The reluctant modernist

by Roger Keys

Andrei Belyi (1880-1934) is generally regarded as the greatest and most influential prose-writer to emerge from the Symbolist movement in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. His early prose 'symphonies' and novels are often compared with the work of such European 'modernists' as Joyce and Proust. This is the first book to attempt a systematic analysis of the place of Belyi's fiction within the 'modernist' prose tradition in Russia, a tradition which has been obscured by decades of ideological distortion. Paradoxically, Belyi himself, a mystic by nature who sought only transcendent certainty from the flux of experience, would have been reluctant to claim this 'modernist' tradition as his own. Keys demonstrates the inadequacy of the various other 'isms' (Symbolism, Impressionism, etc.) which have until recently bedevilled most critical attempts to analyse the prose of the period, giving a comprehensive overview of Belyi criticism both within and beyond the Soviet Union. The book