Subversion of their own, enclosed world of subjective idealism was the obverse side of the Symbolist movement. Because the Symbolists had not yet matured sufficiently to distinguish or indeed to wish to distinguish between life, art and religion, the historical crisis which their country underwent over the years 1904–6 left private lives, literary alliances and faith in the imminent re-establishment of an Earthly Paradise, the Sophianic dream, in tatters. The story of the years between 1906 and 1910 is the story of a prolonged and bitter crisis, during which the idea of the closed Symbolist community gradually gave way before the larger demands of life itself. After a period of frenetic play-acting, of a sustained and conscious effort to turn life into art and to open up the innermost sanctum of private life to that elemental Dionysian chaos from which they hoped for rebirth into a wider community, poet after poet pronounced the return of Symbolism to the sphere of art and, at the same time the demise of the movement as such, the passing of Russian Symbolism into the mainstream of Russian literature.

One of the central myths which the Symbolists conjured up to make this transitional time endurable was that of the spiritual journey, the pilgrimage … and most especially Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio, the story of the soul's journey through hell toward reunion with Beatrice who serves as a figure for Sophia.