Short answers, pulled from the story.
Andrei Bely was the pen name of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, a Russian Symbolist novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic born in Moscow and died on the 8th of January 1934. He is best known for his novel Petersburg (1913/1922), which Vladimir Nabokov ranked as the third-greatest masterpiece of modernist literature. A major Russian literary prize, the Andrei Bely Prize, was named in his honor.
Petersburg centers on Nikolai Apollonovich, a ne'er-do-well drawn into revolutionary politics who is assigned to assassinate a government official that turns out to be his own father. The novel is set against the hysterical atmosphere of turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg and the Revolution of 1905. It employs a prose method in which sounds evoke colors, and has been linked by scholars to ideas from Sigmund Freud's therapeutic method.
The pen name Andrei Bely was given to Boris Bugaev by Mikhail Solovyov, the younger brother of philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. Bely described his close relationship with the Solovyov family in his autobiographical poem The First Encounter, published in 1921.
Bely became a personal friend of Rudolf Steiner and dedicated serious effort to connecting Steiner's Spiritual Science with the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov. His two post-revolutionary novels, Kotik Letaev (1918) and The Christened Chinaman (1921), are both described as highly influenced by Steiner's anthroposophy. Bely also developed the concept of the Eternal Feminine, which he equated with the world soul and what he called the supra-individual ego.
Bely's literary influence can be traced in the work of Zamyatin, Pilnyak, Babel, and Andrei Platonov, among the finest early Soviet writers. His novels are also said to prefigure structural devices and sensibilities found later in Joyce's Ulysses, Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Other major Symbolist novelists, including Fyodor Sologub and Alexei Remizov, also contributed to the reformation of Russian prose.
Bely devised a system for graphically marking and calculating half-stresses in iambic verse, described in his essay "Description of the Russian Iambic Tetrameter" published in the collection Symbolism. He found that metrical diagrams plotted over the great poets frequently produced the shapes of rectangles and trapeziums. Nabokov cited Bely's essay Rhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horseman as "monumental research on rhythm" in his novel The Gift, and his own "Notes on Prosody" follows Bely's method closely.