1934, the Russian Symbolist poet, novelist and critic) is characterized by verbal virtuosity and constant experimentation with the limits of language and genre. Bely referred to his novels (most of which have already been translated into English) as narratives in verse, while he called his prose poems Symphonies—works that aspire to the perfection of music….

Comparable in form to the syncretic creations of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, The Dramatic Symphony is more closely related to the philosophical concerns, aphoristic style and symphonic orchestration of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. Indeed, it is an ambitious work that endeavors to...