Renaissance

University of Minnesota Press

Chapter Title: The Cultural Renaissance Chapter Author(s): GLEB STRUVE

Book Title: Russia Under the Last Tsar Book Editor(s): THEOFANIS GEORGE STAVROU Published by: University of Minnesota Press. (1969) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.cttttdh0.12

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GLEB S T R U V E

The Cultural Renaissance

IN S P E A K I N G of Russian literature of the first decade and a half of the present century, it has become usual to refer to the Silver Age. I do not know who was the first to use this appellation, on whom the blame for launching it falls, but it came to be used even by some leading representatives of that very literature — for example, by the late Sergei Makovskii, the founder and editor of that important and excellent periodical, Apollon,1 and even by the last great poet of that age, Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966).

I regard this usage as very unfortunate and never tire of pointing this out when I deal with this period of Russian literature in my lectures and writing. I greatly prefer the designation of the late Prince Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky (D. S. Mirsky), who also be- longed himself to this period — namely, "the Second Golden Age of Russian Poetry."2 This description certainly fits the poetry of

1 One of Makovskii's books about this period is even entitled Na Parnase Serebrianogo Veka (On the Parnassus of the Silver Age), Miinchen, 1962.

2 Mirsky wrote: "Apart from everything else, in spite of their limitations and mannerism, the Symbolists combined great talent with conscious crafts- manship, and this makes their place so big in Russian literary history. One may dislike their style, but one cannot fail to recognize that they revived Russian poetry from a hopeless state of prostration and that their age was a second golden age of verse inferior only to the first golden age of Russian poetry —the age of Pushkin." (Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881-1925, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (London: Routledge, 1926), p. 183; or, A History of Russian Literature, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (rev. ed.; New

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this period: between the first Golden Age, the age of Pushkin, for which this term is generally accepted, and the beginning of the new century, there were some remarkable individual poets (Tiutchev, Fet, Nekrasov), but there was no such all-round florescence of poetry, no such poetic epanouissement, as was to be witnessed in the first decade of this century.3 One modern Russian literary scholar and critic, Boris Eichenbaum, used the poetic revival at the beginning of the twentieth century in support and illustration of his theory of cyclical development of Russian literature: the Golden Age of Russian poetry gave way to the great age of the Russian novel, and the latter, after a short interval, was followed by a period during which poetry once more came to the fore. The cycle repeated itself after approximately a hundred years.

It is true that at the beginning of this new age in Russian litera- ture the terms decadence and decadentism (dekadentstvo) were frequently applied to the new trends in literature and arts by their detractors, and sometimes accepted by their practitioners; that they are still in common use among Soviet literary scholars and critics; and that some independent Western scholars of modern Russian literature also cling to them when they wish to draw a distinction (a rather arbitrary one) between those whom they designate as "Decadents" (dekadenty) and those whom they describe as "Sym- bolists." But although it is true that there were, in the literature of those days, certain elements and aspects that could be character- ized as "decadent," it is quite wrong to use that term as a general description of the period. And though "the Second Golden Age" can be quite legitimately applied to the poetry of this period, for an overall description of it I should prefer such a term as Renais- sance. It was indeed a Russian cultural renaissance, encompassing all the areas of cultural and spiritual life — arts, letters, philosophy,

York: Knopf, 1959), p. 432. A newly revised edition of A History of Rus- sian Literature was published in 1968 (London: Routledge).)

8 It is also significant that of the three just-named great poets, who came in between, the first two were neglected and largely unrecognized by their contemporaries, and had to be "resurrected" later by the Modernists or by their immediate precursors, such as Vladimir Soloviev, and Nekrasov's fame and popularity rested during his lifetime not on what was best and genuine in his poetry but on its sociopolitical message.

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religious, social, and political thought; a period of great richness, variety, and vitality.4

The beginnings of Russian Modernism in arts and letters are to be sought in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Both Rus- sian and foreign influences were at work in shaping it and deter- mining its course.

