Andrei Bely | |
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.jpg) Bely in 1912 | |
| Born | Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (1880-10-26)26 October 1880 Moscow, Russian Empire |
| Died | 8 January 1934(1934-01-08) (aged 53) Moscow,Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
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| Alma mater | Imperial Moscow University (1903) |
| Period | 1900—1934 |
| Literary movement | |
| Notable works | The Silver Dove (1910) Petersburg (1913/1922) |
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Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (Russian:Бори́с Никола́евич Буга́ев,IPA:[bɐˈrʲisnʲɪkɐˈlajɪvʲɪdʑbʊˈɡajɪf]ⓘ; 26 October [O.S. 14 October] 1880 – 8 January 1934), better known by thepen nameAndrei Bely orBiely,[a] was a Russian and Soviet novelist,Symbolist poet, theorist and literary critic. He was a committedanthroposophist and follower ofRudolf Steiner.[1] His novelPetersburg (1913/1922) was regarded byVladimir Nabokov as 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]
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 apolymath 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 movement and the Russian school ofneo-Kantianism. Bugaev became friendly withAlexander Blok and 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]
Nikolai Bugaev was well known for his influential philosophical essays, in which he decriedgeometry andprobability and 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]
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 theBolshevik rise 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]
Bely did not accomplish his reformation of Russian prose single‐handedly: other major Symbolist novelists, especiallyFyodor Sologub andAlexei 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,Babel andAndrei 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'sUlysses orRobbe‐Grillet'sJealousy or evenThomas Pynchon'sGravity's Rainbow for 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 of experimental prose works, written from 1900 to 1908. In 1909 he published his first novel,The Silver Dove. As critics note, it is notable for itsskaz techniques and its unique ornamental 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 thatPetersburg included 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. Mirsky calledKotik Letaev "Bely's most unique and original work", whileThe Christened Chinaman was called by Mirsky "the most realistic and the most amusing of Bely's works".[19] He also wrote the 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 Russianintelligentsia duringWorld War I and theRussian Revolution. It differs fromThe Silver Dove andPetersburg with 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 have not yet been translated into English.
Bely's essayRhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horseman is 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 tetrameters from 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).
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