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Chaos, Language, and Logos: How the Poet Participates in the Creating Activity of the Word in the Thought of Andrey Bely

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Albert Paretsky OP
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Abstract

Andrey Bely was an important member of the Russian symbolist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This essay presents a summary of the development of his ideas regarding the origins of image and symbol in poetic language. For Bely language organizes chaos. The poet finds images in the internal world of dreams. Music has an organizing power beyond that of language, which language attempts to imitate. Under the influence of Vladimir Solovyov he looked to the union of Divine Wisdom or Sophia with the Eternal Logos as the principle behind symbolic images. Later, under the spell of Rudolf Steiner, he found the source of inspiration in the eternal dwelling of the Logos from which the human ego descends into flesh. The task of the poet is to recover the memory of the time before he left the realm of the Logos and to return to that realm by participating in Christ's ascent to the Cross. The autobiographical novel Kotik Letaev gives an account of recovering memory from before birth and the need to be joined with Christ crucified.

Keywords

“Russian symbolism”Bely“order and chaos”Logos“poetic image”SolovyovSteiner
Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 97 , Issue 1070 , July 2016 , pp. 465 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 The Dominican Council. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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References

1 The name is variously transcribed as Bely, Biely, Belyi, Belyj. In this essay I follow the Library of Congress convention of citation and transliteration.

2 Theosophy usually refers to an occult philosophical system based on Buddhist and Hindu themes and promoted by the Russian Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891).

3 Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) broke with theosophy to found his own occult school in Dornach, Switzerland. See Barfield, Owen, “Listening to Steiner”, Parabola 9.4 (1985), pp. 98-99Google Scholar for a concise summary of Steiner's thought. For a discussion of Steiner's influence on Bely see Elsworth, John D., Andrey Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 37–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 A work full of neologisms and word plays makes translation difficult: four translations of Petersburg have appeared in the last fifty years.

5 I have used the text for Kotik Letaev as reprinted in Belyĭ, Andreĭ, Staryĭ Arbat (Moskva: Moskovskiĭ Rabochiĭ, 1989), pp. 428-578Google Scholar. Unless otherwise indicated all translations from the Russian are my own.

6 The images of lion and child are taken from the beginning of the first of Zarathustra's speeches in Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra: “Three transformations of the spirit do I name to you: how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.” Zarathustra goes on to explain that the camel bears great spiritual burdens; the lion has power to create freedom for itself for a new act of creating, and to say a holy “no” even to duty; and the child enjoys innocence and forgetting, a new beginning and a first motion, uttering a holy “yes”.

7 He called his earliest prose works “symphonies.” His Second Symphony “The Dramatic” (1901) is made up of short sections that depend on the interaction of images across the text, so that seemingly disparate sections are actually united and enriched by one another, much in the way that Wagner used leitmotifs.

8 Bely, Andrey, The Forms of Art (translated by John Elsworth; Edinburgh: Polygon, 1986), pp. 177-178Google Scholar.

9 Or, as Ada Steinberg puts it, “Whereas polyphony in music is the blending of several voices into a single whole, in poetry the poetic word seems to branch out … it requires lapses of time” (Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982] p. 156Google Scholar).

10 See Elsworth, . Andrey Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 The composer Aleksandr Scriabin (1872–1915), a follower of theosophy, tried to create in music what Bely did with words and images. See Carlson, Maria, ‘Fashionable Occultism: The World of Russian Composer Aleksander Scriabin’, The Journal of the International Institute 7 (2000), pp. 1, 18–20Google Scholar.

12 Smysl iskusstva [“The meaning of art”] §5 in Andreĭ Belyĭ, Simvolizm kak miroponimanie [“Symbolism as interpretation of the world”], (Moskva: Respublika, 1994), pp. 119-120.

13 See Mandelker, Amy, ‘Synaesthesia and Semiosis: Icon and Logos in Andrej Belyj's Glossalolija and Kotik Letaev’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 34 (1990), p. 172CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Elsworth, Andrey Bely, pp. 7-36.