As early as 1890, Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891), a remark- able Russian thinker, who has more than once been described as a Russian Nietzsche and whom some regard — with much less justi- fication, I think — as a precursor of Fascism, wrote a controversial but stimulating essay on Tolstoi and his novels.5 In this essay he announced the demise of the dominant "realist" school in Russian literature. He saw that school as something "quite intolerable in some respects." One of its great weaknesses appeared to him to be its harping on minute, "superfluous" details, whether they be physical or psychological. He referred to them as "flyspecks" and said that by way of natural reaction one could prefer almost any- thing, so long as it was different, to this prevalent brand of Russian imaginative literature. He named such disparate works as Byron's Childe Harold and Zhukovskii's "Undine," the Lives of Saints and Voltaire's philosophical contes, Tiutchev's metaphysical poetry and Barbier's fiery revolutionary iambs, Victor Hugo and Goethe,

4 The term "Golden Age" was also used without hesitation, in speaking of this period, by a critic who in many ways stood much closer than the Modernists to the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik. He used it in an article signed "Ippolit Udushiev" (a personage mentioned in Griboedov's Gore ot uma — Woe from Wit) in the collection of essays Sov- remennaia literatura (Contemporary Literature) (Leningrad, 1925), p. 161. For Ivanov-Razumnik, when he wrote, the Second Golden Age was already over, and the Silver Age, the period of decline, had begun. In general, this pseudonymous article of his is full of interesting thoughts and observations.

5 This essay, the posthumous separate edition (1911) of which has been out of print for many years, has been reprinted in this country: Analiz, stif i veianie. O romanakh gr. L. N. Tolstogo (Analysis, Style, and Atmos- phere. On the Novels of Count L. N. Tolstoi), with an essay on Leontiev by Vasilii Rozanov and an introductory piece by Donald Fanger, Brown Uni- versity Slavic Reprint No. 3 (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1965). This edition contains a short chapter at the beginning which was cut out from the original publication in Russkii Vestnik and was not repro- duced in the 1911 edition. It was first published in Grazhdanin, Nos. 157 and 158 (1890), and then incorporated in the article in Vol. VIII of Leontiev's Collected Works (Moscow, 1912).

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Calderon and Corneille, George Sand's novels and Monk Parfentii's Legends of the Holy Land, Horace's Odes and Manon Lescaut, the tragedies of Sophocles and the childlike epic songs of the modern Greeks.6 Leontiev traced the initial stage of this Russian "flyspeck" realism to Gogol; the Tolstoi of his major novels appeared to Leontiev to be the writer in whom it had reached its point of saturation and who himself, with the instinct of a genius, had turned away from it and sought new paths: hence, the new manner, intentionally bare and simple, of his stories for the people. It speaks very much for Leontiev's fairness and objectivity that, guided by purely artistic considerations, he saw those stories of Tolstoi's as superior to his great novels, as a step forward and away from the dead tradition: for the religious and moral views underlying those stories, Leontiev could not possibly have any use.

Leontiev himself, although he also wrote some fiction, can hardly be regarded as a forerunner of any specific trends in modern Russian literature (and because of his "reactionary" world view, his influence during his lifetime was confined to a narrow circle of admirers), but he did, in that essay, voice a reaction against "real- ism" that was soon to spread far and wide. What is more, under- lying his general outlook, his religious, sociopolitical, and historio- sophic ideas, there was a deeply rooted aestheticism, which was to become an important factor in shaping the destinies of modern Rus- sian literature. His aristocratic individualism (as expressed, for instance, in his bitingly satirical essay "The Average European as the Means and End of Universal Progress") was also a sign of the times. There is no doubt that hi his essay on Tolstoi he had put his ringer on the focal point of the malaise which was then affecting Russian literature. Barely a decade had passed since it had completed a great and brilliant cycle of its development — the great age of the Russian novel, of social and psychological realism, had come to an end with the deaths of Dostoevsky (1881) and of Turgenev (1883), and the voluntary (albeit partial and temporary) withdrawal of Tolstoi from art (1879-1880).

