“The artist is the creator of the universe,” Andrei Bely declares in one of his philosophical prose poems collected in this book. Roaming fluidly between poetry and theory, analysis and reverie, Bely transforms the material and intellectual revolution of modernity into an aesthetic revolution, and at the same time presages the revolutionary political upheaval of the twentieth century. In Boris Jakim’s capable translation, Bely’s intriguing, breathless improvisations sparkle with insight and wit.”
— ROBERT BIRD
Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literature, Univ. of Chicago
Andrei Bely — poet, novelist, and thinker — was one of the central figures of early twentieth-century Russian literature. His thought, represented by the nine essays collected here, examining in depth the works of Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, Nietzsche, and the Russian poets (particularly his fellow Symbolists), is remarkable both in its scope and its form of expression. His style combines visionary exaltation with self-humor in a way uniquely his own: “Our salvation,” as he writes in the final essay, “lies in playful exuberance.” Boris Jakim succeeds at the almost impossible task of capturing that quality in his fine translations.”
— RICHARD PEVEAR
translator of War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov
For Andrei Bely, every question is a religious question, every answer a religious answer. The essays collected here, each in its own way, figure as both question and answer. For, with Bely, all that is important in human life — art, meaning, struggle, discovery — shimmers in a metaxu whose domain is precisely that of religion as the locus of revelation. These essays — apocalyptic, imaginal, gnomic — though written nearly a century ago, nevertheless provide us with new ways of seeing the implicitly poetic, integral, and eminently religious nature of both human existence and the structure of the world. Boris Jakim is to be commended for the gift of this translation, which provides the English-speaking world a much-needed alternative to the prevailing religious discourses so preoccupied with apologetics and polemics and so forgetful of poetry and mysticism.”
— MICHAEL MARTIN
author of The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics
