The Moose of the Apocalypse: Andrej Bitov's ‘Čelovek v Pejzaže’

Andrei Bitov's ‘Man in Landscape’ uses two motifs from Revelation to trace the narrator's relationship to his divine origin: reptilian beasts and the interplay of light and dark. The apocalyptic animals, coupled with the hero's passages from light into darkness and from darkness into light, explicate the narrator's pilgrim's progress from spiritual blindness to a life-giving epiphany. The narrator is led through two days of drunken wanderings by a painter who projects his own frailties onto God; he finally recognizes his blasphemy and flees the artist's apartment, later, like John of Patmos, to provide a record of his revelation.