Thread by @akoz33

Yesterday I bought another Russian audiobook. It’s Andrey Bely’s (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Be… ) “Petersburg”. The first time I heard about it was when I read that Vladimir Nabokov considered 4 novels as the greatest works of literature of the 20th century: Joyce’s “Ulysses”,

Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, Kafka’s “The Trial” and Andrey Bely’s “Petersburg”. Until know I have read exactly half of these, in translation. I don’t think I will even attempt “Ulysses”. The idea that I should listen (and listening rather than reading is important here)

to Bely’s novel in Russian came to me while reading the memoirs of Vyacheslav Ivanov. There is a remarkable relationship in this to mathematics, which I would never have suspected, although I knew that Bely’s father was a great mathematician. Ivanov’s story begins with an even

greater mathematical giant, Andrey Kolmogorov. Here is my translation of a part of it.

I met Kolmogorov at the defense of the dissertation of a friend, who was his student. After that we all went to “Prague” together, to celebrate. Mathematicians always observed this sacred ritual. Academician Aleksandrov told us: “I celebrated my first mathematical discovery

here”. In think, it was in 1926. Kolmogorov is a great man, partly because he outlined very early on when and what he will do. And he recorded that at some later age he would be engaged in poetry. And when he reached his sixtieth birthday, he considered that he had already

done quite a lot in mathematics and now we could return to poetry, which he once became interested in under the influence of Andrey Bely. But then, of course, all this was interrupted, because these were the Stalin years, when it was unthinkable to do anything like that.

However, Kolmogorov kept in touch with several poems - this is such a special area of ​​literary criticism - and somehow he called us all home to himself, there were probably six of us.

Even, in this dark time, individual desperate people still continued to be interested in poetry. But Kolmogorov decided that he would give a statistical description of some poets, began with Bagritsky and Mayakovsky, and published several articles.

He knew Russian poetry well and wanted to do rigorously develop all that was needed for a statistical study of Andrei Bely. We collaborated with him on the versification of Tsvetaeva, dealt with the history of Russian verse.

For example, by discussing various stanzas of Derzhavin - do they really have a connection with Mayakovsky?
Then came , the time of our general emancipation, that was, of course, after 1956, after the Twentieth Congress.

Kolmogorov gives a series of lectures, and then a small circle worked with him. Only a few people, including Natasha, the current widow of Solzhenitsyn, belonged to this circle. I remember her as a student of Kolmogorov, she was engaged in this statistics of verse.

It was an attempt to describe Russian poetry through the use of fairly rigorous mathematics. Moreover, there are opportunities to find such forms of verse that have not been used before. It turns out that here science could help art.

This combination of science and art affected the work of Andrei Bely himself, a poet and a brilliant prose writer. This is one case when my views on literature diverge from those of my father. A rare case, because in most cases they are similar. .

My father told me that, in his view, much in Petersburg is incomplete and this prevents him from appreciating the novel.
A moot point. After all, Nabokov believed that this book, along with three others: Ulysses by Joyce, In Search of Lost Time by Proust and Kafka's

“The Trial” were the greatest prose works of the 20th century. That is, according to Nabokov, “Petersburg” is among the greatest novels of the century. But not for my father. I myself reread Petersburg with extraordinary enthusiasm, because it seems to me that the novel

is truly brilliant: we see how the Russian revolution is connected with the secret police, revolutionaries turn out to be the main sleuths, some very significant political problems find a unexpected solution in the philosophy of this novel ... Andrey Bely, it seems to me,

is an underrated as a writer and, in general, as a figure in science and art. In his work, he was partly a scientist. The son of the great mathematician Nikolai Vasilyevich Bugaev, dean of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at Moscow University, who anticipated

much in the science of the 20th century, invents for himself the name Andrei Bely. Andrey Bely is actually a mask that Bugaev put on himself. But since he was the son of a mathematician, he received an excellent mathematical education and realized that you can write poetry,

focusing on the scientifically researched possibilities of the language. With his lectures on prosody, a new era innRussian poetry began. Imagine, that you can build a theory which, based on calculations of how the Russian stress is arranged, can describe what possibilities

exist in the Russian language and which of them have been used by great poets, even Pushkin, and which have never been not used. And Bely then tried not only to print articles and a book about it - but did much more. He wrote poetry in the form that these statistical studies

suggested to him. He wrote poems quite unlike Pushkin’s not because Pushkin does not use this statistical approach to the Russian language.”
(In what follows several examples are given displaying the enormous role that stress or accent, which is extreme variable in Russian,

plays in Russian poetry and how this was used by Bely. This, of course, is why an audiobook is clearly a superior medium for appreciation of this kind of poetry and even prose.)