Andrei Bely
Gale Encyclopedia of Russian History:
Top
Andrei Bely
(1880 - 1934), symbolist poet, novelist, essayist.
Andrei Bely was born Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev on October 26, 1880, in Moscow. His father, Nikolai Bugayev, was a professor of mathematics at Moscow University and a renowned scholar; his mother, Alexandra, was dedicated to music, poetry, and theater. This dichotomy was to influence and torment Boris throughout his life: He would resist both parents' influences while continually seeking syntheses of disparate subjects.
At age fifteen, Boris met the intellectually gifted Soloviev family. Vladimir Soloviev was a philosopher, poet, theologian, and historian whose concept of the "Eternal Feminine" in the form of "Sophia, the Divine Wisdom" became central to Symbolist thought. Vladimir's younger brother Mikhail took Boris under his wing, encouraging him as a writer and introducing him to Vladimir Soloviev's metaphysical system.
From 1899 to 1906 Boris studied science, then philosophy at Moscow University. However, his absorption in his writing and independent research interfered with his formal studies. Restless and erratic, he took interest in all subjects and confined himself to none. His idiosyncratic writing style derives in part from his passionate, undisciplined approach to knowledge, a quality that would later be deemed decadent by socialist critics, including Leon Trotsky.
Mikhail Soloviev applauded Boris's early literary endeavors and suggested the pseudonym Andrei Bely ("Andrew the White"). Bely's four Symphonies (1902 - 1908) combine poetry, music, and prose. Bely's first poetry collection, Gold in Azure (Zoloto v lazuri, 1904), uses rhythms of folk poetry and metrical innovations. Like Alexander Blok and other Symbolists, Bely saw himself as a herald of a new era. The poems of Gold in Azure are rapturous in mood and rich in magical, mythical imagery. Bely's next poetry collections move into murkier territory: Ashes (Pepel, 1909) expresses disillusionment with the 1905 revolution, while Urn (Urna, 1909) reflects his affair with Blok's wife, Lyubov, which caused hostility, even threats of duels, between the two poets.
Bely followed his first novel, The Silver Dove (Serebryany golub, 1909), with Petersburg (1916), which Vladimir Nabokov considered one of the four greatest novels of the twentieth century (Strong Opinions, 1973). It concerns a terrorist plot to be performed by Nikolai Apollonovich against his father, Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov. The novel's nonsensical dialogue, ellipses, exclamations, and surprising twists of plot, while influenced by Nikolai Gogol and akin to the work of the Futurists, take Russian prose in an unprecedented direction. The novel's main character is Petersburg itself, which "proclaims forcefully that it exists."
While writing Petersburg, Bely found a new spiritual guide in Rudolf Steiner, whose theory of anthroposophy - the idea that each individual, through training, may access his subconscious knowledge of a spiritual realm - would inform Bely's next novel, the autobiographical Kitten Letayev (Kotik Letayev, 1917 - 1918).
Like other Symbolists, Bely welcomed the October Revolution of 1917. He moved to Berlin in 1921, but returned in 1923 to a hostile literary climate. Bely tried to make room for himself in the new era by combining Marxism with anthroposophy, but to no avail.
A prolific and influential critic, Bely wrote more than three hundred essays, four volumes of memoirs, and numerous critical works, including his famous Symbolism (1910), which paved the way for Formalism, and The Art of Gogol (Masterstvo Gogolya, 1934). He died of arterial sclerosis on August 1, 1934.
Bibliography
Alexandrov, Vladimir. (1985). Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Elsworth, J. D. (1983). Andrey Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Maslenikov, Oleg A. (1952). The Frenzied Poets: Andrey Biely and the Russian Symbolists. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mochulsky, Konstantin. (1977). Andrei Bely: His Life and Works, tr. Nora Szalavitz. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.
