His mother, Aleksandra Dmitrievna (née Egorova), was not only highly intelligent but a famous society beauty, and the focus of considerable gossip.

Despite—or because of—his father's mathematical tastes, Boris Bugaev was fascinated by probability and particularly by entropy, a notion to which he frequently refers in works such as Kotik Letaev.

[15] Bely did not accomplish his reformation of Russian prose single‐handedly: other major Symbolist novelists, especially Fyodor Sologub and Alexei Remizov, also had a hand in it.

It is to Bely's influence, however, more than anyone else's, that we can trace the literary origins of some of the finest early Soviet writers, such as Zamyatin, Pilnyak, Babel and Andrei Platonov...

Moreover, Bely's novels prefigure and map out both the sensibility and the structural devices of the later Western novel with such thoroughness that a person familiar with his work who reads Joyce's Ulysses or Robbe‐Grillet's Jealousy or even Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow for the first time can't shake off the feeling that their authors somehow must have known Bely, even though there's not a chance that they did.Bely started his literary career as the author of The Symphonies, a cycle experimental prose works, written from 1900 to 1908.

As critics note, it is notable for its skaz techniques and its unique ornamental prose, for its "ability to capture haunting, mesmerizing sense of apocalyptic doom".

To the extent that the book can be said to possess a plot, this can be summarized as the story of the hapless Nikolai Apollonovich, a ne'er-do-well who is caught up in revolutionary politics and assigned the task of assassinating a certain government official — his own father.

At one point, Nikolai is pursued through the Petersburg mists by the ringing hooves of the horse in the famous bronze statue of Peter the Great.

[18] After the Revolution, Bely wrote two psychological autobiographical novels, highly influenced by Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, Kotik Letaev (1918) and The Christened Chinaman (1921).

Fyodor, after discovering Bely's work, re-read all his old iambic tetrameters from the new point of view, and was terribly pained to find out that the diagrams for his poems were instead plain and gappy.