Andrei Bely’s Literary Portraits in the Structure of Critical and Memoir Genre

Abstract

Despite the research boom of recent times and the increased interest in Andrei Bely's personality and creativity, which is reflected in numerous articles, monographs, dissertations, international scientific conferences about him, criticism and memoir remains the least studied part of the largest Russian symbolist creative legacy. Unfortunately, A. Bely's critical texts are not fully collected, we do not even have a complete idea of the volume of what he wrote. In order to comprehend the innovation of A. Bely's critical prose, it is necessary to update the research tools of the criticism itself. The correlation problem between A. Bely's creative method in the context of literary critical and memoir genres, the issues about the role and the uniqueness of portrait characteristics in different types of the discourse and the transformations of Bely's early poetics in late memoir and biography were not the subject of a special study, which determines the purpose and the tasks of the article. The performed analysis showed that the image of writers in the critical and memoir portraits is somewhat similar. This can be explained by the fact that Bely's memoir texts are the continuation of his early work. However, the publicistic nature of the criticism and the polemical origin in the memoir genre are weakened. The portrait in the structure of a memoir book is combined with the experience of the lived life and complicated by the synthesis of previous literary-critical interpretations and later evaluations.