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Bely andrei6/29/2023 ![]() ![]() The day was extinguished like a sad candle.” It’s an extraordinary poetry, and if the conclusions don’t always follow from the premises, the overall effect suggests the power of language as a tool of enchantment and, at times, incantation. The ascetic’s glowing face smiled, even though it was cold. To the timid pedestrian they winked with their countless windows, turned their blind walls to him in a sign of disdain, or mocked his secret thoughts with columns of smoke.” In the second, “Dramatic,” symphony, he concludes a series with “7. Big as the mountains, the houses bristled and swaggered like overfed swine. In “Northern Symphony,” a set of short, numbered paragraphs resembling a kind of syllogism, he writes, with foreboding. These four “symphonies,” a cross between prose poem and novella, manifest both idealism and doom. ![]() ![]() Even so, Bely’s work is marked by a deep pessimism, and if some of it foreshadows magic realism, there is always dark sorcery at work. Symbolist masterpiece by the writer whose work Vladimir Nabokov ranked among Russia’s greatest literary achievements.īoris Nikolaeyvich Bugaev (1880-1934), better known by the pen name that means “Andrew the White,” was an exponent of what translator Stone calls the “short-lived utopianism” of a movement that perhaps naïvely assumed that literature can make a difference in the world. ![]()
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