Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, 1880-1934)
On his timid and taciturn nature. 1933
Autograph letter signed ('B. Bugaev') to Boris Viktorovich Tomashevsky, Moscow, 3 August [1933].

In Russian. Four pages, 142 x 110mm, in purple ink, on a bifolium. Envelope.

On his timid and taciturn nature: 'I always have to, as it were, speak aloud, accumulating pebbles in my mouth'. Bely writes warmly on his return to Moscow from the holiday at Koktebel in the Crimea where he and his wife had met the Tomashevskys: 'thank you for the joy of communication ... with both of you it was so simple, unpretentious, human, musical. I am very happy to have met you both...'. He is exhausted after the weeks of sociability at Koketebel: this went against the grain of his 'very taciturn, inwardly quiet and timid' nature. This, he has long realised, is the 'theme' of his life, one which is 'tongue-tied, constantly surmounted by an artificially fabricated language (I always have to, as it were, speak aloud, accumulating pebbles in my mouth); hence, exhaustion; and the search for inner silence'. The 'easy, quiet and simple' friendship with the Tomashevskys was therefore all the more precious, and Bely concludes the letter with the hope that their meeting will be 'the beginning of our acquaintance'.

Published by A.V. Lavrov in Andrey Bely: Investigations and Studies. Boris Tomashevsky (1890-1957) was a literary critic, theorist and leading Pushkin scholar, based at Pushkin House from 1921 onwards. Although Tomashevsky's own criticism had been inspired from the outset by the statistical poetics set out by Bely in his seminal 1910 work, Symbolism, the personal friendship between the two men had only been established during the holiday at Koktebel which immediately preceded the present letter. Bely's holiday was cut short by ill-health (culminating in his death on 8 January 1934), but their subsequent correspondence is an important source for the last months of his life.

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