The recollections of childhood that were begun in Kotik Letayev are continued in The Baptized Chinaman, which Bely wrote in 1920 and 1921. In the autumn of 1920 he drafted four chapters of a novel that was to be called The Crime of Nikolay Letayev. All but the first were subsequently lost. That first chapter, however, revised in the spring of 1921, was published later the same year under the full title The Crime of Nikolay Letayev (Epopee, Volume one), Chapter one, The Baptized Chinaman. In 1927 it appeared in book form under the original chapter title, with no mention of the intended volume title, and was designated as a novel. The original volume title could not be used because the extant portion does not take the action as far as the ‘crime’ which was to be its focus. That part of the story evidently was never written.

In a short preface to its first publication Bely described The Baptized Chinaman as ‘half biographical, half historical’. He was referring in particular to the fact that there appear on its pages a number of real historical figures, mainly Moscow university professors who were his father's colleagues. In this respect it anticipates the first volume of the memoirs Bely wrote at the end of the 1920s, On the Watershed of Two Centuries, in which the environment of his childhood is described with a wealth of detail.