IT IS A HISTORICAL fact that the term fin de siècle—and, some would argue, the very notion of modernity accompanying it—arose in France. But it is just as true that Russia, originally influenced by the French visual arts and literature of the 1880s and 1890s, contributed to the international sense of modernity in its own ebullient and inimitable way. After the celebrated Paris exhibitions of Russian paintings in the first decade of the new century and the premiere of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe in the teens, the Russian sense of the The Modern effectively eclipsed the movement’s French origins, shaping international understanding for years to come. In many spheres of art and science Russia was at last regarded as an equal partner, paving the way for a new future of mankind. So of course were the western empires of England, Germany and Austria—and other, smaller countries overtaken by the international sense of modernity. In the eighteenth century Russia had been still barely known to Europeans, and Peter I and his successors, notably Catherine The Great, were mostly importing European art—amassing in the process the largest extant collection of Rembrandts and other masters in the world’s richest museum, The Hermitage. Now, however, at the turn of the twentieth century, Russia was no longer merely assimilating and absorbing European culture, she was for the first time in European memory transforming and creating it as well—in music with Rachmaninov, Scriabin, and Stravinsky, and later with Prokofiev and Shostakovich; in painting with Kandinsky, Chagall, and Bakst, or later the Constructivists; in cinema, ballet, costume design, and so on.
Modernism was as much about seeing the old in new ways as exploring new worlds, formerly hidden by established artistic conventions. Its early phase—Symbolist literature—originated indeed in France, spawned by the works of its first poet-practitioners Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The movement was a reaction against positivism and the working assumptions of the realist artists. The dominance of socially conscious, “engaged” art had been particularly strong in Russia for more than half a century. The Symbolist challenge to realism and social utilitarianism was correspondingly strong. Symbolist writers held that empirical reality was a chimera, a mysterious veil through which—as in Baroque poetry—the artist could discern hidden meaning or fragments of higher truth, indeed of Truth itself. Like the earlier Romanticism which Symbolism in many ways recapitulated, the movement rediscovered the Orient and the exotic as an escape from the everyday and exercised a pervasive cultural influence in Europe, expressing itself in aspects of literature, music, and the fine arts. In fact, a distinguishing feature of Symbolism and Modernism was the degree to which they creatively merged and combined previously distinct art forms: literature and music, music and painting, etc. Writers and painters wrote symphonies and sonatas, such as Bely’s Four Symphonies or Chiurlionis’ Sonata to the Stars, Allegro; composers rendered the essence of painting, poetry, or myth in music, as Rachmaninov did in his Isle of the Dead, Mussorgsky in Pictures at an Exhibition, and Scriabin in Prometheus: The Poem of Fire; Russian painters drew inspiration from motifs of written and oral literature, such as Vrubel’s The Demon and Bilibin’s famous illustrations of Russian folk tales. Most of the ideas connected to this synthesizing tendency were born within an association of artists called The World of Art (Mir Isskustva), which began publishing their trend-setting journal in 1898.
Since non-verbal arts are quite readily absorbed and shared across linguistic and cultural borders, many westerners of this period became familiar with a broad range of Russia’s visual arts, its music, dance and graphic design. The same cannot be said of the art of poetry in which the Symbolist and consequent schools had their true flowering in Russia. Often called Russian literature’s Silver Age, this period remains largely unknown in the west. Regrettably, our volume can in no way attempt to remedy this situation, but the reader should be aware that the three Russian Symbolists whose prose is given an entry or two in this section—Valery Briusov, Fyodor Sologub and Andrei Bely—like the Golden Age writers Derzhavin, Pushkin and Lermontov—were all first-rate poets. We supply a newly translated sampling of the poetry of Briusov and Sologub, and (in lieu of translating any poem by Bely) provide a major new translation of one of the best known poems of the period, The Stranger by Alexander Blok (1880-1921), arguably the Silver Age’s greatest poet. This work best exemplifies how the Russian Symbolist school transformed the original French movement and gave it a new expression. The phrase “vernal and decaying breath” in the poem’s first stanza signifies Blok’s aesthetic choice to expand on the Decadent poetics of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, but the eerily divine features of the female which Blok’s poetic persona—in a drunken stupor—sees in a tavern window, has uniquely Russian origins. The image evokes the notion of Sofia, or Holy Wisdom, found in the writings of Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) Russia’s most influential philosopher, who predated and greatly influenced the Russian Symbolist school. It is preeminently due to his writings that Russian Symbolism combined philosophical idealism and Orthodox mysticism with the French movement’s interest in decadence and artistic experimentation. While the seeds of Russian Symbolist idealist poetry go back to such mystical poets as Tiutchev and Fet (not represented in our volume), Solovyov’s teachings on the feminine aspect of God had a profound effect on Russian Symbolists, indeed on an entire school of Russian Orthodox philosophy—the Sophians—which sprang into being in the twentieth century. Solovyov’s teachings anchored their rhetoric in three visions experienced by the philosopher in which he saw Sophia incarnated as a beautiful female, most fully described in his poem “Three Meetings” (Tri svidaniia). The first vision occurred in a church in Solovyov’s youth, the second in the British Museum during his trip abroad in 1875, and the third in the Egyptian desert. Blok’s image of the enigmatic female stranger is a reflex on Solovyov’s visions, but the sacrilegious use of holy symbols and of the phrase in vino veritas is the poet’s own, as is this poem’s unique musicality and expression of the existential paradox by which one may sit in a city bar yet travel, motionless, to enchanted shores.
