Information about the author:
Valery V. Petroff
Valery V. Petroff, DSc in Philosophy, Director of Research, Head of the Center for Ancient and Mediaeval Philosophy and Science, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Goncharnaya St., 12, bld. 1, 109240 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6529-1409
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Abstract:
The article offers an interpretive analysis of the early version of Andrei Bely’s Diaries of an Idiot (1922). The work in question differs from traditional autobiographical and memoir texts by the fact that their author deliberately ignores the details of everyday life and focuses on the reconstruction of his spiritual crisis, tracing the ecstatic moments of mystical illuminations that are constitutive for the formation of his “self-conscious I.” At the same time, ego-documents serve as a means of objectifying his “states of consciousness,” including repression of traumatic experiences by transferring them from an existential plan into the speech acts (illocutionary or perlocutionary) that facilitate self-identification, selfreflection, and, ultimately, creative re-creation of oneself. Through epistolary material, the article traces the evolution of Andrei Bely’s conception of his autobiographical epic, including the author’s search for a suitable title. The research demonstrates the author’s references to the literary prototypes of the Diaries of an Idiot, the writings of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and leads to a suggestion concerning the meaning of the word “Chudak” in the title of the work. The states of spiritual awakening described by the author reveal some similarities with the “spots of time” in Wordsworth’s “The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind.” Andrei Bely links such moments strictly to geographic locations so that “site” and “moment” form a stable complex. The article also indicates that, retrospectively, Andrei Bely interprets “peak moments” teleologically as “foreknowledge” of what would happen to him in the future: this is the concept of “backward causality” developed by Wilhelm Wundt, Carl Duprel, and Rudolf Steiner.
Keywords: Andrei Bely, Recollections by a Strange Man, Diaries of an Idiot, William Wordsworth, spots of time, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato’s anamnesis, peak experience, Abraham Maslow, oceanic feeling, moments of spiritual awakening, teleology, Wilhelm Wundt, Rudolf Steiner, inner and external biography, the actual and the possible, autobiography.
