Volume 22, Number 6 · April 17, 1975
Russian Nightmares
By Helen Muchnic
The Silver Dove
by Andrey Biely, translated and with an introduction by George Reavey
Grove, 419 pp., $4.95 (paper)
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Russian literature—in a period between its marvelous flowering, which began with Pushkin, and the repression of Stalin's Socialist Realism—was in a ferment of daring experimentation and theoretic debate, in which Andrey Biely played a leading role. He was an exponent of Symbolism, an original poet and novelist, a perfervid, sometimes wild, critic, and a meticulous scholar whose work inaugurated in Russia the scientific study of poetics. His essays and dissertations argued and explained the doctrine on which he stood; his imaginative writings—prose poems, which he called 'Symphonies,' lyrics, fiction, memoirs—exemplified it. His three major novels, The Silver Dove, Petersburg,[1] and Kotik Letaev,[2] are by now available in English. (Andrey Biely, incidentally, was the pseudonym of Boris Bugayev, son of an eminent mathematician at the University of Moscow, which he adopted on his first publication to spare his father all embarrassment.)
Review, 2513 words
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