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Andrei Bely

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In this name that followsEastern Slavic naming customs,thepatronymicisNikolaevichand thefamily nameisBugaev.
Andrei Bely
Bely in 1912
Bely in 1912
BornBoris Nikolaevich Bugaev
(1880-10-26)26 October 1880
Moscow,Russian Empire
Died8 January 1934(1934-01-08)(aged 53)
Moscow,Russian SFSR,Soviet Union
Occupation
  • Prose writer
  • poet
  • essayist
  • literary critic
  • dramatist
Alma materImperial Moscow University(1903)
Period1900—1934
Literary movement
Notable worksThe Silver Dove(1910)
Petersburg(1913/1922)
Signature

Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev(Russian:Бори́с Никола́евич Буга́ев,IPA:[bɐˈrʲisnʲɪkɐˈlajɪvʲɪdʑbʊˈɡajɪf]ⓘ;26 October [O.S.14 October] 1880 – 8 January 1934), better known by thepen nameAndrei BelyorBiely(Russian:Андре́й Бе́лый,IPA:[ɐnˈdrʲejˈbʲelɨj]ⓘ), was a Russian novelist,Symbolistpoet, theorist and literary critic. He was a committedanthroposophistand follower ofRudolf Steiner.[1]His novelPetersburg(1913/1922) was regarded byVladimir Nabokovas the third-greatest masterpiece ofmodernist literature.[2][3][4]TheAndrei Bely Prize(Премия Андрея Белого), one of the most important prizes in Russian literature, was named after him. His poems were set to music and performed by Russian singer-songwriters.[5]

Life

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Boris Bugaev was born inMoscow,into a prominent intellectual family. His father,Nikolai Bugaev,was a noted mathematician[6]who is regarded as a founder of the Moscow school of mathematics. His mother, Aleksandra Dmitrievna (née Egorova), was not only highly intelligent but a famous society beauty, and the focus of considerable gossip. She was also a pianist, providing Bugaev his musical education at a young age.

Young Boris grew up at the Arbat, a historical area in Moscow.[7]He was a polymath whose interests included mathematics, biology, chemistry, music, philosophy, and literature. Bugaev attended university at theUniversity of Moscow.[8]He would go on to take part in both theSymbolist movementand the Russian school ofneo-Kantianism.Bugaev became friendly withAlexander Blokand his wife; he fell in love with her, which caused tensions between the two poets. Bugaev was invited but was unable to attend their wedding due to his father's death.[7]

Portrait of Bely byLéon Bakst,1905

Nikolai Bugaev was well known for his influential philosophical essays, in which he decriedgeometryandprobabilityand trumpeted the virtues of hardanalysis.Despite—or because of—his father's mathematical tastes, Boris Bugaev was fascinated by probability and particularly byentropy,a notion to which he frequently refers in works such asKotik Letaev.[9]

As a young man, Bely was strongly influenced by his acquaintance with the family of philosopherVladimir Solovyov,especially Vladimir's younger brother Mikhail, described in his long autobiographical poemThe First Encounter(1921); the title is a reflection of Vladimir Solovyov'sThree Encounters.It was Mikhail Solovyov who gave Bugaev his pseudonym Andrei Bely.[citation needed]

Bely in 1933

In his later years Bely was influenced byRudolf Steiner’santhroposophy[10][11]and became a personal friend of Steiner's. His ideas covering this philosophy included his attempts to connect Vladimir Solovyov's philosophical ideas with Steiner's Spiritual Science.[12]One of his notions was theEternal Feminine,which he equated it with the "world soul"and the" supra-individual ego ", the ego shared by all individuals.[13]He spent time between Switzerland, Germany, and Russia, during its revolution. He supported theBolshevikrise to power and later dedicated his efforts to Soviet culture, serving on the Organizational Committee of theUnion of Soviet Writers.[14]He died, aged 53, in Moscow. Several of the numerous poems written in Moscow in January 1934 were inspired by Bely's death.[15]

Legacy and literary career

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Bely did not accomplish his reformation of Russian prose single‐handedly: other major Symbolist novelists, especiallyFyodor SologubandAlexei Remizov,also had a hand in it. It is to Bely's influence, however, more than anyone else's, that we can trace the literary origins of some of the finest early Soviet writers, such asZamyatin,Pilnyak,BabelandAndrei Platonov... Moreover, Bely's novels prefigure and map out both the sensibility and the structural devices of the later Western novel with such thoroughness that a person familiar with his work who reads Joyce'sUlyssesorRobbe‐Grillet'sJealousyor evenThomas Pynchon'sGravity's Rainbowfor the first time can't shake off the feeling that their authors somehow must have known Bely, even though there's not a chance that they did.

