26 1880 October, the
He was born in Moscow, into a teacher's family. Boris Bugaev — poet, symbolist writer. Known as Andrey Bely.
The tired world falls asleep in peace,
and ahead
No one has been expecting spring for a long time.
And you don't wait
I grew up on Arbat Street. One of the frequent guests at my parents' house was Lev Tolstoy.
He began writing at 16. From his youth, he was friends with the Symbolists and became fascinated with philosophy and Buddhism. He was one of the founders of the literary circle "Argonauts." To hide his "decadent" writing from his parents, he adopted a pseudonym.
While over dead people
You alone have not fallen asleep until now
Rattle with rusty chains
From the stone tower of freedom
In 1903, at his father's insistence, he graduated from the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University. He greeted the 1905 Revolution with enthusiasm. From 1906 onward, he traveled abroad frequently and spent extended periods living in Europe.
Enough: don't wait, don't hope -
Scatter, my poor people!
Fall into space and break up
Year after year of torment!
Centuries of poverty and lack of willpower.
Allow me, O Motherland,
Into the damp, empty expanse,
In your expanse to cry
He welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 and dedicated the poem “Jesus Christ” to it.
My country is a grave,
Stretching out the pale cross
Into the harsh vaults of the sky
And - in the unknown places
After October, he taught at the Moscow Proletkult for young Soviet writers. He continued to visit Europe..
During his life he wrote several literary symphonies, the novels “The Silver Dove”, “Petersburg” (pre-revolutionary) and “Moscow under Attack” (Soviet).
Nabokov called Petersburg the second novel of the 20th century.
The streets of St. Petersburg have an undeniable property: they turn passers-by into shadows; the shadows of St. Petersburg streets turn into people.
Russia is what books are broken against, knowledge is scattered, and life itself is burned.
During his lifetime, Bely was read mainly by the intellectual elite: Zamyatin called him "a writer's writer."
He died in his wife's arms in 1934, from a stroke resulting from sunstroke in Koktebel. Twenty-five years earlier, he had predicted his own end in his collection "Ashes."
I believed in the golden shine,
And he died from the sun's arrows.
The Duma measured the centuries,
But he couldn't live his life