James Joyce and Andrei Bely
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It was James Joyce's misfortune that he wrote for the English-speaking world - Andrei Bely's tragedy that he wrote for a Russian culture that would virtually disappear with Josef Stalin. Both writers created great novels, works of art that have influenced others ever since. But both men's greatest works - Ulysses and Petersburg, respectively - are more praised than read. To borrow a Marxist catchphrase, I would propose that "the wheel of history" crushed each artist's novel. They were smashed under a tread of time that gave no countenance to the nuances of style, storytelling and psychology the authors sought to explore, thus depriving the authors from achieving the popular audience their works deserved. Petersburg and Ulysses now stand like the giant statues on Easter Island: solitary, isolated accomplishments that emanate power without clear connection to the everyday world from which they derived their life's blood. There is a distinction between Ulysses and Petersburg, though, in how they each came to this impasse. Joyce definitely chose his isolation; Andrei Bely did not. In discussion their mutual exile, one must also discourse on their common bonds. It is an easy cliche to say that Petersburg and Ulysses are "style-conscious" novels. Excerpts from each point to that fact quickly. In this passage from Ulysses, the hero, school lecturer Stephen Dedalus living in Dublin, is borrowing money from a headmaster - and learns that he must copyedit an article as par
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Bely derived their inspiration from full center of Ireland and Russia's respective self-absorption. The Brothers Grimm, assembling their folk tales in the 1800s, did so as philologists: finding in the words transmitted important oral histories and psychological messages buried within the Germanic culture. Bely and Joyce wrote with that type of linguistic insight in mind; they created, in essence, epic folk tales in (then-)modern idiom. Folk tales are an oral tradition; both Ireland and Russia give full attention to the vocal transmission of words. Despite the fact that Ulysses and Petersburg are fully conceived/written/ edited/published novels, both were very clearly worked out by their respective authors through reading aloud. Certainly, if the Irish stereotype of "love for words" means anything, Joyce was intending readers to hear such phrases as:
Reduce Bloom by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune from which these supports protected him, and by elimination of all positive values to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity. (725)
The alliteration is musical; the meaning, such as it is, has the instinctual logic of melody as much as it carries a strictly rationalistic literal interpretation.
Bely makes
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1707
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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