“Only in <i>The History of the Formation of the Self-Conscious Soul</i> Did Bugaev Reveal His Ideas about Music”: Music in the System of Andrei Bely

Abstract

Symbolism distinguished itself in world culture in that its representatives were inclined to a dialogue and intersection of different types of art. In Russian literature, one of the brightest examples of such a synthesis is the work of Andrei Bely (Boris Bugaev; 1880–1934). The aim of the present article is to consider the writer’s ideas about music itself. As the main source we use Bely’s treatise The History of the Formation of the Self-Conscious Soul. Bely in his Symbolist articles of the 1900s laid down the idea of musical art as an antinomy, which emphasized the troubling importance of the problem, but did not principally imply any positive answer. However, in his anthroposophic treatise The History of the Formation of the Self-Conscious Soul (1926–1931), enormous in volume and scale of the material, the author’s antinomical understanding of music was transformed into a structure which is extremely complicated, but consistent. That is why Andrei Bely does not apply the word “antinomy” to music, but he extensively uses the musical term “counterpoint” (together with other musical terms). Whereas the word “antinomy” pointed at some irreconcilable conflicts, on the contrary, a “counterpoint” introduces these clashes into the frame of a single structure of a system, thus reconciling them. Accordingly, the romance “It is so sweet to be with you” by Mikhail Glinka (called in The History “the greatest genius”) contains, in Andrei Bely’s texts, the message of a wide spectrum.

Keywords

• symbolism
• Russian literature
• Andrei Bely
• <i>The History of the Formation of the Self-Conscious Soul</i>
• counterpoint
• Mikhail Glinka