The use of sacrilegious motifs in poetry was not, of course, invented by Blok, but rather followed the general Symbolist wish to discard clichéd concepts of universal beauty, propriety, or objective art in favor of the subjective, elitist view of representation with limited disclosure. The previously held convention of the beautiful female representing beauty itself, for instance, was later replaced by the evocation of the masculine—in the poetry of Sologub and Kuzmin—or by the androgynous, in the works of far too many artists to list here. This trend can even be seen from the public reactions to the single-line poem by one of the founders of Symbolism in Russia, Valery Iakovlevich Briusov (1873-1924):
O, close your barren pale legs! (O zakroi svoi blednye nogi. [1894])
The poem’s ambiguity is derived from Briusov’s use of the Russian verb “zakroi” (in its imperative mood meaning either cover something naked, or close something which is open), and its possibly implicit androgyny: to whose legs (male of female) was the poet referring? A. Izmajlov, for example felt it necessary to ask Briusov if he might have meant the legs of Christ taken down from the cross, since the poem would then indeed carry a profound significance for Izmajlov. Briusov answered in the negative, claiming that the line was simply an attempt to write a poem modeled on the minimalist poetry of Roman poets, who considered a single line to be potentially a complete poem. If, on the other hand, the legs belonged to a female then the poem could read in a rather scandalous way (as it was read at the time), or even sacrilegious, if the female in question were imagined to be Sophia herself. Whatever Briusov might have meant, the principal point about the newly rising sensibility engulfing Russia at the time was that the ultimate key to the decoding of any poem could only be found within the persona of the poet himself, or as Blok would state in The Stranger: “There lies within my soul a treasure chest/its Key—a trust that’s solely mine!” (cf. final stanza). Ambiguity—one of the mainsprings of artistic function—was thus elevated by the Symbolist school to the status of an aesthetic priority, indeed, its teleology. Briusov’s prose is represented below by a far less ambiguous, clearly dystopian short story, The Republic of the Southern Cross, which reflects the period’s general sense of doom. Yet the cause of the mental disease which overtakes the circumpolar society of the future—Mania contradicens—is in the typical Symbolist manner hidden and never explained.
The Symbolists’ purposeful lack of disclosure led at times to unforeseen results. For instance, in 1899 Briusov—watching as the furniture in his room was dusted—composed what seemed to him an innocuous poem, Demons the Dust-born (Demony pyli); the poet attached little significance to the work, except for the pride he took in its metrical complexity. He was even a bit annoyed when, during a visit to Peterburg several months later, his audience requested that he declaim this poem; he simply felt there were more important works he wished to share with the listeners. Yet as Thomas Venclova has recently demonstrated, it was this poem that Briusov’s Symbolist peer, Fyodor Kuzmich Sologub (1863-1927), productively utilized in the formation of his own celebrated novel, Petty Demon (Melkii bes). The novel, unlike the poem that inspired it, was a grand undertaking, deftly portraying the moral decay, silliness, and sheer banality of Russia’s degenerate provincial society at the turn of the century. Sologub’s works are represented here by more modestly sized selections: the poem Asteroid, expressing the poet’s metaphysical loneliness, and a short story A Little Man, a masterpiece in its own right, blending fantasy and social satire. The work takes the celebrated (and by that time hackneyed) subject of Russian realism—the theme of the so-called “little man”—and literally makes it shrink into thin air. The ending might well represent the author’s tongue-in-cheek hope that the subject had finally exhausted itself. But the greed of the corporate world surrounding the poor protagonist of A Little Man, as well as the plight of the authentic fairy-tale personages in other Sologub writings, show that the author had great misgivings about the survival of the fantastic in the unfolding twentieth century.
