Refusing to Love. The Paths of Russian Love from Pushkin to AI. Part II – The Silver Age. Yury Tomin
was the period of the formation of a new stage of life, when, having lost their way, brightly illuminated by the dawns of symbolism, after evil blizzards and «the whirling of endless, ugly demons,» each found himself far after the inevitable fork in the road. Blok shared his spiritual path with Strindberg, and Bely was pushed by providence into the arms of Steiner’s witnesses and the trails of anthroposophy.
Wishing to support Blok, who, as Bely felt, suffered in his «tormenting life,» being carried away by gypsies, wine, and random women, he spoke in detail about his own inner life, in which esotericism, the secrets of initiates, spiritual exercises emerged as inevitable milestones of destiny, colliding first with the missionary of occultism in Russia Anna Mintslova, who gave Bely, before her mysterious disappearance, a ring with the emblem of the Rosicrucian brotherhood and «several evangelical sayings – as „identification marks“ in case of a possible meeting,» and then with the artist Asya (Anna Turgeneva) who was prone to mysticism. Moreover, in Asya, Bely apparently still found a compromise «between Divine and non-divine love,» abandoning his own conviction that «the greatest insight of the world should not approach middle ground.» Blok, who was less impressed with Asya than her sister Natasha upon meeting her, asked whether Bely was happy with his relationship with Asya, «and on learning that he was, it was as if he were surprised; but – he said nothing.»
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev – Andrei Bely (1880—1934)
With the «compromise» of high love, Bely had already twice experienced a mortal combat. At the end of 1903, he became close to Nina Petrovskaya, a member of literary circles, who had the ability to listen with understanding to Bely’s spiritual outpourings, so that he considered her like-minded in the necessity of knowing God in oneself through «mystical love for the Soul of the World,» which, being transferred to the «earthly image» would only be a return to pagan practices of love. When spiritual intimacy involuntarily turned into romantic rapprochement, Bely had to experience the harsh consequences of his «fall.»
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