Soul of the Soviet South : A CAPTIVE OF THE CAUCASUS, <i> By Andrei Bitov Translated from the Russian by Susan Brownsberger (Farrar Straus & Giroux: $23; 322 pp.)</i>

Much as Goethe, Shelley and whole coach-loads of German, English and other northern Romantics came down to Italy to discover sunshine, the golden monuments of antiquity and the natural sensuousness of the Mediterranean world, so did Andrei Bitov come down from Leningrad to Armenia.

It was in the late 1960s. Armenia was a Soviet republic, glasnost was not even dreamed of, and the whole apparatus of Soviet bureaucracy was immovably in place. It was a skin, though; beneath it was the sunshine, a pulsating national pride, and the fierce love for a brilliant mountainous landscape and skies very different from Russia’s skies and dusty horizons.

In the airport, the arriving passengers stood mired in Aeroflot’s sluggishness at yielding up their luggage. They did not simply wait, though; they took turns weighing themselves on the counter scales. They weighed the fathers, brothers, cousins and nieces who had come to meet them. They weighed the friends of the relatives, and the relatives of the friends.

No Moscow or Leningrad accents called them to order. The usual officious sign hung over the counter: “Rights and Responsibilities of the Aeroflot Passenger.” But it was in Armenian--not only the language, but the delicatelycurved alphabet--and that altered it utterly.

“A Captive of the Caucasus”--taken from a poem by Pushkin--is the title Bitov gives to his trip to Armenia and to a companion notebook that alternates scenes from Georgia with others from Russia. Both parts are about himself as well--so much so, in the second part, as all but to blot out any sense of travel. The “captive” is a play on words. He is captivated by Armenia, in particular--but the real captivity he wrestles with is the murky condition of being a Russian.

If there is a central question that beats in the heart of this book and its dizzy swaths of reportage, poetic evocation and philosophical self-questioning, it is: Why can’t a Russian have such a passionately energizing sense of his own country as Bitov finds in the Caucasus? “I was in Armenia 10 days--and wrote a book,” he tells us. “In the 10,000 days of my sojourn in Russia, I’ve written nothing of the sort.”

Indeed, the Russian sections seem lethargic and forced. Bitov writes with love about his summer cottage, the birch woods, the lake, but it is a melancholy, unfocused love, as if all these things just might be an illusion. He tells of a peasant who talks of the Last Judgment and of wood lice, but despite--or perhaps because of--the Tolstoyan echoes, the man is immensely tedious.

He writes of an aunt who was a doctor and war hero. Undoubtedly, she was a remarkable woman and an inspiration, but somehow Bitov can’t quite possess her or convey her to us. Only occasionally does this poet-novelist’s penetrating eye break through. At the aunt’s funeral, a fat general arrives, his gold epaulets glittering. When he gets back into his black limousine, “It’s like a tuba being put away.”

Otherwise, Bitov’s observations about his country and himself tend to disappear into their own cloudy speculations. It’s as if the condition of being Russian obscures the reality of being Russian. Toward the end, lying in bed, he watches the motes in a column of sunlight. All reality is in those motes, he reflects; why bother to look farther?

Fortunately, Armenia is moteless. His account has both the clarity and the brilliance of intoxication. At least for those 10 days, it is liberation from the Russian conundrum, the Russian abstraction, the Russian heaviness.

There is the language (Mandelstam called it “a wildcat”) and the way it is written. In 10 days of endless hospitality, the first question Bitov was asked was how he liked Armenia; the second went: “Well, how do you like our alphabet? Very much, isn’t it so?” The answer was contained in the question.

“The tenacity of Armenian speech is so well matched to the hammered look of Armenian letters that the word, when inscribed, clanks like a chain,” he writes. “These letters could be used to shoe horses.” Script and print are virtually identical; books bear the imprint of their authors’ hands. The alphabet’s reputed creator, Meskob Mashtots, is said to have invented all the letters and then found he was missing one. “So he invented that one too.” It is the most human and artistic of contrasts to the planned world of the Soviet Union.

Touring the countryside, with its brilliant light and cobalt lakes, visiting a church carved out of a cliffside where his friends break into a polyphonic anthem, stopping at a market with its heaps of fruit and vegetables, feasting on tomatoes and shashlik--it is the opposite of greed, Bitov writes, “which is a man stuffing himself and despising what he ate”--the author recognizes a millennial culture beneath the superficial forms of Soviet organization. An enlightened city planner tells him of plans to make Erevan a more human city; he as well as Bitov is utterly bored. Then a friend shows him the gardens and courtyards behind the facades of the old houses. Each one, unplanned, is the very essence of design: “An accumulation of things that please people.”

His dazzled enthusiasm has its own check, and the Armenian journal is at its deepest when Bitov reports it. “Why do you believe you’re the only one who appreciates this,” an Armenian asks him at one point; and the author reflects that “Rapture, too, is aggression. A tank in its own way.”

Most revealing is his questioning by an Armenian friend. He entreats Bitov not to begin his account, as so many do, by writing that “Armenia is a sunny and hospitable land.” Bitov tries out a number of other beginnings, and the friend vetoes each one. Well, how would the friend begin? “Armenia is my homeland . . . “ But Bitov can’t write that. “Then why write?” the friend asks.

It is a key, and like so much in this book written two decades ago, it takes us right into the present. How could the Soviet Union possibly hold together? It is not just that Armenia--to take one example--has a burning sense of its own identity and a burning need to possess itself. It is that this identity is so profound that it is inseparable from the words used to describe it. Only an Armenian can write of Armenia. How removed this is from her own sense of the commonality of language and understanding; how it suggests our perplexity at what is going on in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tadjikistan, Serbia, Bosnia, Slovakia.