Summary
Andrej Beli: The Silver Dove
Andrej Beli wrote "The Silver Dove", a novel about a sect of fans of the Silver Dove, an idol that represents a kind of combination of good and evil principles (a dove with a hawk's beak), in 1909. Belo's story "Adam", published in 1908, is a kind of introduction to the history of sectarians. In "Adam", written in an expressive manner, the theme of the "return of the prodigal son" already sounds quite clearly - the return of the raptured-intellectual, torn from his own soil, to his native land (Daryalski's theme in "The Silver Dove", whose "return" ends in tragedy). In "The Silver Dove", Beli uses the stylistic traditions of the last century (primarily Gogol's way of storytelling), which he incorporates into his own original prose style, which is characterized by the rhythmic principle in prose, the combination of objective and subjective angles of storytelling, the variety of language-speech systems - "bookish", stylized and the skaza system, the uniqueness of syntax - the unusual use of many punctuation marks (and their equally unusual absence in necessary cases), especially the construction of huge and extremely complex in composition sentence, the frequent change of the traditional word order (inversion), which highlights the rhythm, the writer's placement of unexpected accents above the words (applied in order to achieve a certain rhythm) - all of which represent the constant basis on which all his subsequent novels, as well as his prose as a whole, are built.
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