Andrei Bely

Andrei Bely was the pen name of Boris Nikolayevich Bugaev (Moscow, 1880 – Moscow, 8 January 1934), a Russian novelist, poet and literary critic associated with Symbolism. Vladimir Nabokov counted him among the most important writers in the Russian language, and his novel Petersburg, often compared with Joyce's Ulysses, has become one of the landmarks of modernist fiction.

Bugaev grew up in a prominent intellectual family in Moscow. His father, Nikolai Bugaev, was a respected mathematician regarded as a founder of the Moscow school of mathematics. Between 1899 and 1906 Bugaev studied at Moscow University, first natural sciences and then philology and philosophy, and he took a keen interest in music, religion, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He eventually chose to devote himself entirely to literature. He moved in Symbolist circles and, together with Sergei Solovyov, Alexander Blok and Ellis, formed the group known as the Argonauts, which edited the journal The Golden Fleece between 1906 and 1909. His first book, Second Symphony, Dramatic (1902), appeared under the name Andrei Bely so as not to embarrass his father. His four 'symphonies' in poetic prose tried to combine literature, music and painting, and his verse collections pursued the same fusion of the arts.

His first novel, The Silver Dove (1910), and above all Petersburg, serialised between 1913 and 1914, shaped the prose for which he is best known. Petersburg unfolds over roughly twenty-four hours during the unrest of 1905 and follows Nikolai Ableukhov, a young revolutionary ordered to kill his own father, a tsarist senator. The city is the real protagonist, the prose plays with sound and colour, and irony runs through the whole book. Bely revised and shortened it in 1922.

From about 1912 he embraced Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy and became a personal friend of Steiner. His marriage to Asya Turgeneva took the couple to Dornach in Switzerland. He returned to Russia in 1916 and welcomed the Revolution of 1917, which he treated in essays and in poems such as Christ Is Risen. After the revolution he wrote Kotik Letaev, a psychological novel of childhood, and a new trilogy centred on Moscow, along with memoirs in three volumes. His last book, a study of Gogol's style, appeared in 1934, the year he died.

His works were banned in the Soviet Union from 1940 to 1965. He influenced Yuri Olesha, Boris Pilnyak, Boris Pasternak and Nabokov, and today he is recognised as one of the great renovators of twentieth-century Russian prose.