Andrei Bely

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Boris Bugaev is born in Moscow to a prominent intellectual family with a father, Nikolai Bugaev, who is a leading mathematician and founder of the Moscow school of mathematics. His mother is not only highly intelligent but also a famous society beauty, causing considerable gossip. Young Boris is a polymath whose interests include mathematics, biology, chemistry, music, philosophy, and literature. He takes part in both the Symbolist movement and the Russian school of neo-Kantianism. Bugaev becomes friendly with Alexander Blok and his wife, falling in love with her, which causes tension between the two poets. Nikolai Bugaev is well-known for his influential philosophical essays that decried geometry and probability while trumpeting the virtues of hard analysis. Despite or because of his father's mathematical tastes, Boris Bugaev is fascinated by probability and particularly by entropy, a notion he frequently refers to in works such as Kotik Letaev. As a young man, Bely is strongly influenced by his acquaintance with the family of philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, especially Mikhail, described in his long autobiographical poem The First Encounter. It was Mikhail who gives Bugaev his pseudonym Andrei Bely. Bely's symbolist novel Petersburg (1916; 1922) is generally considered to be his masterpiece. The book employs a striking prose method that often evokes colors with sounds. Set in the somewhat hysterical atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Petersburg and the Russian Revolution of 1905, the novel tells the story of Nikolai Apollonovich, a ne'er-do-well who is caught up in revolutionary politics and assigned to assassinate his own father. In later years, Bely is influenced by Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy and becomes a personal friend of Steiner's. He spends time between Switzerland, Germany, and Russia during its revolution, supporting the Bolshevik rise to power and later dedicating his efforts to Soviet culture, serving on the Organizational Committee of the Union of Soviet Writers. Bely dies in Moscow at 53 years old. He is one of the major influences on Vsevolod Meyerhold's theater. The Andrei Bely Prize, one of Russia's most important literary prizes, is named after him. His poems are set to music and frequently performed by Russian singer-songwriters.