Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, 1880-1934) - photo 1
Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, 1880-1934) - photo 2
Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, 1880-1934) - photo 3
Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, 1880-1934) - photo 4

Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, 1880-1934)

Lot 14
01.12.2021 10:00UTC +00:00
Classic
Starting price
£ 3 500
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 681130
Lot 14 | Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, 1880-1934)
Estimate value
£ 4 000 – 6 000
Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, 1880-1934)
Two typed fragments for the second version of Petersburg. 1922
Two typescript fragments with extensive autograph emendations from the novel Petersburg, n.p., n.d. [c.1922].

In Russian. Irregular fragments, approx. 128 x 182mm and 75 x 175mm, with extensive cancellations and emendations, one numbered '308'. Provenance: I.V. Ivanov-Razumnik (1878-1946); D.E. Maksimov; L.K. Dolgopolov (1928-1995); Vasily Molodyakov (historian, b.1968: provenance given in his Obraz Yaponii v Yevrope i Rossii ... (Moscow, 1996), 151-2).

Fragments from the typescript of Bely’s great Modernist novel. The drafts come from a passage describing the dismal approach from Kolpino to Petersburg, ‘not a single soul, not a single village, the earth itself is a corpse’: ‘Ot Kolpina vietsia doroga :mrachneee mesta net! Podezaete k Peterburgu prosnulisi: i v oknax vagonnix – mertvo: ni edinoy dushi, ni edinoy derevni, sama zemlia – trup. Mnogoutrodnoye, mnogodimnooe Kolpino! Ot Kolpina vietsia doroga- liniya telagrafnih stolbov … (in the ‘Asbuka’ edition, 2000, pp.92-93).

Bely’s second novel, Petersburg was first drafted in just a few weeks in 1912-1913 as a result of a moment of inspiration experienced while climbing the Great Pyramid of Cheops. The novel is set in Saint Petersburg at the onset of the 1905 revolution: its hero is the young Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, and the main device of the intricate and at times surrealist plot is his attempts to escape from a promise to assassinate his own father, a prominent official. The characters include his disdainful beloved, Sofia Petrovna Likhutina, an alcoholic terrorist named Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin and even the Bronze Horseman statue in Saint Petersburg, which appears to Dudkin in a dream. The novel is widely recognized as the pinnacle of prose in Russian symbolism and Modernism in general: Vladimir Nabokov placed it next to Joyce's Ulysses as one of the great masterpieces of 20th-century prose, and in some respects, including Bely’s use of rhythmic prose (based on the anapaest) and the development of the city itself as a character in the novel, it may be said to anticipate Joyce’s novel. The present fragments appear to relate to Bely's heavily-revised 1922 'Berlin' version of the text.
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