Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism (Studies of the Harriman Institute)

Andrey Bely (1880-1934) should rank with Yeats, Joyce, and Proust among the inimitable innovators of early 20th-century letters. Bely, however, wrote in Russian and chose to stay in the USSR, where his loyalty was valued but his legacy, so out of tune with socialist realism, neglected. These illuminating essays, the product of a symposium at Columbia University's Harriman Institute in 1984, cover Bely's art intensively. Among their topics are influences (Orthodoxy, Nietzsche, theosophy); experiments in "musical" prose ("symphonies"); the sound patterning and leitmotifs of the novels ( St. Petersburg, The Silver Dove, et al.); plus the poetry, memoirs, and theoretical and philosophical works. Andrey Bely, the man and the book, will fascinate students of the modernist heritage. Mary F. Zirin, Altadena, Cal.Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.