SOURCE: "Boris Bugayev as Man and Artist," in The Frenzied Poets: Andrey Biely and the Russian Symbolists, University of California Press, 1952, pp. 65–95.

Maslenikov was a Russian educator, translator, editor, and author with a special interest in twentieth-century Russian poetry. In the following excerpt, he examines autobiographical aspects of Bely's poetry.

Bugayev's earliest literary work was essentially lyrical. It comprises his first three Symphonies and his first book of verse, Gold in Azure (1904). The novelty and freshness of Andrey Biely's writings astonished readers who were sympathetic to modernism, and who, from the very first, recognized in Andrey Biely a radical innovator in Russian literature. His readers felt his lines vibrating with the voice of a truly "new man," who had discarded the language of his fathers, because it could not adequately convey the inner experiences of a radically changed mode of life and thought.

His first published work, the...