Andrei Bely

Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (Russian: Бори́с Никола́евич Буга́ев, IPA: [bɐˈrʲis nʲɪkɐˈlajɪvʲɪtɕ bʊˈɡajɪf] (listen)), better known by the pen name Andrei Bely or Biely (Russian: Андре́й Бе́лый, IPA: [ɐnˈdrʲej ˈbʲelɨj] (listen); 26 October [O.S. 14 October] 1880 8 January 1934), was a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, communist, and literary critic. He was a committed antroposophist and follower of Rudolf Steiner.[1] His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as the third-greatest masterpiece of the 20th century.[2][3][4]

Andrei Bely
Bely in 1912
BornBoris Nikolaevich Bugaev
(1880-10-26)October 26, 1880
Moscow, Russian Empire
DiedJanuary 8, 1934(1934-01-08) (aged 53)
Moscow, Russian SFSR, USSR
Alma materImperial Moscow University (1903)
Notable worksPetersburg

Biography

Boris Bugaev was born in Moscow, into a prominent intellectual family. His father, Nikolai Bugaev, was a leading mathematician who is regarded as a founder of the Moscow school of mathematics. His mother was not only highly intelligent but a famous society beauty, and the focus of considerable gossip. Young Boris was a polymath whose interests included mathematics, biology, chemistry, music, philosophy, and literature. Bugaev attended university at the University of Moscow.[5] He would go on to take part in both the Symbolist movement and the Russian school of neo-Kantianism. Bugaev became friendly with Alexander Blok and his wife; he fell in love with her, which caused tensions between the two poets.

Nikolai Bugaev was well known for his influential philosophical essays, in which he decried geometry and probability and trumpeted the virtues of hard analysis. Despite—or because of—his father's mathematical tastes, Boris Bugaev was fascinated by probability and particularly by entropy, a notion to which he frequently refers in works such as Kotik Letaev.[6]

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

Portrait of Bely by Léon Bakst, 1905

Bely's symbolist novel Petersburg (1913; 1922) 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 the Russian 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 famous bronze statue of Peter the Great.

In his later years Bely was influenced by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy[7][8] and became a personal friend of Steiner's. He spent time between Switzerland, Germany, and Russia, during its revolution. He supported the Bolshevik rise to power and later dedicated his efforts to Soviet culture, serving on the Organizational Committee of the Union of Soviet Writers.[9] He died, aged 53, in Moscow.

The Andrei Bely Prize (Russian: Премия Андрея Белого), one of the most important prizes in Russian literature, was named after him. His poems were set to music and frequently performed by Russian singer-songwriters[10]

Research on rhythm in poems

Bely's essay Rhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horseman is cited in Nabokov's novel The Gift, where it is mentioned as "monumental research on rhythm".[11] Fyodor, poet and main character, praises the system Bely created for graphically marking off and calculating the 'half-stresses' in the iambs. 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 old iambic 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.[11] 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 essays Symbolism, Moscow, 1910).

Selected works

Novels

  • The Silver Dove (Серебряный голубь, 1910)
  • Petersburg (Петербург, 1913, revised edition published 1922)
  • Kotik Letaev (Котик Летаев, 1918)
  • The Baptized Chinaman (Крещёный китаец, 1927, translated into English as "The Christened Chinaman"[12])
  • Moscow (Москва, 1926–1931)
    • The Moscow Eccentric (Московский чудак, 1926)
    • Moscow Under Siege (Москва под ударом, 1926)
    • Masks (Маски, 1931)

Poetry

  • Second Symphony, the Dramatic (Симфония (2-я, Драматическая), 1902)
  • The Northern, or First—Heroic (Северная симфония (1-я, героическая), 1904)
  • Gold in Azure (Золото в лазури, 1904)
  • The Return—Third (Возврат. III симфония, 1905)
  • Goblet of Blizzards—Fourth (Кубок метелей. Четвертая симфония, 1908)
  • Ash (Пепел, 1909)
  • Urn (Урна, 1909)
  • Christ Has Risen (Христос воскрес, 1918)
  • The First Encounter (Первое свидание, 1921)
  • Glossolalia: Poem about Sound[13] (Глоссолалия. Поэма о звуке, 1922)

Non-fiction

  • 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)
  • Rhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horseman (Ритм как диалектика и «Медный всадник», 1934)
  • The Mastery of Gogol (Мастерство Гоголя, 1934)

Autobiography

  • 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

Petersburg

  • John Cournos, Grove Press, 1959.
  • Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, Indiana University Press, 1978.
  • David McDuff, Penguin, 1995.
  • John Elsworth, Pushkin Press, 2009.

The Silver Dove

  • George Reavey, Grove Press, 1974.
  • John Elsworth, Northwestern University Press, 2001.

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.

The Dramatic Symphony

  • John Elsworth, Grove Press, 1987.

The Christened Chinaman

  • Thomas Beyer, Hermitage, 1991.

In the Kingdom of Shadows

  • Catherine Spitzer, Hermitage, 2001.

The Moscow Eccentric

  • Brendan Kiernan, Russian Life Books, 2016.

References

  1. Norwich, John Julius (1985–1993). Oxford illustrated encyclopedia. Judge, Harry George., Toyne, Anthony. Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press. p. 43. ISBN 0-19-869129-7. OCLC 11814265.
  2. 1965, Nabokov's television interview TV-13 NY
  3. Nabokov and the moment of truth on YouTube
  4. Nabokov’s Recommendations (opinions on other writers)
  5. Noah Giansiracusa, Anastasia Vasilyev (7 Sep 2017). Mathematical Symbolism in a Russian Literary Masterpiece (Report). Morgan, Matthew. arXiv:1709.02483. Bibcode:2017arXiv170902483G. (PDF, 24kb). Accessed 12 February 2018.
  6. Janecek, Gerald (1976). "The Spiral as Image and Structural Principle in Andrej Belyj's Kotik Lataev". Russian Literature. 4 (4): 357–63. doi:10.1016/0304-3479(76)90010-7.
  7. Judith Wermuth-Atkinson, The Red Jester: Andrei Bely's Petersburg as a Novel of the European Modern (2012). ISBN 3643901542
  8. Bely, Andrei. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001–07 Archived July 1, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  9. http://www.britannica.com/biography/Andrey-Bely
  10. Little theater on the planet of Earth, sound tracks of songs on poems by Andrei Bely, music and performance by Elena Frolova
  11. Nabokov (1938) The Gift, chapter 3, p. 141.
  12. "The Christened Chinaman" at community.middlebury.edu
  13. "Glossolalia" at community.middlebury.edu

Bibliography

  • Imperial Moscow University: 1755-1917: encyclopedic dictionary. Moscow: Russian political encyclopedia (ROSSPEN). A. Andreev, D. Tsygankov. 2010. p. 63. ISBN 978-5-8243-1429-8.
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