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The Persistence of Memory: The Quest for Human Origins and Destiny in Andrey Bely's Kotik Letaev and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Andrey Bely's autobiographical novel Kotik Letaev and Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life do not share a common subtext. Nevertheless, they have strikingly similar themes. They each deal with an adult's confrontation of his past through memory, a memory that extends back before birth. Coming to terms with the past prepares the adult protagonist of each work for his destiny. The essay discusses Malick's use of William Blake's mysticism and Bely's dependence on the religious‐philosophical ideas of Rudolf Steiner. Memory plays an important role in both works as it touches on the recapitulation of cosmic origins in the development of the individual human being. What the quester discovers through memory enables him to find the way back to Eternity from which he has descended. Both artists invoke the World Tree uniting heaven and earth and its association with the Cross of Christ. In both the novel and the film the world is seen first through a child's eyes, then through growing understanding of the adult. Malick illustrates with cinematography what Bely describes in words. Malick uses music in a way that fleshes out what Bely attempted to create through using musical tropes in language.
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References
1 Geoffrey O'Brien, “The Variety of Movie Experience”, The New York Review of Books July 14, 2011 <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/variety‐movie‐experience/>
2 The novel was completed in 1915 and published by Èpokha in Petersburg in 1922. The only English translation available is Bely, Andrei, Kotik Letaev (translated from the Russian, annotated, and with an introduction by Gerald J. Janecek; new, revised translation; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. Andrey Bely was the pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (1880‐1934). The name is variously written as Bely, Biely, Belyi, Belyj; in this essay I follow the Library of Congress convention of citation and transliteration.
3 Blake briefly came under the spell of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688‐1772). Blake, already seeing visions, found confirmation of his experience in the Swedish mystic's call to purify our vision of nature. Angels and spirits were the perfect forms of what human beings are. After a visitation from Paracelsus he rejected Swedenborg as a spiritual predestinarian lacking depth. See Ackroyd, Peter, Blake: A Biography (London: Sinclair‐Stevenson, 1995) pp. 100–3; 150Google Scholar.
4 Descriptions of The Tree of Life are from my own viewing; quotations are based on a transcription by Christopher Page, <https://inaspaciousplace.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/%E2%80%9Cthe‐tree‐of‐life%E2%80%9D‐notes‐from‐a‐viewing‐July‐7‐2011>. Accessed Oct. 16, 2014.
5 For a more thorough discussion of Bely's thought see my earlier essay “Chaos, Language, and Logos: How the Poet Participates in the Creating Activity of the Word in the Thought of Andrey Bely”, New Blackfriars 97 (2016):465–478CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Published in 1905. He called his earliest prose works “symphonies.” Meaning would be created by the word as music and the poet would open up the way to transcendence through the meaning expressed simply in the sounds of music. Music creates motifs which evoke moods without images but analogous to the moods that the literary symbols create: motifs create what the contemplation of images creates.
7 The Russian text consulted is in Belyĭ, Andrey, Staryĭ Arbat (Moskva: Moskovskiĭ Rabochiĭ, 1989), pp. 201–58Google Scholar. There is no English translation of the work, but there is an excellent French translation by Christine Zeytounian, published as Biely, Andreï, Le Retour (Paris: Ed. Jacqueline Chambon, 1990)Google Scholar.
8 “Since I entered the world not with an undefined but with a defined soul – predispositions, my work on myself cannot have begun with my birth. I must, as spiritual man, have existed before my birth. … I must, as spiritual being, be the repetition of someone through whose life‐history mine can be explained. … I owe the form of the content of my life‐history to a spiritual life only, prior to birth (or more correctly to conception).” Steiner, Rudolf, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1961), p. 55Google Scholar. Translated from the 28th German edition Theosophie – Einführung in übersinnliche Welterkenntnis und Menschenbestimmung, 1961; original edition 1922.
9 Anschuetz, Carol, “Recollection as Metaphor in Kotik Letaev”, Russian Literature, 4 (1976), p. 350CrossRefGoogle Scholar, referring to Plato, Meno, 81c‐d.
10 L. N. Tolstoy, War and Peace, Vol. 2, Fourth Part, Chapter X. Natasha and her brother Nikolai are discussing childhood memories and the difficulty of distinguishing dream from memory. To the music teacher Dimmler, who interrupts, she says that we are angels and that she must have lived before and for all eternity. Unless otherwise noted translations are my own.
