A survey of responses to the cycle between 1989 and 1998, while Nareon was alive and writing. Most of the later "canon about the cycle" was assembled by fans in the 2000s, but the first reviews of the 1990s have a character of their own, above all in that they do not know the ending.
Both waves are gathered here, the English-language and the Russian: the original appeared in small print runs, the Russian editions lagged by two or three years, and that gap left its mark on the differing tone of the reviews.
Before the first novel
By 1989 Nareon was known to a narrow circle as a writer of short stories in "speculative" magazines; no standalone reviews survive from before the first novel, but the "editorial blessings" in magazines' reply letters circulate as "early testimony" in the fan collections.
1989: the first response
On release The House of the Inner Wind drew two survey reviews, both from critics used to "exotic science fiction" and forced to "admit the genre would not help them". Those two reviews set the rhetoric for the whole life of the cycle in criticism over the decade that followed.
The English-language wave, 1990 to 1996
With the second and third books, a kind of "magazine rivalry" over Nareon formed in England and the United States: he was covered eagerly by outlets with a reputation for "bringing strange authors into the household". This wave produced the phrases the Nareonic vocabulary and almost-English, both still in use.
The Russian wave, 1992 to 1998
Russian criticism responded to the Russian editions, and because of the delay it was forced to write "about all the books at once". This gave the reviews a "generalizing" tone: a single review would take up every novel published to that point, and this sweep worked out a Russian "magazine plot of Nareon" before the cycle had been read in full by its critics.
After The Last Low Toll
The fifth book appeared as a "finale", and criticism took it as one. Some reviews were written to "sum up" the whole five; among these summarizing pieces fans still prize two, the British review by Kirsten Avery (1998) and the Russian one by Dmitry Shildyaev (1999), after which "the Russian Nareon became Russian for good".
What the critics missed
Almost no one in the 1990s wrote about the inner workings of the houses, about the distinctions between circles of access, or about the double names; these things were taken up seriously only by the fans of the 2000s. It is exactly this split between "reception in the author's lifetime" and "reception after" that makes The House of the Inner Wind a "book of two lives".
English reappraisal after 2000
English-language criticism returned to the cycle only after 2000, and from a different quarter: not the genre magazines of the first wave but academic translation studies, which found in the almost-English coinages a case study in how far an invented sociolect can be carried across languages. This later English attention runs parallel to the Russian fan canon of the same years, yet stays largely unaware of it, so the cycle now has two separate scholarly afterlives that rarely cite each other.