and the "supra-individual ego", the ego shared by all individuals. He spent time between Switzerland, Germany, and Russia, during its revolution. He supported the Bolshevik rise to power and later dedicated his efforts to Soviet culture, serving on the Organizational Committee of the Union of Soviet Writers. He died, aged 53, in Moscow. Several of the numerous poems written in Moscow in January 1934 were inspired by Bely's death. Legacy and literary career Bely started his literary career as the author of The Symphonies, a cycle experimental prose works, written from 1900 to 1908. In 1909 he published his first novel The Silver Dove. As critics note, it is notable for its skaz techniques and its unique ornamental prose, for its "ability to capture haunting, mesmerizing sense of apocalyptic doom". The novel is the first part of Bely's unfinished trilogy East or West. Bely's novel Petersburg (1913/1922), the second part of the unfinished trilogy, is generally considered to be his masterpiece. The book employs a striking prose method in which sounds often evoke colors. The novel is set in the somewhat hysterical atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Petersburg and the Russian Revolution of 1905. To the extent that the book can be said to possess a plot, this can be summarized as the story of the hapless Nikolai Apollonovich, a ne'er-do-well who is caught up in revolutionary politics and assigned the task of assassinating a certain government official — his own father. At one point, Nikolai is pursued through the Petersburg mists by the ringing hooves of the horse in the famous bronze statue of Peter the Great. There are scholars who have suggested that Petersburg included ideas from Sigmund Freud's therapeutic method. An example is the way in which psychoanalysis was used as Bely's interpretive tool for literary criticism, and as a source of creativity. After the Revolution, Bely wrote two psychological autobiographical novels, highly influenced by Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, Kotik Letaev (1918) and The Christened Chinaman (1921). D. S. Mirsky called Kotik Letaev "Bely's most unique and original work", while The Christened Chinaman was called by Mirsky "the most realistic and the most amusing of Bely's works". He also wrote poems Christ is Risen (1918), in which he glorifies the Revolution, Glossolalia (1917), and The First Encounter (1921). Bely's last novel is Moscow (1926—1932), an attempt to give an image of Russian intelligentsia during World War I and the Russian