by Andrei Bely

It is awkward and difficult for me to speak about myself as a writer. I am not a professional; I am simply a person who is searching; I could have become a scientist or a carpenter. Least of all, had I thought about writing; still, I have always thought a great deal about the details of my trade; had I become an engraver, I would probably have devoted myself with the same enthusiasm to the details of engraving; inspiration attends
(…)
One of my peculiarities as a writer is rooted in a habit I have had since I was young; I have composed my texts, more than written them at a table; selecting from word to word, I would note down the phrases I had composed while walking in the fields, pronouncing aloud what I had composed in this way; often I composed my passages on horseback. The dominating peculiarity of my works lies in the intonation, the rhythm, the pause for breath, all of which convey the gesture of the speaker; I either sang my verses in the fields or I declaimed them to an invisible audience – into the wind; all that can only help influence the peculiarities of my language; it is difficult to translate; it calls, not for reading with the eyes, but for a drawn-out internal pronunciation of the words; I became more a composer of language in search of personal performance of his work, than a belle-lettrist, in the usual sense of the word.
(…)
All my life I dreamed of new forms of art in which the artist could experience himself as fused with all aspects of creation; the way to the creation of life, in oneself and in others, lies in this confluence. A book has always constricted me; neither the sounds nor the colours are sufficient; I wanted an explosion from a dull word to a bright one; hence my experiments with language may also be taken as making new signs of intercourse (of words); hence too, my interest in popular speech, which has still preserved a vital wholeness; hence also, the abundance of neologisms in my lexicon, and the experience of rhythm as the principle uniting poetry and ‘prose;’ I see the writer as an organizer of the linguistic aspirations of a people: he is both a living story-teller and a singer-performer who operates with the timbre of his voice and gesticulation.
The quest for timbre and gesture drove me out of my study into the fields, the forest, and the square, where I compose fragments of my works, like songs written on scraps of paper.
(…)
I feel confined in a book; and being locked within it, I involuntarily shake its walls; and that is not because I think that in the approaching culture the book will disappear; all genres of literature will be preserved in it, of course; but a new creative sphere will rise above them, toward which the exit out of just music and just literature will lead; a new man in an epoch of synthesis will make himself felt there.
(…)
My misfortune has been that more than once, in the process of creation, I have seen images arise which have been realized in life only some years after the book was written. (…) The hero of my novel The Silver Dove, the joiner Kudeiarov, half-voluptuary, half-fanatic, (…) was fantasized; he reflected the still unseen Rasputin who had not yet appeared in Petersburg. The novel Petersburg, while reflecting the 1905 revolution, is saturated with the dark downfall of tsarist Petersburg. (…) In the fall of 1931 I gave a synopsis of my projected novel Germany to the Writers’ Publishing House in Leningrad; its plot depicted a fascist conspiracy and the persecution of an intellectual with revolutionary inclinations by those same fascists. I had never met any fascists; the plot was a vague leitmotif which presented itself to me out of the atmosphere of life in Berlin in 1922; if I had written the novel last year, readers would have exclaimed, ‘It is a parody of Germany that vilifies reality! Alas, the terrible events of recent weeks have shown the truth of my fantasy. The thin varnish of such fantasy in a number of my novels has turned out to be, time and again, a muted anticipation of events of an immediate future which were ripening beneath the protective covering of the issues of the day. (…) And yet (…) I had today experienced the embryo of tomorrow dimly, for outward appearance did not as yet provide the ripened facts of actuality. Had I written Petersburg only two years later, had I refrained from writing The Silver Dove, my mythical joiner would have appeared in Petersburg as Rasputin. (…)
Such have been the difficulties of my path as a writer: they lie in the gap between ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’, between the art of books and the art of life, between the study and the auditorium, between the soundless pen and the living human voice; I am an artist-performer in the process of becoming a writer, or a writer writing for a stage performer. I think I shall not overcome the difficulties of my role, but I set my hopes upon my searches finding resonance in the future. (March 1933.)

translationcopyright© Charlotte Douglas