Authors

Discussion

The first decades of the twentieth century were marked by an increased interest in eighteenth-century Russian literature and culture both among writers and artists and among literary theorists and historians of literature. In the 1920s, Iurii Tynianov produced a groundbreaking theoretical analysis of the odes of Mikhail Lomonosov, while his student Grigorii Gukovskii, drawing on his ideas, offered the first account of the history of eighteenth-century Russian poetry more broadly. This paper studies the reception of eighteenth-century Russian poetry, and the figure of Lomonosov in particular, in the writings of Andrei Bely, who was not only a poet but also an active participant in the literary-theoretical debates of his time. In his study Rhythm as Dialectic and The Bronze Horseman (1929), devoted to an examination of the rhythm of Pushkin’s poem, Bely justifies his approach and explains why a poet might study verse form using exact methods citing Goethe and Lomonosov as examples of figures who were both scholars and poets and stood at the origins of major transformations in literature. The pairing of these two names had anthroposophical roots: the Russian Anthroposophical Society, in which Bely was deeply involved, was named after Lomonosov. This was the idea of the founder of anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner, who from the beginning of the century had advanced the notion of Galileo’s reincarnation in the body of Lomonosov. For members of the Russian Anthroposophical Society, Lomonosov was an unexpected choice, primarily associated with poems they memorised in school, which made it necessary to study his biography in greater detail. Bely’s perception of Lomonosov evolved along similar lines. In his early studies of verse (including Symbolism (1910)), Bely analysed lines from Lomonosov’s most canonical poems as examples of eighteenth-century poetry. In particular, he noted that the rhythm of Symbolist poetry, including his own, was closer to that of the eighteenth century: his iambic verse resembled Lomonosov’s more than Pushkin’s. With his immersion in anthroposophy, these same lines began to acquire a mystical significance for him, reflected in his literary works, and came to serve as a kind of anthroposophical code for the circle of initiates. At the same time, Lomonosov’s scientific activities also gained new relevance for Bely. By the late 1920s, then, Bely’s perception of Lomonosov was defined by several different contexts: the anthroposophical, in which Lomonosov was seen primarily as a scientific genius and the reincarnation of Galileo; the theoretical, since Bely regarded Lomonosov as his predecessor—a poet and a researcher of verse; and the context of the invention of a literary tradition—for Bely as a Symbolist it was important to locate himself in the chain of literary geniuses and thereby justify the principles of his own creative work.