— Simon Karlinsky,The New York Times,1974[16]

Bely started his literary career as the author ofThe Symphonies,a cycle experimental prose works, written from 1900 to 1908. In 1909 he published his first novelThe Silver Dove.As critics note, it is notable for itsskaztechniques and its uniqueornamental prose,for its "ability to capture haunting, mesmerizing sense of apocalyptic doom". The novel is the first part of Bely's unfinished trilogyEast or West.[17]

Bely's novelPetersburg(1913/1922), the second part of the unfinished trilogy, is generally considered to be his masterpiece. The book employs a striking prose method in which sounds often evoke colors. The novel is set in the somewhat hysterical atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Petersburg and theRussian Revolution of 1905.To the extent that the book can be said to possess a plot, this can be summarized as the story of the hapless Nikolai Apollonovich, a ne'er-do-well who is caught up in revolutionary politics and assigned the task of assassinating a certain government official — his own father. At one point, Nikolai is pursued through the Petersburg mists by the ringing hooves of the horse in the famous bronze statue ofPeter the Great.[citation needed]There are scholars who have suggested thatPetersburgincluded ideas fromSigmund Freud's therapeutic method. An example is the way in which psychoanalysis was used as Bely's interpretive tool for literary criticism, and as a source of creativity.[18]

After the Revolution, Bely wrote two psychological autobiographical novels, highly influenced byRudolf Steiner's anthroposophy,Kotik Letaev(1918) andThe Christened Chinaman(1921).D. S. MirskycalledKotik Letaev"Bely's most unique and original work", whileThe Christened Chinamanwas called by Mirsky "the most realistic and the most amusing of Bely's works".[19]He also wrote poemsChrist is Risen(1918), in which he glorifies the Revolution,Glossolalia(1917), andThe First Encounter(1921).

Bely's last novel isMoscow(1926—1932), an attempt to give an image of RussianintelligentsiaduringWorld War Iand theRussian Revolution.It differs fromThe Silver DoveandPetersburgwith complex, multi-faceted characters who experience a transformation of personality. It also continues Bely's linguistic experiments. The first part ofMoscow,The Moscow Eccentric,was published in English in 2016, the other two are not translated yet.

Bely's essayRhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horsemanis cited inNabokov's novelThe Gift,where it is mentioned as "monumental research on rhythm".[20]Fyodor, poet and main character, praises the system Bely created for graphically marking off and calculating the 'half-stresses' in theiambs.Bely found that the diagrams plotted over the compositions of the great poets frequently had the shapes of rectangles and trapeziums. Fyodor, after discovering Bely's work, re-read all his oldiambic tetrametersfrom the new point of view, and was terribly pained to find out that the diagrams for his poems were instead plain and gappy.[20]Nabokov's essay "Notes on Prosody"follows for the large part Bely's essay" Description of the Russian Iambic Tetrameter "(published in the collection of essaysSymbolism).

Selected bibliography

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Novels

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  • The Silver Dove(Серебряный голубь, 1910)
  • Petersburg(Петербург, 1913, revised 1922)
  • Kotik Letaev(Котик Летаев, 1918)
  • Notes of an Eccentric "(novel, 1922)
  • The Christened Chinaman(Крещёный китаец, 1927)
  • Moscow(Москва, 1926–1932)
    • The Moscow Eccentric(Московский чудак, 1926) - Volume 1, Part 1
    • Moskva pod udarom(Москва под ударом, 1926, not translated yet,Moscow Under Siege,Moscow in Jeopardy) - Volume 1, Part 2
    • Maski(Маски, 1932, not translated yet,Masks) - Volume 2

Short fiction

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  • Story No. 2 (from the Notes of an Official) (1902)
  • A Light Tale (1903)
  • We're Waiting for his Return (1903)
  • Argonauts(1904)
  • The Bush (1906)
  • The Mountain Lady (1907)
  • Notes on Adam (1908)
  • The Yogi (1918)
  • Human. the Preface to the novelMan- a Chronicle of the 25th Century (1918)
  • Return to the Motherland (excerpts from the story, 1922)

Poetry

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  • Gold in Azure(Золото в лазури, 1904)
  • Ash(Пепел, 1909)
  • Urn(Урна, 1909)
  • Christ Has Risen(Христос воскрес, 1918)
  • The First Encounter(Первое свидание, 1921)
  • Glossolalia: Poem about Sound(Глоссолалия. Поэма о звуке, 1922)

Symphonies

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  • Second Symphony, the Dramatic(Симфония (2-я, Драматическая), 1902)
  • The Northern, or First—Heroic(Северная симфония (1-я, героическая), 1904, written in 1900)
  • The Return—Third (Возврат. III симфония, 1905)
  • Goblet of Blizzards—Fourth (Кубок метелей. Четвертая симфония, 1908)

