Portraits of Philosophers in Andrei Bely’s Memoir Trilogy

Portraiture is an integral way of describing characters in novels and biographies, but the expression of portraiture in these two genres is different. Compared to novels, portraits in biographies should be based on relevant facts, emphasizing the characteristic features of the character by his real behavior and words. However, Andrei Bely’s memoir trilogy has its own genre specifics, this memoir not only has pronounced personal characteristics, but also a special kind of literary memoirs. An important factor due to which the memoir trilogy acquires genre specificity is the portrait description: in his memoirs, Bely depicts people of different social and intellectual groups, among whom philosophers stand out as people who influenced the author and are especially interesting to him. It turned out that we can distinguish two main techniques used by Bely to depict philosophers: animalistic comparisons and increased attention to the environment. However, the use of these techniques increases the subjectivity of perception, shifts the center of gravity to “speculation,” which gave Bely’s contemporaries the opportunity to reproach him for his subjectivity and careless handling of facts. Nevertheless, it is possible to express the opinion that exaggerations and even distortions in the portraits of philosophers testify to the development of a special creative manner of Andrei Bely when organizing the documentary material. And the use of irony and “stream of consciousness” in writing his memoirs is an attempt to put the subjective vision at the center, which brings the memoirs extremely close to the artistic text. As a result, the writer managed to create a work in which the facts, being the basis, are transformed and deformed, giving an opportunity to learn about Bely ‘s methods of working on reality.