A History Of Russian Symbolism

This book is the first detailed history of the Russian Symbolist movement, from its initial hostile reception as a symptom of European decadence to its absorption into the mainstream of Russian literature, and eventual disintegration. It focuses on the two generations of writers whose work served as the seedbed of Existentialism in thought and of Modernism in prose and the performing arts, and reassesses their achievements in the light of modern research. At the centre of the study are the texts themselves, with prose quoted in English translation and poetry given in the original Russian with prose translations. There is a valuable bibliography of primary sources and an extensive chronological appendix. This book will fill a long-felt gap, and will be invaluable to students and teachers of Russian and comparative literature, Symbolism, modernism, and pre-revolutionary Russian culture.

The era of Russian Symbolism (1892-1917) has been called the Silver Age of Russian culture, and even the Second Golden Age. Symbolist authors are among the greatest Russian authors of this century, and their activities helped to foster one of the most significant advances in cultural life (in poetry, prose, music, theater, and painting) that has ever been seen there. This book is designed to serve as an introduction to Symbolism in Russia, as a movement, an artistic method, and a world view. The primary emphasis is on the history of the movement itself. Attention is devoted to what the Symbolists wrote, said, and thought, and on how they interacted. In this context, the main actors are the authors of poetry, prose, drama, and criticism, but space is also devoted to the important connections between literary figures and artists, philosophers, and the intelligentsia in general. This broad, detailed and balanced account of this period will serve as a standard reference work an encourage further research among scholars and students of literature.

In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, mysticism, anti-Semitism, and mathematical theory fused into a distinctive intellectual movement. Through analyses of such seemingly disparate subjects as Moscow mathematical circles and the 1913 novel Petersburg, this book illuminates a forgotten aspect of Russian cultural and intellectual history.

The book examines Russian symbolist texts and turns the focus from their traditional historic-cultural interpretations to analyze the symbolist cognitive aesthetics—aesthetics that govern links between poetry, art, and cinema and the sensory-emotional imagery they evoke. This aesthetics inextricably map mystical transcendence to a spiritual world—a realibus ad realiora—through fluid transmutation. Anastasia Kostetskaya presents an innovative cross-disciplinary analysis of iconicity—a relationship of resemblance between the artistic form and its meaning, the possibilities of which symbolist artists explored to create sublime emotional experiences for the reader or viewer. She challenges the strictly dualistic and hierarchical terms of traditional symbolist concepts. This study demonstrates that this counterdualistic tendency cognitively extends from liquescence—a perception of fluid continuity between people and water. This analysis of interconnected symbolist media shows how symbolists rely on blending in their attempts to engender emotional flux through the pliable form. Fusing cognitivist and historic-cultural approaches in fluidly connected art modes, this book represents chronological, conceptual, and aesthetic continuity from poetry by Konstantin Bal'mont (1867–1942), paintings by Viktor Borisov-Musatov (1870–1905), and cinematography by Evgenii Bauer (1865–1917).

Originally published in 1998, in this book, a number of stereotypes, symbols and signs of Russia, such as the double-headed eagle, the star, bread-and-salt, troika, the Orthodox cross, etc., are presented as a consistent set of metaphors, revealing a symbolic world made by and for the Russians in order to sustain and reinforce their group identity. The Russian language, culture and history form the basic core of the symbolic archive, or thesaurus, of Russianness, from which the necessary images, symbols and signs of identification are provided to manifest connection with the sphere of Russian identity. Such symbolism may directly or obliquely refer either to the territory (soil) of Russia, or to the ethnically specific traits of the Russian people (soul). Both soil and soul are emphatically personified in the symbolic image of Holy Russia - Mother Russia.

A pioneering study of the Symbolist Movement in early twentieth-century Russian opera.

Acclaimed for treading new ground in operatic studies of the period, Simon Morrison’s influential and now-classic text explores music and the occult during the Russian Symbolist movement. Including previously unavailable archival materials about Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, this wholly revised edition is both up to date and revelatory. Topics range from decadence to pantheism, musical devilry to narcotic-infused evocations of heaven, the influence of Wagner, and the significance of contemporaneous Russian literature. Symbolism tested boundaries and reached for extremes so as to imagine art uniting people, facilitating communion with nature, and ultimately transcending reality. Within this framework, Morrison examines four lesser-known works by canonical composers—Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Scriabin, and Sergey Prokofiev—and in this new edition also considers Alexandre Gretchaninoff’s Sister Beatrice and Alexander Kastalsky’s Klara Milich, while also making the case for reviving Vladimir Rebikov’s The Christmas Tree.