11 Molnar, Michael, Body of Words: A Reading of Belyi's Kotik Letaev (Birmingham Slavonic Monograph no. 17; Birmingham: Department of Russian Language and Literature, University of Birmingham, 1987), p. 45Google Scholar.
12 Kotik Letaev is cited as KL, followed by chapter number and the title of the chapter's subsection; page number is from the edition published in the collection Belyĭ, Andreĭ, Staryĭ Arbat (Moskva: Moskovskiĭ Rabochiĭ, 1989), pp. 428–578Google Scholar. I have tried to preserve in English Bely's awkward syntax and punctuation, but not his page layout.
13 See Carol Anschuetz, “Recollection as Metaphor in Kotik Letaev”, p. 353; Cioran, Samuel, “The Eternal Return: Andrej Belyj's Kotik Letaev”, Slavic and East European Journal 15 (1971), p. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 In his first novel, The Silver Dove (1909), Bely has an extended discussion of Ten Sephirot, the Qabbala's own “tree of life”. There are other associations of crucifixion with the tree of life in that novel which cannot be treated here.
15 For Steiner the Christian initiate beholds Golgotha enacted in the physical world, and becomes a partaker of the mystical, which was hitherto accessible only to those who sought supersensible facts of the mysteries. See “Osiris, Buddha, and Christ” (1902) in McDermott, Robert A., ed., The Essential Steiner: Basic Writing of Rudolf Steiner (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984Google Scholar; r. Edinburgh: Floris, 1996), p. 184.
16 Aside from being a failed musician, Mr. O'Brien – we know the characters’ names only from the end credits – is also a failed gardener. Do we have a reference to Adam here? The first gardener ate from the forbidden tree and was cast out. Mr. O'Brien could have been a great musician but let himself get sidetracked.
17 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4, 7).
18 The young Jack turns God's question to Job around by asking God where he was when a child drowned. The adult Jack asks God how he, Jack, lost him.
19 In The Return Khandrikov forgets his origins in Eternity. Malick's recent film, Prince of Cups, deals with the protagonist's attempts to remember what he has forgotten about his origins.
20 Steiner, drawing on Goethe's 1790 Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen, stressed the need to grasp the totality of the life of a plant from germination to final decay, perceiving it over time from within as well as from without at discrete moments of its development. See also Bely's 1916 essay O smysle poznaniĭa (“On the Meaning of Cognition”) (Minsk: Polifakt, 1991), p. 63Google Scholar [reprint of 1922 Petersburg edition]) §19, p. 52.
21 For more on Bely's thought on the role of the eternal feminine, Divine Wisdom, and the logos see my article “Chaos, Language, and Logos” cited above.
22 Compare Blake, “The cut worm forgives the plough” (Proverbs of Hell).
23 Compare the concluding sentences. “This cry of ours [‘Remember me Lord’] turns into another: ‘Not “I” – but Christ in me.’ In Christ we die. But in this death occurs the rending of the veil in the Temple: our personal ‘I’ is the veil: behind the veil are we ourselves, risen in the Spirit and Truth. We are born in God. In Christ we die.And we rise in the Holy Spirit. The three moments of cognition are a Triunity. The cognitive act reflects it” (O smysle poznaniĭa [“On the Meaning of Cognition”], p. 63).
24 Bely draws the two ideas together by playing on the Russian word for education (obrazovanie) and images (obrazy) (Chap. 1 §“The Formation of Consciousness”, pp. 432‐33).
25 The child associates his mother with swarming (roĭ), suggesting formlessness and freedom, and his father with structure (stroĭ), suggesting restriction of form (Chap. 1 §“Roĭ – Stroĭ”, pp. 456‐7).
26 Compare Proust's use of the experience of taste, sight, and sound to bring to mind long sequences of associations from “lost time”, although Proust's narrator is not trying to recover the time before birth.
27 Music is the dissolving of the shells of memory and the free entrance into another world: – and everything everywhere was opened for me” KL, Chap. 5, §“Music”, p. 520).
28 See Elsworth. Andrey Bely: A Critical Study, p. 55.
29 Compare Blake's criticism of Newton.
30 Reminiscent of Augustine Confessions Book 10, 27.