Reconstruction of Andrei Bely's Book “On Rhythmic Gesture”

DOI:

https://www.doi.org/10.22455/2541-8297-2017-3-236-254
Issue:

2017 №3
Author: Dmitry O. Torshilov
About the author:

Torshilov Dmitry O. PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Classical Philology of the Institute of Oriental and Classical Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities. Moscow.

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Abstract:

Andrei Bely's Book “On the Rhythmic Gesture” was lost in 1921. However, it is possible to reconstruct it by several saved drafts and by cuts, made by Bely. The main source of the text — the storage unit of the Russian State Library (RGB) — contains mixed fragments not of one, sed of two different versions of the book. The fragment preserved in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), is connected with the first version. Comparing them with each other, with the later Bely’s book “Rhythm as Dialectics and The Bronze Horseman by Pushkin”, with Bely’s letters to R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik and S.M. Alyansky, and with other sources of evidence, makes possible to restore the lost book almost entirely, as well as to find the date of the first version of the RGB (it is February–March 1917), of the RGALI fragment (which can be joined with some of the documents; it is April 1917), of a brief retelling, called the author “Rhythm and Meaning” (no later than the spring of 1918); date of the second RGB version is 1919–1921.
Keywords: Andrei Bely, reconstruction, philology, textual criticism, poetics, the verse study, Russian poetry, Russian revolution.
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