Андрей Белый: автобиографизм и биографические практики

Only a few weeks later, in December 1910, Belyj took flight himself in what his memoirs repeatedly describe as «begstvo».[673] Accompanied by Asja Turgeneva, he set off for foreign cultures: Tunisia, Egypt, and Palestine. The trip climaxed in his experiences in March 1911 at the foot of the Sphinx and the pyramids at Giza outside Cairo. Here the emerging idea behind the novel acquired further contours, for the massive piles of stone he encountered were later incorporated into the cityscape of «Peterburg».

The mighty Sphinx and its shifting expressions seemed to take on certain features of the Bronze Horseman. In «Egipet», an article written later that year just before he began working on «Peterburg»,[674] Belyj summarized his impressions, noting that the Sphinx made him feel the proximity of «terror» and «provocation» – the emerging theme of the novel. Like Dudkin, he was able to look into the cosmic dimension and sense how from its very beginning down through evolution, humanity had fled in terror: «My ubegali ot prarodimogo užasa i togda, kogda byli komočkami slizi; dalee ubegali my, stavši podobiem červej, a kogda my stali obez’janami, bezdna legla meždu nami i prarodimym».[675] Here we have the embryo not only of the cosmic ascent of the Bronze Horseman in «Peterburg», but also of Belyj’s next novel «Kotik Letaev», where he draws autobiographical parallels between the formation of his early consciousness and the evolution of the species.

As he worked on the novel Belyj avoided Moscow. In letters to Blok he described how he «fled» from urban civilization; on one occasion, for example, he writes: «Raz v nedelju prichoditsja imet’ delo s gorodom; ugorelye, čerez den’, my brosaemsja v begstvo». This particular letter, in which he also comments on the progress of the novel, clearly has points of contact with Dudkin’s catastrophic vision.[676] Eventually, in April 1912, Belyj and his partner «fled» Russia for the second time,[677] now toward a meeting in May with what would soon become Anthroposophy and, as is reflected in Nikolaj Ableuchov’s suggested rebirth in the epilogue of the novel, a new life that Belyj hoped would dawn for the entire nation.

Tellingly, early in Belyj’s memoir phase, when some of what he wrote about the recently deceased Blok actually alluded to himself, he portrayed the latter’s crisis around 1912 as a flight from an avenging Horseman. He is referring here to «Vozmezdie», Blok’s epic poem spanning three generations, which he was writing at the same time Belyj was working on «Peterburg». Belyj explicitly comments on how features of Peter’s statue in Puškin’s poem merge with the mysterious horseman who destroys the sorcerer in the final scene of Gogol’s story «Strašnaja mest’».[678]

Thus it appears that at this fateful moment in Russian history just before the First World War Belyj attributed deep national and personal significance to Evgenij’s flight through the streets in «Mednyj vsadnik». The first Swedish translation of «Peterburg» (1969) features on its cover Aleksandr Benois’s famous portrayal of this central scene. It is in fact an excellent summary of the keynote theme of the novel.

Dates are according to the Gregorian Calendar.

Translated by Charles Rougle.

Claudia Criveller (Padua, Italy). The Beast as an Element of Autobiographical Representation. «The Baptized Chinaman»: An Interpretative Hypothesis

Andrej Belyj’s wide autobiographical corpus is comprised of works that can be attributed to different genres (memoirs, autobiographies, autobiographical novels, diaries, letters), where the author played with new and experimental narrative devices and forms which, if sometimes borrowed from literary tradition, were always original. In these works the conventions typical of different genres can be recognized. An example can be found in his autobiographical trilogy «Epopeja»: «Notes of an Eccentric» («Zapiski čudaka») can be attributed to the genre of spiritual autobiography,[679] while «Kotik Letaev» and «The Baptized Chinaman» both contain some of the stylistic features of the Bildungsroman and of childhood autobiography.[680] However, none of these works can be interpreted through a single and rigid point of view. While Belyj uses traditional forms, its experimentalism produces extremely varied forms and devices which are typical of modernism.[681] This allows considering Belyj’s works as what Suzanne Nalbantian has defined as «aesthetic autobiography». Nalbantian derived her idea from the «transformation theory», which is grounded on the analysis of the processes of selection, substitution, distancing, abstraction, creation of composites, multiplication, diffusion, misrepresentation, mythification).[682]