Indeed, it could be safely argued that the most prevalent form of envisioning the Russian future in Sologub’s time was one heralding doom. The most influential apocalyptic vision of such a future was again to be found in the writings of Vladimir Soloviev. His principal work in this regard is the aforementioned Three Conversations, a text rarely cited by cultural historians. Its apocalyptic themes and prophecies of the Antichrist are productively explored in Andrei Bely’s superb novel, Petersburg. Bely does not make clear the actual future he foresees as the outcome of the cataclysm about to engulf the St. Petersburg of 1905, but a Horseman of the Apocalypse does make an appearance. Within Bely’s fictional world physical actions have metaphysical consequences and vice versa, as is patently evident in the selections we offer from the novel. Taken from the Prologue and Chapter I, they introduce the three major protagonists—Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, his son Nikolai, and Petersburg itself—as well as the novel’s chief plot device, a terrorist bomb with which Nikolai hopes to assassinate his father. He fails, but the bomb’s abortive explosion—a metaphor for the 1905 revolution—does have the tangible consequence of forever separating him from his family and propelling him on a quest for life’s ultimate wisdom. The quest’s Egyptian setting speaks to the influence of Solovyov’s visions, especially since St. Petersburg’s Sophia (Sophia Petrovna Likhutina), is in fact the true opposite of Solovyov’s Holy Wisdom. At the same time our selections typify Bely’s dialogue with Gogol’s St. Petersburg tales and Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, texts embedded at the novel’s core, but in Pushkin’s poem Petersburg as an artifice survives the catastrophic flood, whereas Bely’s vison for the city’s future is far more enigmatic. Our selections form a prose companion to Blok’s The Stranger, and showcase techniques which succeed in integrating Bely’s poetry-in-prose into a victory of fantasy-making narrative. The brief example of Bely’s actual poetry, The Demon, which we newly translate, simultaneously echoes the cited poems by Lermontov, Sologub and Briusov.
Modernism was not, of course, characterized by Symbolism alone but equally by those movements and schools which grew out of it or in reaction to it, such as Russian Acmeism, Imaginism, Futurism, etc. Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Velemir Khlebnikov, to name but a few, are commonly understood in Russia to be the period’s best poets. Much of the subject matter of their poetry is either pure fantasy or borders on the fantastic. The doomsday mentality of the early Russian Symbolists and other writers, reaffirmed by the traumatic experience of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and the attendant revolution of the same year, came to a climax in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Early on the regime was welcomed by some of the Symbolists and most certainly sung by Mayakovsky, as it seemed to promise a truly glorious and remarkable emancipation of mankind in blazingly radiant futuristic scapes. The pathos of these days was further affirmed by the ascendant art forms of the poster, to which Mayakovsky contributed in no small measure, and the cinema, with Eisenstein’s films such as Ten Days that Shook the World being the most widely known. It is, however, ironic that Eisenstein’s cinematic accomplishment is generally viewed as a documentary of revolution, and that indeed millions participated in the Bolshevik undertaking. In fact the storming of the Winter Palace involved fewer than one thousand individuals, thus making the film effectively a fantasy, and assigning to “airy nothing” a St. Petersburg address. Nonetheless once the overthrow was accomplished, the terror inflicted by the Bolshevik government on the people was massive and did involve millions. The terror also affected the lives of Russia’s finest poets, writers and artists. Blok, after initially welcoming the Bolsheviks in an enigma-ridden poem, The Twelve (1918; cf. below)—in which he paradoxically saw the revolution led by Jesus Christ himself—died agonized by its consequences in 1921. The same year witnessed the suicide by drowning of Sologub’s closest life-companion, his wife Anastasia, who simply could not bear the Bolshevik regime, thus leaving her husband utterly bereft till 1927, when he died just as utterly alone. Esenin committed suicide in 1924, and Mayakovsky in 1930; Bely died nearly insane in 1934; Mandelstam perished in a concentration camp in 1936-7; Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. Such were the non-enigmatic endings of some of Russia’s most talented explorers of unknown and alternate worlds.