Andrei Bely, the pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (1880-1934), was a central figure of Russian symbolism and modernism as a poet, novelist, and theorist. He was a proponent of innovation who aimed both to revolutionize Russian literature and to find a philosophical framework for modernist techniques. His books include The Silver Dove, Petersburg, and Kotik Letaev.

Jonathan Stone is associate professor of Russian at Franklin & Marshall College. His books include The Institutions of Russian Modernism: Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism (2017) and Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture: Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s (2019).