The Fiery Angel (novel)

Set in sixteenth-century Germany, it depicts a love triangle between Renata, a passionate young woman; Ruprecht, a knight; and Madiel, the Fiery Angel. The novel tells the story of Ruprecht's attempts to win the love of Renata, whose spiritual integrity is seriously undermined by her participation in occult practices. This love triangle is now recognised to be that which existed between the author, Bryusov, the symbolist novelist Andrei Bely and their shared lover, the nineteen-year-old Nina Petrovskaya.^{[citation needed]}

The Fiery Angel is generally^{[weasel words]} regarded as a work of painstaking research and heightened emotion in which the author's comprehensive knowledge of the esoteric is displayed. Its modernity is reflected in its tension between sexuality and spirituality.^{[citation needed]}

The Fiery Angel has been compared^{[by whom?]} to Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita for its general theme of the occult, to Joris-Karl Huysmans's Là-bas for its description of a Black Mass, and to Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun for its depiction of religious hysteria.^{[citation needed]}

The composer Sergey Prokofiev based his opera of the same name upon Bryusov's novel.

The novel was first serialized in the Russian literary monthly Vesy in 1907–08, and then published in two volumes in 1908. The novel was translated by Ivor Montagu and Sergei Nalbandov in 1930. A new edition with an afterword by Gary Lachman was published in 2005.^[1]