Angel Classics The Silver Dove

Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize.

Bely's The Silver Dove, published four years before its author's celebrated Petersburg (ranked by Nabokov with Proust, Kafka and Joyce), is the first modern Russian novel. Breaking with Russian Realist tradition, a pioneering Symbolist work, it reaches subconscious layers of experience through images of the surface world, capturing the living rhythm of the soul. At the same time, its vividly drawn characters, elemental landscapes, and richly wrought, Gogolian style are immediately accessible to the Western reader. This brilliantly faithful new translation makes the complete work available in English for the first time. Dissatisfied with the life of the intelligensia, the Moscow poet Daryalsky joins a rural mystic sect, The Silver Doves, whose leader, the carpenter Kudeyarov later claimed by Bely to have anticipated something of Rasputin makes ruthless use of him in a bid to produce offspring from a sectarian Mother of God. The story reverberates with concerns that seethed in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution – the identity of Russia, torn between East and West, theosophy, the religious nature of art and its potential for creating a new organic community. The Silver Dove, writes the translator in his introduction, depicts a culture on the brink: aware that it can no longer survive without incorporating the formless strivings and undisciplined imaginings of the common people, which it has hitherto repressed, but simultaneously aware that the attempt to do so may spell disaster.

This translation was shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2001... "magnificent in its sweep, taking in the whole expanse of Russian life ... Modern Russian literature has produced nothing greater." Nikolay Berdyayev, review, 1910

"Bely depicts a world which is fascinating, full of strange imagery and tormented by passions. It is less stylised and more accessible than his better-known Petersburg." Isobel Montgomery,The Guardian