Andrei Bely

Bely was born Boris Bugaev in Moscow, the son of a prominent mathematician, and mathematics shaped his fiction as much as poetry did: he treated prose rhythm as a kind of proof, countable and structural. He joined the Symbolist circle around the poet-philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, then fell under the mystic Rudolf Steiner's sway, pursuing anthroposophy for years and helping build Steiner's temple in Switzerland by hand.

Petersburg, his masterpiece, follows a czarist bureaucrat and the revolutionary son who has been handed a bomb timed to kill him, its prose built from recurring sound-motifs and rhythmic repetition until the whole doomed city seems to pulse like a single nervous organism. Gogol's grotesque, half-alive Petersburg is its acknowledged ancestor, pushed here into full modernist fragmentation on the eve of revolution.

He returned to Soviet Russia in 1923 after years abroad with Steiner's movement, increasingly dismissed by Soviet critics as a decadent 'formalist' relic, and died in Moscow in 1934 of complications from a stroke suffered in the summer heat.