Posted by Steven on 9/11/2010, 22:46:58, in reply to "Re: Petersburg"
76.186.51.185
Here is an interesting sidelight:
Today I finished reading Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow, a book in which the narrator expounds on anthroposophy, which I would describe as a blend of philosophy, religion and spiritualism. For more background on this school of thought, I looked up the Wikipedia article. In a list of prominent supporters of anthroposophy, it mentions, in addition to Saul Bellow, the name of Andrei Bely.
From my rudimentary understanding of it, I can't say that I saw any evidence of anthroposophy in Petersburg. Indeed, the autobiographical article on Bely says he took it up "in his later years" when he became a friend of the founder, Rudolph Steiner. Steiner died in 1925 in Switzerland, but lived in Berlin until 1923, so this friendship was probably formed after Bely wrote the 1916 edition in Russia, and before his drastic cuts in Berlin in 1922. Could his anthroposophical views have motivated at least some of those edits?
Here's something that may support this theory:
Early in Chapter 2, in the 1916 edition (Elsworth translation) the author playfully describes Sofia Petrovna's interest in spiritualism. One paragraph concludes:
"Since that time a magnificently bound book Man and His Bodies, by some Madame Henri Besancon, sat in splendour on her table. (Sofia Petrovna had got things confused again: not Henri Besancon--Annie Besant.)"
Annie Besant was one of the early writers on anthroposophy. This irreverent passage does not appear in the Cournos translation of the 1922 edition.
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