Andrei Bely
Andrei Bely (meaning “white”) was one of the key figures of the Silver Age of Russian poetry, a novelist, critic, symbolist thinker, and anthroposophist who was a follower of Rudolf Steiner from the early 1910s. He was the greatest writer among Russian mystics and the greatest mystic among Russian writers of the twentieth century. Bely was the son of leading mathematician Nikolai Bugaev and studied natural sciences at the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University. Despite his positivist upbringing, as a young man he was drawn to mysticism (“A spiritual voice clearly spells out to me that which reason cannot explain”) and the subliminal (“An intense mystical and aesthetic life is arising in me; we [...] are going deeper in our studies of the Gospels; we are observing the agency of grace in our era; our mystical experience of this time is the recognition of apocalyptic feelings in relation to the color.”)1
In 1912, Bely and his partner Anna (Asya) Turgeneva met Rudolf Steiner. Bely was fascinated by Steiner and his views and decided to make anthroposophy part of his life. In 1913 and 1914, he followed Steiner across Europe, attended his lectures, and explored esoteric practices under his guidance. Admitted to Steiner’s Esoteric School, he studied meditation and astral projection. “Between sleep and awakening I experienced strange states, as if I were flying freely across spaces and looking around, 2he later recalled. Bely documented those experiences in a series of drawings, which he described as copies of what he “saw spiritually,” or his “spiritual findings.”
From 1914 to 1916, Andrei Bely lived in Dornach and took part in the construction of the First Goetheanum, for which he carved architraves from various woods with a chisel. Around the same time, anthroposophical ideas and imagery entered his literary work (e.g. the novel Kotik Letaev and the philosophical essay Life Crisis).
In fall 1916, Bely returned to Russia where he worked to spread Steiner’s ideas through lectures, articles, and essays, in which he offered anthroposophical explanations of the First World War and the Russian Revolution and suggested possible solutions for the crisis in Russia and across the world. All of his work in the 1920s and 1930s was strongly informed by anthroposophical ideas and images, which resonated with his own mystical experiences.
From 1921 to 1923, Bely lived in Germany where came into conflict with Western anthroposophists, but continued to be faithful to Steiner’s teachings.
He returned to Moscow in 1923 and remained the spiritual leader and ideologist of the Russian anthroposophists even after the society was banned. In 1931, most people in his anthroposophist circle were arrested. He was not, although there was a prosecution file detailing his mystical views and anti-Soviet activities. He most likely did not live long enough to be arrested.
Monika Spivak
1. Andrei Bely, “Material k biografii,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 105 (Moscow: Nauka, 2016), 57, 65.
2. Ibid., 256.