Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction (RUSSIAN RESEARCH CENTER STUDIES)

A leading Russian Symbolist poet, essayist, and mentor to an entire generation of writers, Andrei Bely (1880-1934) achieved greatest renown for three brilliant novels: Petersburg -- which has been ranked with the masterpieces of Joyce, Kafka, and Proust -- The Silver Dove, and Kotik Letaev.Vladimir Alexandrov argues cogently that the main-spring of Bely's complex art is his conception of Symbolism as a new form of cognition that links the individual, the material world, and the transcendent realm. Supplementing close textual analysis with material drawn from Bely's theoretical and autobiographical writings, Alexandrov traces in detail how this conception evolved from four early experimental prose narratives to the major novels, and how it is manifested in their themes, form, and style. Alexandrov also provides lucid discussions of the significant influence that several philosophical and occult systems had on Bely's art, and of the theoretical problem of what constitutes a Symbolist novel.

The quintessential Benjamin gesture of Volume 3 is the 1936 selection of letters by a wide assortment of figures from the German Romantic era, together with his brief, meticulously sympathetic commentaries, contained in German Men and Women I It is the story primarily of friendships amidst the passages and misfortunes of time, and of ideas as the substance of friendship: Their exchange becomes the fabric that connects one individual to another, and binds each to their precarious, uncertain lives.