From Dreams and Fire

Andrei Bely — a thinker and poet, one of the most interesting and original writers of the Silver Age, his “captured spirit” striking contemporaries with “novelty, audacity, sometimes — glimpses of true genius.” He was admired, he was marveled at, and, as V. Khodasevich writes, even his adversaries were somewhat in love with him. The basis of this edition is the author's collection of selected poems from 1923, a “novel in verse,” which essentially became the culmination of Andrei Bely's poetic creativity. The poems are divided by the author into sections and internal cycles in such a way that the reader can see the “grain,” the main thing that defines the spiritual image of the poet. “Everything I have written — is a novel in verse: the content of the novel is my search for truth, with its achievements and falls. Let the reader discover for themselves the content of the parts of my novel. I give them a whole; to understand what it represents — is the reader's task.”