‘Man in a Landscape’: Toward an Understanding of Bitov's Design

The three tales in The Monkey Link, Andrei Bitov's “pilgrimage novel”, seem disparate but share an array of motifs. The central tale, ‘Man in a Landscape’, is an Aesopian tour de force recapitulating in miniature the novel's unifying design. Its basic element is a spiral: retracing his route in memory, “the author” reaches deepening levels of self-knowledge. The spiral is intersected by an elaborate set of parallels to Dante – mischievously inverted and perverted – as “the author” searches for his Russian soul in the sunset of the Soviet empire. Insights generated at points of intersection are dramatized later in the novel.