Andrei Bely. The Line of My Life. Plan and Explanatory Notes, 1918

This plan is the product of Andrei Bely’s meticulous analysis of his life. The cloud of lines, arrows, and writings might seem chaotic at first sight, but Bely has left a key to the idea and logic behind his lifeline:

“Its relief (the highs and lows) is based on an attentive and honest analysis of how I felt during the given period of time (high or low life energy); below I indicated the people who were especially close at this time (friends, opponents, collaborators); above, I tried to pinpoint the cultural influences; and at the very bottom, the periods of work on different books are shown.“

The “relief“ is represented by the dark blue graph in the center. The timeline does not begin with the year Bely was born (1880) but with 1882, since the writer believed he started having “early moments of self-awareness” from the age of two.

“The highs and the lows” correspond to periods of inspiration and enthusiasm and of desperation and depression. The graph peaks in 1901 and 1913. The first peak marks the beginning of Bely’s literary career: the rise of the second generation of Russian symbolists and what he called “the dawn years.” The second marks the start of his anthroposophical and esoteric training under Rudolf Steiner. 

The main graph is accompanied by two diagrams that are smaller in size and narrower in scope: two details of the lifeline. In a note regarding the diagram, Bely explained that they represented “detailed (month-by-month) reliefs of the two peak periods in [his] life (the dawn years and the years of learning), with an attempt to comprehend the reliefs.”

This explanation referred to Detail 1 (“The Dawn Years”) and Detail 2 (“The Culmination of Life“), whereas Detail 3 (“Invisible Forces”) was organized differently. Featuring a smaller copy of the lifeline graph with all the “highs” and “lows,” it presented a special mystical perspective on the journey of life:

“This diagram shows the lifeline at an angle that presents it as a battle between the light and dark forces that have recruited certain people as the messengers of light or darkness for me.”

Monika Spivak