The Symphonies

Andrei Bely

Published by Columbia University Press 2021

The Symphonies

Andrei Bely
Translated by: Jonathan Stone

In the series Russian Library

https://doi.org/10.7312/bely19908

Overview
Contents

About this book

This book presents Andrei Bely’s four Symphonies—“Dramatic Symphony,” “Northern Symphony,” “The Return,” and “Goblet of Blizzards”—fantastically strange stories and quintessential works of modernist innovation.

Author / Editor information

Andrei Bely, the pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (1880–1934), was a central figure of Russian symbolism and modernism as a poet, novelist, and theorist. He was a proponent of innovation who aimed both to revolutionize Russian literature and to find a philosophical framework for modernist techniques. His books include The Silver Dove, Petersburg, and Kotik Letaev.

Jonathan Stone is associate professor of Russian at Franklin & Marshall College. His books include The Institutions of Russian Modernism: Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism (2017) and Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture: Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s (2019).

Reviews

Barry Scherr, Dartmouth College:
Those who read Stone’s introduction and translation with care will come away with an understanding that will enable them to appreciate what Bely is undertaking in the Symphonies, even as they work through the profusion of imagery and the fragmentary structure of these writings. There are very few works that compete with this volume in any way.

Sibelan Forrester, translator of The Russian Folktale:
The richly saturated prose of Bely’s innovative Symphonies demands an effective translation. Jonathan Stone has made a scrupulous, powerful version that conveys the work’s mythological complexity and the hypnotic effect of its verbal and musical texture. An essential book for study of the Symbolists.

Caryl Emerson, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature:
Intermodal art was central to Russian Symbolism, but Bely’s four Symphonies resist easy definition. Rhythmic, motivic, visionary, commingling mundane matter with elevated spirit and shot through with satire, they relay Bely’s sense of symphonic music as a linkage of levels and moods. Jonathan Stone’s exquisite translation suspends the reader between the real and the more real.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
NOTE ON THE TEXT Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
INTRODUCTION Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
NORTHERN SYMPHONY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
DRAMATIC SYMPHONY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	67
THE RETURN Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195
A GOBLET OF BLIZZARDS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	471

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: General/trade;

eBook

Published: November 2, 2021
ISBN: 9780231552936