EDMUND EDWARD FOURNIER D’ALBE AS A SOURCE OF BRYUSOV’S SCIENTIFIC POETRY: FROM THE DRAMA OF ELECTRICITY TO THE CONTOURS OF THE METANOVEL
I prove that Fournier d’Albe’s work “Two New Worlds”, rather than just general discussions of the nature of matter, was the main source of V. Y. Bryusov’s poem “The World of the Electron” (1922). The history of ideas traces how particular theses of the source were transformed here, such as the communication of worlds in a chain, the status of the electron as a unit of information, the relativity of time, and electricity as the only way to correlate incommensurable temporalities, that are reflected in the images of Bryusov’s poem. The metaphysics of the infinite nesting of worlds was a response to the crisis of the novel genre, inspiring the invention of the metanovel.