Andrei Biely
(Borís Nikolaievich Bugaiev or Bugaev, better known by his pseudonym Andrei Bely, Biely or Belyj; Moscow, 1880-1934) Russian novelist, poet and critic.The son of a Moscow professor of mathematics, after having completed his secondary studies at an illustrious institute (and already more fond of poetry than mathematics or philosophy), he obtained a degree in science and philosophy at the University of Moscow.
Andrei Biely
He joined the Symbolists at age twenty; he wrote poems and novels that caused commotion between 1903 and 1917.In works of poetic prose ( Symphonies , 1904-1908) he showed his enthusiasm for the advent of a new mystical era.At the same time he published his first book of verses, Gold on blue (1904), aesthetically influenced by modernist symbolism and ideologically by the thought of Nietzsche.
He was faithful and militant within of many trends.Disciple of Soloviev and friend of Blok, he began as a mystic; later he was a firm populist and sympathizer of the Revolution, until he suffered the great disillusionment that followed its failure; he then acted as protector of the Futurists; in 1913 he became a disciple of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner in Switzerland and the communists considered him a "reactionary symbolist", but declared him a Marxist in 1930, although his dialectical materialism coupled with Steiner's enlightenment gave him a rather peculiar quality.
Most of his poetic work is built with the character of a musical composition.All its inflections and tonalities, its alliterations, its delays and accelerations of rhythms, its auditory effects, are not mere virtuoso tricks, but deliberately poetic experiments supported by a broad auditory background.His works of formal analysis of the work of other Russian poets and his treatises on different aesthetic problems have a clear literary value.
Even more important is his attempt to establish a connection between the Symbolists and the Russian literary tradition of the 20th century.Andrei Bely asserted that, in poetry, the Symbolists were the heirs of Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Nekrasov, Fyodor Tiutchev and Afanasi Fet, and that, in prose, they were the heirs of Gogol, Dostoevsky and Chekhov.In his own poems he dealt with the problems of the Revolution and liberalism that, until then, seemed the prerogatives of critical realism.
In the novel The Silver Dove ( Serebriannij Golub , 1910), he recounted the murder of an intellectual at the hands of members of an orgiastic sect.The description of the rough sect of the old believers gave him an opportunity to emphasize the duality of Russian culture and the gap between educated society and the popular masses.The work that followed, Petrograd ( Peterburg , 1913-16), goes even further in the political interpretation of national problems.Following markedly expressionist guidelines, it featured the murder of a bureaucrat killed by his anarchist son.Both revolutionaries and bureaucrats formed a collapsing world, an illusory culture.The spectral capital of water and granite was doomed to disappear into darkness and nonexistence, while the realm of Spirit held promise for the future.
The surprising composition of this novel, which deliberately mixes the real, the symbolic and the ideological, the symphonic unity of its fragmentary parts, the combination of fantasy and observation and the extraordinary linguistic richness in terms of vocabulary and the syntax (often eccentric and changeable, sometimes pretentious, esoteric and irritating) make Petrograd one of the most important Russian novels of the 20th century.
Biely's last works ( Kotik Letaev, Moscow, Masks ) are no less significant in linguistic and poetic aspects.An enigmatic and puzzling writer, Andrei Bely acted as the promoter of a stylistic revolution and the "poeticization of prose": he ushered in a new era whose development was interrupted by the Revolution, and it was for Russia what James Joyce and Marcel Proust were in the West in the 1920s.
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