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Symbolism Before Thewar Chapter 1 Symbolism Before the War The Birth of Symbolism. Two Generations The roots of Russian symbolism are to be sought in the 1880’s. The failure of populism and terrorism – the attempts to use enlightenment and violence to achieve political goals – had resulted in frustration. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 was followed by a period of reaction, during which politi- cal and social reforms were postponed. The change in the atmosphere was also felt within the cultural sphere. Since the time of Vissarion Belinskii the role of Russian literature had been defined mainly in terms of its social significance. Writers felt obliged to point out social defects and to foster radical attitudes in their readers. As doubts about the prospects of socio-political change grew stronger, this utilitarian approach to literature began to be questioned. Not only were the results achieved by “civic writers” meagre, but the demand for a marked socio-political tendency had also impoverished fiction. This was felt particularly strongly in poetry, but prose had also fallen into decline after the era of the great realists. In other countries, too, a significant shift in the outlook on life of writers and artists occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century. There was a reaction against positivism and materialism, against rationalism and scientific methods of obtaining knowledge. The impact of the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche was felt strongly all over Eu- rope, including Russia. From France there came impulses for a corresponding renewal of art. A new literary movement, symbolism, gained ground in poetry, challenging prevailing aesthetic and ethical values. At its core was a wish to evoke “unseen realities” through a concentration on emotions and fantasies and a refined, subjective use of metaphors and symbols. One of the first manifestations of a revolt against realism in Russia was Nikolai Minskii’s In the Light of Conscience (Pri svete sovesti, 1890). Attacking re- alism and the expectations of civic commitment Minskii asserted the freedom of art to serve goals other than the social. The starting point of his search for the “mysterious origin of life” was an affirmation of the “ego”.1 Self-indulgence is no shameful vice, Minskii declared, but an inescapable imperative, equal to 1 N.M. Minskii, Pri svete sovesti: Mysli i mechty o tseli zhizni (St. Petersburg, 1890), p. VII. © KoninklijkeBrillNV,Leiden,2018 | DOI10.1163/9789004366817_003 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Ben Hellman - 9789004366817 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 06:58:17PM via free access SymbolismBeforetheWar 5 an acceptance of life. His was a distinctly Nietzschean ideal of a superman beyond good and evil, rejecting Christian pity as a sign of weakness. Minskii gained support from Dmitrii Merezhkovskii. In his 1892 lectures “On the rea- sons for the decline of and on new currents in contemporary Russian litera- ture” (“O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh sovremennoi russkoi lit- eratury”) Merezhkovskii accused the literary critics of having thrown Russian literature into a state of crisis. Their demands for a “useful” and altruistic liter- ature had led to the neglect of metaphysical questions and art’s aesthetic di- mension. In accordance with what was happening in contemporary European literature, Merezhkovskii anticipated the rise of an idealistic, neo-romantic literature in Russia. Minskii and Merezhkovskii were both poets, but the first artistic achieve- ments of Russian symbolism are not to be found in their poetry. Theory was put into practice in the mid-1890’s by Valerii Briusov, Konstantin Bal’mont, Fedor Sologub and Zinaida Gippius. Poetry became the main vehicle of the new movement, even if Merezhkovskii, Sologub and Gippius proved that prose could also be put into the service of the new artistic sensibility. Three volumes of poetry, Russian Symbolists (Russkie simvolisty, 1894-1895) gave a name and a face to the literary revolution. Behind most of the poems stood Valerii Briusov (1873-1924), a Moscow student, who at an early age had decided to become the leader of Russian symbolism. His dependence upon contemporary French poetry was obvious, but the slim booklets of Russian Symbolists nevertheless attracted attention, not least because of Briusov’s chal- lenging, self-confident tone. Successive volumes of poetry revealed Briusov also to be a master of form. His literary credo was formulated in the essay “The Keys to the Mysteries” (“Kliuchi tain”, 1904). Poetry should treat eternal and therefore always topical themes like beauty, love, life and death. The poet was to concentrate upon his own inner life and in an impressionistic manner depict the fleeting moments of human existence. Honesty was an obligation and therefore the poet should also accept that which was irrational and gener- ally considered immoral. Briusov’s eclectic world view was defined by a devel- oped historical consciousness and a love of the heroic and the grand. His main concern was for literature, and