Essays

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  • Symbolism(Символизм, 1910)
  • Green Meadow(Луг зелёный, 1910)
  • Arabesques(Арабески, 1911)
  • Revolution and Culture(Революция и культура, 1917)
  • Recollections of Blok(Воспоминания о Блоке, 1922)
  • "Reminiscences of Rudolf Steiner"
  • Rhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horseman(Ритм как диалектика и «Медный всадник», 1934)
  • Gogol's Artistry(Мастерство Гоголя, 1934)

Non-fiction

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  • In the Kingdom of Shadows(Одна из обителей царства теней, 1925)
  • At the Border of Two Centuries(На рубеже двух столетий, 1930)
  • The Beginning of the Century(Начало века, 1933)
  • Between Two Revolutions(Между двух революций, 1934)

English translations

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  • Petersburg
  • The Silver Dove
    • George Reavey, Grove Press, 1974.
    • John Elsworth, Northwestern University Press, 2000.
  • The Symphonies
    • The Dramatic Symphony,John Elsworth, Grove Press, 1987.
    • The Symphonies,Jonathan Stone, Columbia University Press, 2021.
  • Kotik Letaev,Gerald Janecek,Ardis,1971.
  • The Complete Short Stories,Ronald E. Peterson, Ardis, 1979.
  • Selected Essays of Andrey Bely,Steven Cassedy, University of California Press, 1985.
  • Reminiscences of Rudolf Steiner: Andrei Belyi, Aasya Turgenieff, Margarita Voloshin,Adonis Press, 1987
  • The Christened Chinaman,Thomas Beyer, Hermitage Publishers, (a publisher specializing in Russian writers in English translation, started and owned byIgor Yefimov), 1991.
  • In the Kingdom of Shadows,Catherine Spitzer, Hermitage Publishers, 2001.
  • Glossolalia,Thomas Beyer, SteinerBooks, 2004.
  • Gogol's Artistry,Christopher Colbach, Northwestern University Press, 2009
  • The Moscow Eccentric,Brendan Kiernan, Russian Life Books, 2016.

See also

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References

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  1. ^Norwich, John Julius (1985–1993).Oxford illustrated encyclopedia.Judge, Harry George., Toyne, Anthony. Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press. p. 43.ISBN0-19-869129-7.OCLC11814265.
  2. ^1965, Nabokov'stelevision interviewTV-13 NY
  3. ^Nabokov and the moment of truthonYouTube
  4. ^Nabokov’s Recommendations (opinions on other writers)
  5. ^Little theater on the planet of Earth,sound tracks of songs on poems by Andrei Bely, music and performance byElena Frolova
  6. ^Pattison, George; Emerson, Caryl; Poole, Randall A. (2020).The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought.Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. p. 294.ISBN978-0-19-879644-2.
  7. ^abMatich, Olga (2005).Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siecle.Madison: Univ of Wisconsin Press. p. 89.ISBN978-0-299-20883-7.
  8. ^Noah Giansiracusa; Anastasia Vasilyev; Matthew Morgan (7 Sep 2017). "Mathematical Symbolism in a Russian Literary Masterpiece".arXiv:1709.02483[math.HO].Accessed 12 February 2018.
  9. ^Janecek, Gerald (1976). "The Spiral as Image and Structural Principle in Andrej Belyj'sKotik Lataev".Russian Literature.4(4): 357–63.doi:10.1016/0304-3479(76)90010-7.
  10. ^Judith Wermuth-Atkinson,The Red Jester: Andrei Bely's Petersburg as a Novel of the European Modern(2012).ISBN3643901542
  11. ^Bely, Andrei. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001–07ArchivedJuly 1, 2007, at theWayback Machine
  12. ^Bely, Andrey (1979).The First Encounter.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 104.ISBN978-1-4008-6722-6.
  13. ^Smith, Kenneth M. (2013).Skryabin, Philosophy and the Music of Desire.Oxon: Taylor & Francis. p. 56.ISBN978-1-4094-3891-5.
  14. ^"Andrey Bely | Russian poet".16 February 2024.
  15. ^Lacqueur, Walter (1963).Survey, A Journal of Soviet and East European Studies.Eastern News Distributors. p. 153.
  16. ^Karlinsky, Simon (27 October 1974)."The Silver Dove".The New York Times.
  17. ^Cornwell, Neil; Christian, Nicole (1998).Reference Guide to Russian Literature.Taylor & Francis.ISBN9781884964107.
  18. ^Livak, Leonid (2018).A Reader's Guide to Andrei Bely's "petersburg.Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 111.ISBN978-0-299-31930-4.
  19. ^Contemporary Russian literature, 1881-1925.Contemporary literature series. A. A. Knopf. 1926.
  20. ^abNabokov (1938)The Gift,chapter 3, p. 141.

Sources

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  • Imperial Moscow University: 1755-1917: encyclopedic dictionary.Moscow: Russian political encyclopedia (ROSSPEN). 2010. p. 63.ISBN978-5-8243-1429-8– via A. Andreev, D. Tsygankov.
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