Moscow by Andrei Bely in the dialogue with Austrian literature of the 20th century (a case study of Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem)

Abstract

The article identifies typological parallels between Andrei Bely and G. Meyrink based on their similar worldviews: Bely, the ideologist of Russian Symbolism, was an adept of Rudolph Steiner’s anthroposophy; Gustav Meyrink, an outstanding representative of the Prague School, had an intense interest in occultism and mysticism. Both factors - the aesthetic representation of unconsciousness in fiction and the appellation to mystic and occult experience - bring together Bely’s novel Moscow (1926-1932) and Meyrink’s The Golem (1915). The interest to the oeuvre of both writers emerges in the period of breaking the old paradigm, the epoch of methodological impasse, and the search for new heuristic opportunities of text interpretation. The article reveals the common features of oneyropoetics in both novels and the typological proximity of the “characters of the way” (Ivan Korobkin and Athanasius Pernat) in the aspect of life creation (Bely) and in overcoming the “golemic” aspect and creating “Higher Self’ (Meyrink), raising the problem of the ambivalent finals. Architectonically, both novels are a two-layer text for a “mass” reader on the one hand and a special “initiated” reader on the other. The demonic urban spaces of Moscow and Prague take on the shape of a utopian city, undergoing transformed through the character’s mysterial suffering and becoming the final of their way (initiation) to “Higher Self.” The ideological centre of the novels is the concept of personality; namely, awareness and overcoming the “rapture” (“golemic nature”) by the character in Austrian (Prague) novel and responsibility for a scientific discovery and desire to “warm the Universe” by the character of the Russian novel, which results in his search for a spiritual integrity. Dreams as a bright epitomy of linguistic experiment serve for the plot formation in Moscow and accompany the character, the scientist, throughout his entire spiritual way. The Golem has a frame composition where dreaming and identification of the narrator with Pernat, who passed a mysterial way, become his spiritual experience and initiation. The present study is intended to show the opportunities of “comparative poetics”, which allows to correlate the oeuvre of both writers who fit stadially in the Expressionist Aesthetic and in more epochal sense - in the poetics of art modality (Samson Broytman). The author declares no conflicts of interests.