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Abstract:

One of the plots that haunted Andrey Bely was the plot about some “crime” that his autobiographical character committed in his early youth while studying at the gymnasium of L.I. Polivanov. Bely first announced that he was writing a novel, The Crime of Nikolai Letaev, in 1921, but the plan was not realized. Then the writer returned to this theme in “Material for Biography” (1923–1924), in the memoir At the Turn of Two Centuries (1930), and in the first part of the novel Moscow (1925–1926). In this article, we compare how he explains and describes the same event in these three sources. It turns out that in all the works the “crime” of the autobiographical character appears in slightly different ways. In the memoir At the Turn of Two Centuries, the main crime of Boris Bugayev was forging the signature of his parents (to hide absenteeism in the gymnasium). In “Material for Biography” it is hidden failure at the exam and re-examination. In the novel Moscow, there are all the crimes mentioned in the “Material for the Biography” and in the memoir At the Turn of Two Centuries, but one more is added, the main one, when Mitya Korobkin steals and sells books from his father’s library. The comparison of the three versions of the same event shows that Andrey Bely’s novel Moscow can be considered an ego-document of no less importance than the memoirs.

Keywords: Andrey Bely, N.V. Bugaev, L.I. Polivanov, autobiography, memoirs, ego-documents.