until the October revolution he never tired of defending its independence from political, social and religious obligations. Another Moscow poet, Konstantin Bal’mont (1867-1942), gave proof of an impressive linguistic refinement with his first collection of poetry, Under the Northern Sky (Pod severnym nebom, 1894). Sonority and melodiousness were his outstanding features. From pure aestheticism and a resigned acceptance of the limitations of earthly existence, Bal’mont soon moved to a joyful praise of all aspects of life. In the spirit of a pantheistic belief in cosmic oneness, he Ben Hellman - 9789004366817 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 06:58:17PM via free access 6 Chapter 1 saw everywhere a striving towards a higher, only intuitively conceivable reality. In his poetry Bal’mont tried to convey subjective impressions and moods, and he characteristically often compared himself to the wind or a cloud.2 With his ecstatic self-glorification, he created a poetic world where the persona is a superman, not even hesitating to strike amoral poses. By contrast with Briusov, Bal’mont relied more on spontaneous inspiration than on hard work. As a globetrotter and a skillful translator, he showed an extraordinary openness and thirst for world culture. Some literary critics have chosen to see Briusov and Bal’mont, together with marginal figures like Iurgis Baltrushaitis, as forming a symbolist group of their own. The features they had in common were a programmatic individualism and a preoccupation with the aesthetic side of poetry. Symbolism was for them a purely literary movement, and the standard of poetry was to be raised through the cultivation of language and form. Through translations of modern European and American poetry, Briusov and Bal’mont opened up windows to the West. They also shared traits that made critics initially call the new movement “decadence”. Both challenged established norms, manifestly shar- ing Minskii’s statement from In the Light of Conscience that all moral values are relative. Love yourself above everything else, escape the present moment, and do not feel pity for anyone, were the postulates propounded in Briusov’s poem “To a Young Poet” (“Iunomu poetu”, 1896).3 As pronounced individualists they used poetry to reveal the secrets of the human soul, but lacked the other symbolists’ inclination towards philosophy and religion. The St. Petersburg symbolist Fedor Sologub (1863-1927) stood out as the arch-decadent of Russian literature. A few years before the First World War, his wife Anastasiia Chebotarevskaia summarized the image critics had created of him: “A maniac, a sadist, a morbid, maimed talent with psychopathic lean- ings.”4 Eroticism, satanism and the aestheticization of death were traits that could have been added to the list. In his poems, short stories, novels and plays, written in a simple but artistic style, Sologub expressed a feeling of alienation from the physical world. Life is seen as dominated by the powers of evil and unable to be transformed through social activity. Dreams, fantasies and death offer ways out. A famous example is the first paragraph of the novel A Legend 2 Marc Slonim, From Chekhov to the Revolution: Russian Literature 1900-1917 (New York, 1972), p. 95. 3 Valerii Briusov, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, vol. I (Moscow, 1973), pp. 99-100 (“Iunomu poetu”). 4 Anastasiia Chebotarevskaia, “‘Tvorimoe’ tvorchestvo”, in O Fedore Sologube: Kritika, stat’i i zametki (St. Petersburg, [1911]), p. 79. Ben Hellman - 9789004366817 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 06:58:17PM via free access SymbolismBeforetheWar 7 in the Making (Tvorimaia legenda, 1913-14), in which Sologub gives the artist the role of a demiurge, the all-mighty creator of an enchanted world of his own.5 Faithful to the poetics of early symbolism, Sologub equated change with aes- thetic metamorphosis, the creation of an artistic image of the world. For the creative act he used the neologism to “dulcinate” (dul’tsinirovat’), referring to Don Quixote, who with the help of his imagination turned the plump peasant girl Aldonsa into the beautiful maiden Dulcinea. Sologub’s metaphysical pes- simism, which has been compared to Manichaeism, culminated in 1908 with the volume Circle of Fire (Plamennyi krug). More generally accepted than the term “decadents” is the “older symbolists” or the “first wave of symbolism”, a group which apart from Briusov, Bal’mont and Sologub also includes Merezhkovskii and Gippius. The “older symbolists” started to publish in the 1890’s, and their early poetry was characterized by aestheticism and a fin de siècle mood. Yet the difference between them was obvious and they were gradually to grow even greater. While Briusov, Bal’mont and Sologub remained foreign or even hostile to Christianity for a long time, Merezhkovskii and Gippius, two writers who had been united by marriage in 1889, actively contributed to the emergence of a new religious consciousness in Russia, overcoming personal despair and isolation by subordinating their art to the promotion of spiritual values and a Christian sociality.
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