Apollon Apollonovich was in a certain sense like Zeus: from his head there emerged gods, goddesses and genii. We have already seen: one such genius (the stranger with the little black moustache), arising as an image, continued as a being there and then in the yellowish expanses of the Neva, claiming it was from them he had emerged: and not the senator’s head; this stranger turned out to have idle thoughts of his own; and his idle thoughts possessed all the same qualities.
They escaped and acquired solidity.
And one such escaping thought of the stranger’s was the thought that he, the stranger, existed in fact; this thought ran back from the Nevskii into the senator’s brain and there established the idea that the very existence of the stranger in that head was an illusory existence.
And so the circle was closed.
from Petersburg, Andrei Bely, trans. by John Elsworth, Pushkin Press, 2009
