When one great author engages another, as Andrei Bely so brilliantly does in Gogol’s Artistry, the result is inevitably a telling portrait of both writers. So it is in Gogol’s Artistry. Translated into English for the first time, this idiosyncratic, exhaustive critical study is as interesting for what it tells us about Bely’s thought and method as it is for its insights into the oeuvre of his literary predecessor. Bely’s argument in this book is that Gogol’s earlier writing should be given more consideration than most critics have granted. Employing what might be called a scientific perspective, Bely considers how often certain colors appear; he diagrams sentences and discusses Gogol’s prose in terms of mathematical equations. The result, as strange and engaging as Bely’s best fiction, is also an innovative, thorough, and remarkably revealing work of criticism.

Andrei Bely was the greatest Russian writer of the twentieth century. Chiefly known outside of Russia as a novelist (his Petersburg is the best modern Russian novel), he was also a leading symbolist poet and profound philosophical critic. Bely was also a mystic who had an unsurpassed ability to express his visions in writing, and he often did so in the form of lyrical essays, a selection of which is offered here. Many of these essays were written as the twentieth century stood at the threshold of a new epoch. For Bely, a new religious consciousness was emerging, rooted in Vladimir Solovyov's visions of Sophia and Nietzsche's proclamation that a new man was on the verge of being created. A new dawn-both joyful and terrifying-was already visible on the horizon. "The artist is the creator of the universe," Andrei Bely declares in one of his philosophical prose poems collected in this book. Roaming fluidly between poetry and theory, between analysis and reverie, Bely transforms the material and intellectual revolution of modernity into an aesthetic revolution, and at the same time presages the revolutionary political upheaval of the twentieth century. In Boris Jakim's capable translation, Bely's intriguing, breathless improvisations sparkle with insight and wit.-Robert Bird, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literature, Univ. of Chicago Andrei Bely-poet, novelist, and thinker-was one of the central figures of early twentieth-century Russian literature. His thought, represented by the nine essays collected here, examining in depth the works of Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, Nietzsche, and the Russian poets (particularly his fellow Symbolists), is remarkable both in its scope and in its form of expression. His style combines visionary exaltation with self-humor in a way uniquely his own: "Our salvation," as he writes in the final essay, "lies in playful exuberance." Boris Jakim succeeds at the almost impossible task of capturing that quality in his fine translations.-Richard Pevear, translator of War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov For Andrei Bely, every question is a religious question, every answer a religious answer. The essays included in this collection, each in its own way, figure as both question and answer. For, with Bely, all that is important in human life-art, meaning, struggle, discovery-shimmers in a metaxu whose domain is precisely that of religion as the site of revelation. These essays-apocalyptic, imaginal, gnomic-though written nearly a century ago, nevertheless provide us with new ways of seeing the implicitly poetic, integral, and eminently religious nature of both human existence and the structure of the world. Boris Jakim is to be commended for the gift of this translation, which provides the English-speaking world a much-needed alternative to the prevailing religious discourses so preoccupied with apologetics and polemics and so forgetful of poetry and mysticism.-Michael Martin, author of The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics

Widely considered the greatest Russian modernist novel, Andrei Bely's Petersburg has until now eluded the critical attention that a book of its caliber merits. In The Stony Dance, Timothy Langen offers readers a study of Bely's masterpiece unparalleled in its comprehensiveness, clarity, and inclusion of detail--a critical study that is at the same time a meditation on the nature of literary art. Thoroughly versed in Russian and European modernism, in Bely's biography and writings, and in twentieth-century literary theory, Langen constructs an original analytic scheme for reading Petersburg. Guided by Bely's fertile but challenging notions of art and philosophy, he analyzes the novel first as an object embodying intentions and essences, then as a pattern of signification and events, and finally as a dance of gestures that coordinate body and meaning, regularity and surprise, self and other, and author, novel, and reader. The terms are derived from Bely's own writings, but they are nuanced with reference to Russian and European contexts and clarified with reference to philosophy and literary theory. Langen shows how Bely invariably challenges his own concepts and patterns, thereby creating an unusually demanding and dynamic text. In finding an approach to these enriching difficulties, this book at long last shows readers a welcoming way into Bely's thought, and his masterwork, and their place in the complex world of early twentieth-century literature.

This book presents Andrei Bely's four Symphonies--"Dramatic Symphony," "Northern Symphony," "The Return," and "Goblet of Blizzards"--fantastically strange stories and quintessential works of modernist innovation.

Andrei Bely's 1913 masterwork Petersburg is widely regarded as the most important Russian novel of the twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov ranked it with James Joyce's Ulysses, Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Few artistic works created before the First World War encapsulate and articulate the sensibility, ideas, phobias, and aspirations of Russian and transnational modernism as comprehensively. Bely expected his audience to participate in unraveling the work's many meanings, narrative strains, and patterns of details. In their essays, the contributors clarify these complexities, summarize the intellectual and artistic contexts that informed Petersburg's creation and reception, and review the interpretive possibilities contained in the novel. This volume will aid a broad audience of Anglophone readers in understanding and appreciating Petersburg.

This literary guide leads students with advanced knowledge of Russian as well as experienced scholars through the text of Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist masterpiece “The Nose.” Part I focuses on numerous instances of the writer’s wordplay, which is meant to surprise and delight the reader, but which often is lost in English translations. It traces Gogol’s descriptions of everyday life in St. Petersburg, familiar to the writer’s contemporaries and fellow citizens but hidden from the modern Western reader. Part II presents an overview of major critical interpretations of the story in Gogol scholarship from the time of its publication to the present, as well as its connections to the works of Shostakovich, Kafka, Dalí, and Kharms.