14 Èmblematika smysla in Andreĭ Belyĭ, Simvolizm kak miroponimanie, pp. 25-82.

15 Elsworth, Andrey Bely, p. 21.

16 Simvolism [“Symbolism”] in Simvolizm kak miroponimanie, pp. 336-337.

17 Bely blames Kant specifically for this duality in “The Emblematics of Meaning” §3. Bely saw a need to overcome the duality that Western man experiences in perception and thought and used Steiner to extend his earlier theory of the symbol in artistic creation. We divide what is perceived from what is conceived, we separate object and idea. Dualisms pervade our experience and disrupt our inner life as the rational and non-rational aspects of our engagement with the external world are in conflict. Analytical thought sees the world according to mechanical models. The result is a dislocation of inter-human relationships (“The Emblematics of Meaning,” pp. 30-32). In his Second Symphony one of the characters is driven insane by reading Kant. In Petersburg there are frequent references to Kant (whose name is deliberately confused with Comte), whom Bely holds responsible for the breakdown of the relationship between Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov and his son.

18 Simvolizm, p. 338; see also “The Emblematics of Meaning” §6.

19 Apokalipsis v russkoĭ poèzii [“The Apocalypse in Russian Poetry”], (1905), in Andreĭ Belyĭ, Simvolizm kak miroponimanie, p. 411.

20 See Fink, Hilary, “Andrei Bely and the Music of Bergsonian Duration”, The Slavic and East European Journal, 41 (1997), p. 289CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 There is no English translation of the work, but there is an excellent French translation by Christine Zeytounian, published as Andreï Biely, Le Retour (Paris: Ed. Jacqueline Chambon, 1990).

22 “The unity that does not create [Brahma] is identifiable with the first Logos. From the first Logos issues the second Logos (form – metaphysical unity, Purusha) and every kind of substance (Prakriti); from the second Logos issues the third Logos, identifiable with the norm of cognition (Mahat) and with the world soul” (“The Emblematics of Meaning,” §13, p. 59).

23 Solovyov relates his encounter with the eternal Feminine in his long poem Tri svidaniya (“Three Meetings”). Bely includes Solovyov in his discussion of this image in Russian poetry from Pushkin to Blok in “The Apocalypse in Russian Poetry”. Bely further acknowledges Solovyov's influence in his 1922 autobiographical poem Pervoe svidanie (“First Meeting”).

24 Bely refers to Goethe's Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1790), to which Steiner had introduced him.

25 “Osiris, Buddha, and Christ” (1902) in McDermott, Robert A., ed., The Essential Steiner: Basic Writing of Rudolf Steiner (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984; r. Edinburgh: Floris, 1996), p. 184Google Scholar.

26 ‘The soul must awaken in itself the ability to recall representations related to the spiritual world.’ The Case for Anthroposophy, being extracts from Seelenrätseln, by Rudolf Steiner, selected, translated, arranged, and with an Introduction by Owen Barfield (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1970), p. 50Google Scholar.

27 Carol Anschuetz, “Recollection as Metaphor in Kotik Letaev”, Russian Literature, 4 (1976), p. 350. She identifies the locus classicus for the concept of recollection in Plato's Meno, 81c-d (“The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about virtue and about everything; for as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things, there is no difficulty in her eliciting, or as men say, “learning”’, out of a single recollection, all the rest . . . for all inquiry and all learning is but recollection.”)

28 Barfield, “Listening to Steiner”, p. 99.

29 Michael Molnar, Body of Words: A Reading of Belyi's Kotik Letaev (Birmingham Slavonic Monograph no. 17; Department of Russian Language and Literature, University of Birmingham, 1987), p. 45.

30 See Elsworth, Andrey Bely, p. 130.

31 Carol Anschuetz, “Recollection as Metaphor”, p. 353; Cioran, Samuel, “The Eternal Return: Andrej Belyj's Kotik Letaev”, Slavic and East European Journal 15 (1971), p. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.