Source of Andrei Bely quote

[Joseph Schlegel]

Dear Bradley,

I believe the source is Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir, Hope Against Hope. In the 1970 Atheneum edition, on page 66, there is the following passage: "'The voices,' M. said to me once, 'are like a composite quotation of everything I heard.' ('Composite quotation' is an expression coined by Andrei Bely, who said that for him every writer was represented not by a series of separate, word-for-word quotations, but by a kind of 'composite quotation' that summed up the essentials of his thoughts and words.)"

Sincerely,
Joseph




Date:    Tue, 27 Nov 2012 09:44:12 -0500
From:    Bradley Gorski <bradleygorski at GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Source of Andrei Bely quote

Dear SEELANGs!

Can anyone point me to the source for Andrei Bely's concept of "composite
quotation"? I ran across it in the introduction (p. xxv) to Clive
James's *Cultural
Amnesia *(Norton, 2007):

The Russian symbolist writer Andrei Bely once said that what we keep in our
> heads is the *sum* of a writer: a "composite quotation."


The only other reference I can find is on p. 220 of Alexander
Zholkovsky's *Text
Counter Text* (Stanford UP, 1994):

To outline these strategies, underlying *Second Birth*, I use Andrei Bely's
> strategy of "composite quotation": a semi-prosaic summary of poems...


I would be grateful if anyone could point me to the Bely essay which
originated this idea, or even to the wording in the original Russian (I've
tried searching under several possible translations with no luck so far).

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Bradley
-- 
bradleygorski at gmail.com
509.714.6883

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