The Line of Life and the Gesture of Rhythm: An Idea of 'Curve' in Andrei Bely's Writings of the 1920s

• In Event: Beginnings and Endings in Russian Poetry: Progressions, Portrayals, Potentials

Abstract

In her study of Andrei Bely’s (auto)fiction, Maria Levina Parker suggests the term “repetition of the upcoming” for describing Bely’s favorite technique of repetition of images and motifs in his texts. Normally a repetition implies that the author refers to some preceding element of the text, but in Bely the starting point for a series or repetitions is to be found not at the beginning but at the end of the narrative (or even beyond it), which gives his texts their open structure. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the “repetition of the upcoming” is not only a feature of Bely’s fictional works, but also the foundation of his theoretical writings on poetic rhythm. In his work Rhythm as Dialectic and “The Bronze Horseman” (1929), in which a method for calculating the “curve of the rhythm” of Pushkin’s poem is proposed, Bely reinterprets his own creative career in such a way that each of his earlier texts on rhythm turns out to be a “repetition” of the future discovery of the method of the “curve of the rhythm”. Eventually, the study of the “rhythmic evolution” of Pushkin’s poetry regarded as a reflection of the trajectory of the poet’s life becomes a way of capturing and understanding Bely’s own biography: in 1927, while calculating the “curve of the rhythm” of Pushkin’s poem, he makes a drawing depicting his life in the form of a similar line, beginnings now being reinvented from the perspective of the end.

Author

• Melaniia Kalinina, U of Oxford (UK)