—DIANA SENECHAL
Bely, Andrei (əndrā' byĕ'lē), pseud. of Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev (bûryēs' nyĭkəlī'əvyĭch' būgī'ĭf), 1880-1934, Russian writer. A leading symbolist, he had a close but stormy relationship with Aleksandr Blok. His poetry includes the four-volume Symphonies (1901-8); his best prose is in the novels The Silver Dove (1910) and Petersburg (1912, tr. 1959) and in Kotik Letayev (1922), an autobiographical novel in the manner of James Joyce. He was an experimenter-his involved style often mixes realism and symbolism in complex forms. In his later years Bely was influenced by Rudolph Steiner's anthroposophy. He accepted the Soviet regime, but his works were not well received by Soviet critics. By the mid-1970s Western critics had discovered Bely, and several, including Vladimir Nabokov, proclaimed him the most important Russian writer of the 20th cent. In 1974 new translations of The Silver Dove and Kotik Letayev were published in the United States, and in 1977 a new translation of Petersburg.
Bibliography
See study by J. D. Elsworth (1984).
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
Top
Andrei Bely
.jpg)
Andrei Bely (Russian: Андре́й Бе́лый [] (
listen)) was the pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (Russian: Бори́с Никола́евич Буга́ев [] ( listen)) (October 26 [O.S. October 14] 1880, Moscow – January 8, 1934, Moscow), a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic. His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century.[1][2]
|
Contents
|
Biography
Boris Bugaev was born 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, music, philosophy, and literature. He would go on to take part in both the Symbolist movement and the Russian school of neo-Kantianism.
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.
Bely's creative works notably influenced—and were influenced by—several literary schools, especially symbolism. They feature a striking mysticism and a sort of moody musicality. The far-reaching influence of his literary voice on Russian writers (and even musicians) has frequently been compared to the impact of James Joyce in the English-speaking world. The novelty of his sonic effects has also been compared to the innovative music of Charles Ives.[citation needed]
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.
Bely's symbolist novel Petersburg (1916; 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[3] and became a personal friend of Steiner's.
Bely was one of the major influences on the theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold.[citation needed]
He is the namesake of the Andrei Bely Prize (Russian: Премия Андрея Белого), one of the most important prizes in Russian literature.
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".[4] 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.[4] 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).
Bibliography
- 1902 Second Symphony, the Dramatic
- 1904 The Northern, or First—Heroic
- 1904 Gold in Azure (poetry)
- 1905 The Return--Third
- 1908 Goblet of Blizzards--Fourth
- 1909 Ash
- 1909 Urn (poetry)
- 1910 Symbolism (criticism/theory)
- 1910 Green Meadow (criticism)
- 1910 The Silver Dove (novel)
- 1911 Arabesques (criticism)
- 1916 Petersburg (Revised edition published, 1922)
- 1917 Revolution and Culture
- 1917-18 Kotik Letaev (novel based on his early childhood; pub. as book 1922)
- 1918 Christ Has Risen (poem)
- 1921 The First Encounter (autobiographical poem)
- 1922 Recollections of Blok
- 1922 ["Glossolalia" (A Poem about Sound)] http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/gl/intro.html
- 1926 The Moscow Eccentric (1st of trilogy of novels)
- 1926 Moscow Under Siege (2nd of trilogy of novels)
- 1927 The Baptized Chinaman (Translated into English as ["The Christened Chinaman"][5])
- 1931 Masks (3rd of trilogy of novels)
- 1930 At the Border of Two Centuries (1st memoir of trilogy)
- 1933 The Beginning of the Century (2nd memoir of trilogy)
- 1934 Between Two Revolutions (3rd memoir of trilogy)
- 1934 Rhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horseman (criticism)
- 1934 The Mastery of Gogol (criticism)
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.
References
- ^ 1965, Nabokov's television interview TV-13 NY
- ^ Nabokov and the moment of truth
- ^ Bely, Andrei. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07
- ^ a b Nabokov (1938) The Gift, chapter 3, p. 141.
- ^ Untitled Document at community.middlebury.edu
External links
- Encyclopedia of Soviet Writers
- Translation of Andrei Bely's short story "The Yogi"
- English translations of 3 poems by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky, 1921
- English translations of 4 poems
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:
Copyrights:
Gale Encyclopedia of Russian History
Encyclopedia of Russian History. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.
Read more
Mentioned in
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok
(Russian history)
Cabaret
(Russian history)
Vladimir Sergeyevich Soloviev
(Russian history)
Russian literature
(literature, Russia)
Silver Age
(Russian history)
» More