Russian symbolism

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Alexandre Benois, Illustration to Alexander Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman, 1904. The Russian capital was often pictured by symbolists as a depressing, nightmarish city.

Russian symbolism was an intellectual and

artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It arose separately from West European symbolism, and emphasized defamiliarization and the mysticism of Sophiology.[1]

Literature

Influences

The Russian symbolism movement was primarily influenced by Russian thinkers such as

D'Annunzio, Joris-Karl Huysmans, the operas of Richard Wagner, the dramas of Henrik Ibsen and the broader philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche
.

Rise of symbolism - The older generation

By the mid-1890s, Russian symbolism was still mainly a set of theories and had few notable practitioners. It was not until the new talent of Valery Bryusov emerged that symbolist poetry became a major movement in Russian literature. The early Russian symbolism movement included:

  • Alexei Remizov

Though the reputations of many of these writers had faded by the mid-20th century, the influence of the symbolist movement was nonetheless profound. This was especially true in the case of

Mandelshtam
) was paramount.

Younger generation: Ivanov, Blok, Bely

Vsevolod Meyerhold in his production of Alexander Blok's Puppet Show (1906)

Russian symbolism flourished in the first decade of the 20th century. Many new talents began to publish verse written in the symbolist vein. These writers were especially indebted to the philosopher

Classical studies, returned from Italy to establish a Dionysian club in St Petersburg. His self-proclaimed principle was to engraft "archaic Miltonic
diction" to Russian poetry.

Maximilian Voloshin, known best for his poetry about the Russian revolution, opened a poetic salon at his villa in the Crimea. Jurgis Baltrušaitis, a close friend of Alexander Scriabin and whose poetry is characterized by mystical philosophy and mesmerizing sounds, was active in Lithuania.

Of the new generation, two young poets, Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, became the most renowned of the entire Russian symbolist movement.

Petrograd
in pseudo-religious terms.

modernist novel Petersburg (1911-1913), a philosophical and spiritual work featuring a highly unorthodox narrative style, fleeting allusions and distinctive rhythmic experimentation. Vladimir Nabokov placed it second in his list of the greatest novels of the twentieth century after James Joyce's Ulysses
. Other works worthy of mention include the highly influential theoretical book of essays Symbolism (1910), which was instrumental in redefining the goals of the symbolist movement, and the novel Kotik Letaev (1914-1916), which traces the first glimpses of consciousness in a new-born baby.

The city of

Russian Revolution
as the next evolutionary step in their nation's history.

Decline of the movement

Russian symbolism had begun to lose its momentum in literature by the 1910s as many younger poets were drawn to the

acmeist movement, which distanced itself from excesses of symbolism, or joined the futurists
, an iconoclastic group which sought to recreate art entirely, eschewing all aesthetic conventions.

Despite intense disapproval by the Soviet State, however, Symbolism continued to be an influence on

Soviet dissident poets like Boris Pasternak. In the Literary Gazette of September 9, 1958, the critic Viktor Pertsov denounced, "the decadent religious poetry of Pasternak, which reeks of mothballs from the Symbolist suitcase of 1908-10 manufacture."[3]

More recently, Robert Bird has been less critical than the Literary Gazette, "Nomenclature notwithstanding, Russian Symbolism owed far less to

French Symbolism (with which, according to Ivanov, it shared 'neither a historical no ideological basis') than it did to German Romanticism and to the great poets and prose writers of nineteenth-century Russia. It was not so much an artistic movement as a comprehensive worldview, an attempt to give aesthetics a spiritual foundation. The Russian Symbolists sought to preserve the insights and achievements of past civilisations and to build upon them. They viewed human creativity as a continuum, celebrating 'Symbolist' tendencies in the art and culture of civilisations distant both temporally and spatially... According to Symbolist conviction, divisions between various fields of knowledge and artistic disciplines were artificial: poetry was intimately linked not only to painting, music, and drama, but also to philosophy, psychology, religion, and myth. The intellectual cross fertilization that took place at Ivanov's 'Tower', in short, was a social manifestation of Symbolist tenets."[4]

Visual arts

The Vision of the Youth Bartholomew
(1890) is often considered to mark the inauguration of the Russian Symbolists.

Probably the most important Russian symbolist painter was Mikhail Vrubel, who achieved fame with a large mosaic-like canvas The Demon Seated (1890) and went mad while working on the dynamic and sinister The Demon Downcast (1902).

Other symbolist painters associated with the

Puvis de Chavannes; Mikhail Nesterov, who painted religious subjects from medieval Russian history; Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, with his "urbanistic phantasms", and Nicholas Roerich, whose paintings have been described as hermetic, or esoteric. The tradition of Russian symbolism in the late Soviet period was renewed by Konstantin Vasilyev, whose style was greatly influenced by the Russian Neo-romantic painter Viktor Vasnetsov, as well as Mikhail Nesterov and Nicholas Roerich
.

Music and theatre

Alexandre Benois designed symbolist sets for Stravinsky's Petrushka in 1911.

The foremost symbolist composer was

Andrey Bely and Wassily Kandinsky articulated similar ideas on the "stage fusion of all arts."[This quote needs a citation
]

As to more traditional theatre,

Constantin Stanislavski was as realistic as possible. Stanislavski collaborated with the English theatre practitioner Edward Gordon Craig on a significant production of Hamlet in 1911–12, which experimented with symbolist monodrama as a basis for its staging. Two years later, Stanislavski won international acclaim when he staged Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird in the Moscow Art Theatre
.

Nikolai Evreinov was one of a number of writers who developed a symbolist theory of theatre. Evreinov insisted that everything around us is "theatre" and that nature is full of theatrical conventions, for example, desert flowers mimicking stones, mice feigning death in order to escape cats' claws, and the complicated dances of some birds. Theatre, for Evreinov, was a universal symbol of existence.

References

  1. ^ a b "Symbolism". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2023-02-21.
  2. ^ a b Waegemans, E. (2016). History of Russian Literature Since Peter the Great 1700-2000 (Revised edition. ed.). Antwerp: Publisher Vrijdag.
  3. ^ Olga Ivinskaya (1978), A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak, page 231.
  4. ^ Viacheslav Ivanov (2003), Selected Essays, Northwestern University Press. Page xi.
  5. ^ The Plays of Anton Chekhov, trans. Paul Schmidt (1997)

Bibliography

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