| Titre | Une descente aux enfers : le projet autobiographique ? Andrej Belyj et son séjour à Berlin (1922-1923) | |
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| Auteur | Wolfgang Kissel | |
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Revue | Revue des Etudes Slaves |
| Numéro | Vol. 79, no 3, 2008 Entre les genres. L'écriture de l'intime dans la littérature russe XIXe-XXe siècles | |
| Rubrique / Thématique | Entre les genres l'écriture de l'intime dans la littérature russe XIXe-XXe siècles Articles |
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| Page | 375-388 | |
| Résumé anglais |
A Descent Towards Hell : Belyj's Autobiographical Project and His Sojourn in Berlin (1922/23)
The symbolist poet and novelist Andrej Belyj is known to have been a prolific memoir writer as well. This paper examines the emergence of his complex autobiographical project in the wake of his travelogue on a journey to Egypt in 1911 and his memoir on Blok. After the death of his friend and rival Blok in 1921 Belyj embarked on writing a lengthy memoir in which he tried to tell the story of their troubled friendship and to justify his own behaviour towards his dead friend. As he felt unsatisfied by the outcome he continued to rework Blok's image and gradually became intrigued by the prospect of giving a detailed picture of the whole prewar and prerevolutionary epoch. These ramifications were later to develop into the three volumes of his memoirs On the Border of Two Centuries (1930), The Beginning of the Century (1933) and Between Two Revolutions (1934). Yet in 1922 he first went for several months to Berlin probably in order to consider the perspectives of exile, an option which he nevertheless discarded categorically at the end of his stay. Instead he decided to return to the Soviet Union and to write a hybrid description of the city Berlin - part travelogue and part confession of a tormented soul - which already contains key notions of the fully elaborated memoirs. Belyj compares the German capital to an ancient Egyptian necropolis thus highlighting the decline of a quintessential Western city against the backdrop of the rising Soviet capital Moscow, the centre of a new civilization the author is going to choose as his permanent home. The paper gives special attention to the chronotope 'Egypt' which serves as a semantic link between the early travelogue on Egypt, the Berlin memoir piece and the last chapters of the third volume of the memoirs Between Two Revolutions. From this chronotope emerges a complex figure of modernity incorporating ancient as well as contemporary elements and emphasizing a tendency towards ambivalence which precludes any unilateral or teleological interpretation. Source : Éditeur (via Persée) |
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| Article en ligne | https://www.persee.fr/doc/slave_0080-2557_2008_num_79_3_7149 |
