Poets of Hope and Despair Russian History and Culture Editors-in-Chief Jeffrey P. Brooks (The Johns Hopkins University) Christina Lodder (University of Kent) Volume 21 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rhc Poets of Hope and Despair The Russian Symbolists in War and Revolution, 1914-1918 Second Revised Edition By Ben Hellman This title is published in Open Access with the support of the University of Helsinki Library. This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder. Cover illustration: Angel with sword, from the cover of Voina v russkoi poezii (1915, War in Russian Poetry). Artist: Nikolai K. Kalmakov (1873-1955). Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN1877-7791 ISBN 978-90-04-36680-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-36681-7 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by the Authors. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. “The natives of Borneo use glow-worms on sharp poles as candles. This is the fate of writers.” Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Bylo i budet (1915) ∵ Contents Preface to the First Edition ix Preface to the Second Edition x Introduction 1 1 Symbolism Before the War 4 The Birth of Symbolism. Two Generations 4 The Symbolists and Politics 12 2 The War: Act I (1914-1915) 26 First Reactions 26 Realities of the War 40 Valerii Briusov as War Correspondent 40 The Theme of Life at the Front 50 The Burning Questions 63 The Tragedy of Occupied Belgium 63 The Tragedy of Divided Poland 69 The Tragedy of the Victimized Jews 81 The Neo-Slavophiles 86 Viacheslav Ivanov: The Messianic Task of Russia 86 Fedor Sologub: East Against West 96 Valerii Briusov: Slavs Against Germans 106 The Dream of Tsar’grad 115 Patriotic Fiction 122 Fedor Sologub: To Believe or to Doubt 122 Konstantin Bal’mont: Cursing the Satanic Dogs 136 The Critics of Nationalism 143 Zinaida Gippius: Accepting the War Outwardly, Rejecting It Inwardly 143 Dmitrii Merezhkovskii: How to Overcome the War 159 The Outsiders 173 Aleksandr Blok: “Back to You, Russia!” 173 Andrei Belyi: “‘I’ Am the War” 182 Facing Adversity 191 Fedor Sologub: The War as a Sacrificial Feat 191 viii Contents 3 The War: Act II (1915-1917) 198 Defeats and Deadlock: Occasional Verse 198 Viacheslav Ivanov: Behind the German Threat – China! 204 Fedor Sologub: “Our Children Will Save Russia…” 209 Valerii Briusov: The Duty to Remember 219 Konstantin Bal’mont: Betrayed 222 Zinaida Gippius: Waiting for Revolution 226 Dmitrii Merezhkovskii: Waiting for the Apocalypse 231 Andrei Belyi: The Revolt of the Machines 237 Aleksandr Blok: Demoralization on all Sides 247 Valerii Briusov: After Thirty Months of War 253 4 The War: Act III (1917-1918) 258 The February Revolution of the Spirit 258 Who Is for the War? Who Is Against? 271 Russia in Deep Crisis 291 The October Revolution: The End or the Beginning? 312 5 The Symbolist Experience 1914-1918 337 Bibliography 347 Index of Names 365 The system of transliteration used in this study is the Library of Congress sys- tem without diacritical marks. Some exceptions from the general rules (i.e. geographical names) have been made to allow for more commonly accepted spellings. Dates are given according to the Julian, or Old Style calendar, but the corresponding Gregorian calendar dates are in certain cases added. Preface to the First Edition This work was began under the tutorship of the late Professor Sven Linnér at Åbo Akademi. His generous support and unfailing belief in my work were of the most decisive importance. I dedicate this book to his memory. My col- league at the University of Helsinki, Associate Professor Pekka Pesonen, him- self a prominent specialist on Russian symbolism, has also wholeheartedly en- couraged me with much valuable advice. Concrete help has further been given by Professor Richard Stites (Georgetown University) and Dr. Efim Kurganov (Helsinki). As my work on the general topic of Russian writers and the First World War has been conducted over a long period of time, I have had the op- portunity to discuss the subject with more colleagues than can be mentioned here. To all of them – unnamed but not forgotten – my sincere gratitude. Help with the English translation has been given by several native-speakers, but the main work was proficiently done by Richard Davies (University of Leeds). I am also grateful to Paul Graves (Helsinki) who thoroughly revised the poetry translations. I myself, needless to say, bear all responsibility for the final version of the book. Financial support for my work was provided by the University of Helsinki, the Research Institute of the Åbo Akademi Foundation, Jenny ja Antti Wihurin rahasto and Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland. Helsinki, 8 October 1995 Ben Hellman Preface to the Second Edition The centennial of the First World War brought with it a renewed interest in the topic of the present volume. The Russian literary heritage of the war years was discussed at seminars and conferences and laid out and analyzed in pub- lications. In Russia, a move away from the Soviet limited perception of the war could be seen, resulting in new, more profound perceptions of the emotional and analytical involvement of the individual writers in the event. From hav- ing been a largely forgotten war it was now seen as an integral part of Russia’s tragic twentieth century. The second edition of my Poets of Hope and Despair follows in all essen- tials the first. As fairly little new material connected specially with the Russian Symbolists at war and revolution has been published, I have mainly confined myself to correcting misprints, taking heed of reviews of the first edition of my book and adding references to new research. Helsinki, 6 December 2017 Ben Hellman Introduction Fedor Sologub called one of the articles he wrote during the First World War “Why the symbolists accepted the war” (“Pochemu simvolisty priniali voinu”). According to Sologub, the Russian symbolists had welcomed the World War in 1914, not as a struggle for territorial conquests and economic influence, or as mass annihilation, but as a phenomenon which on a spiritual level was in harmony with their world view. In their works the symbolists had repeatedly expressed contempt for the modern world and forebodings of a coming cat- aclysm. The war represented not only the judgement of humankind, but also the threshold to a transfigured world, and therefore it had been accepted by the symbolists. To back up his claim, Sologub quoted poems by Valerii Briusov and Viacheslav Ivanov.1 Presumably only modesty prevented him from refer- ring to his own works. Still Sologub’s declaration was a simplification. Perhaps he realized this, as the title of the manuscript was changed to the less chal- lenging “Faithful until the End” (“Derzanie do kontsa”) when the article was published in 1917.2 In reality the reactions of the symbolists to the World War were complicated and did not even conform to the dichotomy of acceptance or rejection. Their response to the revolutions of 1917 confirmed the difficulty of speaking in the name of all the symbolists. An important chapter in the history of Russian literature was clearly drawing to a close. Symbolism was the major literary movement in Russia in the early 20th century, gathering some of the greatest poets of the period under its banner. It is mainly these outstanding individual symbolists who have received scholarly attention, while the movement as a whole was long treated only in connection with the general history of Russian literature. Notable exceptions are Ronald Peterson’s A History of Russian Symbolism (1993) and Avril Pyman’s A History of Russian Symbolism (1994), in which, however, the period 1914-1918 is given only scant attention. In the 1910s symbolism lost its dominant role as the result of internal crises and exterior challenges, and, consequently, attempts to trace the shared features of this final period of the movement have been rare. As a reaction against realism in literature, Russian symbolism did not con- form with the aesthetic ideals that became dominant in Soviet Russia.