Two years after Leontiev's essay (published in 1891), the general 6 Ibid., p. 14.

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crisis in Russian literature was analyzed in greater detail, and in the light of incipient Modernism, by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii (1865- 1941) in his celebrated essay "On the Causes of Decline and the New Trends in Russian Literature" (1893). This essay is some- times treated as the manifesto of Russian Symbolism. I think this is a mistake.7 Nevertheless, its symptomatic significance was very great. Merezhkovskii became one of the harbingers of that revolt which was soon to spread to a large section of the Russian intelli- gentsia. It was, above all, a revolt against the traditional values of that intelligentsia as they had become crystallized in the 1860's and 18 70's —against its positivism, against its tendency to subordinate art to social utility and to look upon it as a service to the people. It was a revolt in the name of individualism, of aestheticism, of religious and philosophical idealism. Speaking of the first timid manifestations of these new trends in the last decade of the nine- teenth century, D. S. Mirsky wrote: "Aestheticism substituted beauty for duty, and individualism emancipated the individual from all social obligations. The two tendencies, which went hand in hand, proved a great civilizing force and changed the whole face of Russian civilization between 1900 and 1910, bringing about the great renascence of Russian art and poetry, which marked that decade." 8

What was the background of that renaissance and what were its sources? The last decade of the nineteenth century in Russia — that century which the great modern Russian poet Alexander Blok described in his autobiographical and at the same time historical poem "Vozmezdie" (Retribution) as "iron and truly cruel" — i s usually thought of as a period of dark reaction, of stagnation, of bezvremen'e (an untranslatable Russian word, particularly associ- ated with the futility and frustration which permeate Chekhov's stories and plays). But this is only one side of the medal. It was at the same time a period of political, social, and artistic fer- mentation; of great and heated controversies. It saw the birth of

7 See a discussion of this point in Ralph E. Matlaw, "The Manifesto of Russian Symbolism," The Slavic and East European Journal, XV, No. 3 (Fall 1957), 177-191.

8 Contemporary Russian Literature, pp. 151-152.

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the organized Social Democratic Party in Russia, the violent debate on a number of general and topical issues between the Marxists and the populists (narodniki). The end of the century saw also the first defections from the Marxist camp into that of Neo-Kantian ideal- ism, personified in such men as Peter Struve, Nicholas Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Simon Frank, all of whom were later to play a prominent part in the Russian religious-philosophical revival and all of whom also ended their lives as exiles under the Soviet regime.

A significant landmark in this movement was the publication of a collection of essays, entitled Problems of Idealism (1902), to which all the above-named men contributed. A much later but direct sequel of it was the volume Vekhi (Landmarks, or Signposts, 1909) in which seven authors (described by some of their critics as "the seven penitents") joined forces and subjected to a critical analysis some of the fundamental premises of the outlook of the Russian intelligentsia: its positivism and utilitarianism, as well as its political maximalism. Simon Frank, for example, opposed the ideal of "religious humanism" to the "nihilistic moralism" of the traditional intelligentsia mentality, and Bulgakov, who was then al- ready a practicing Orthodox believer and was later to be ordained as a priest, contrasted the Christian saintly ideal with the ideal of revolutionary heroism. This volume of highly sophisticated polit- ical-philosophical essays rapidly became a bestseller and went within one year through several printings — a success unprecedented in the history of Russian letters. The volume also led to a heated controversy with the champions of the intelligentsia's traditional mentality and values. The volume was attacked both by the extreme Left (some of the most venomous attacks on it were made, and continued to be made for years, by Lenin) and by the tradition- bound Liberals.9

An important role in fin-de-siecle thought was played by Vladi- mir Soloviev (1853-1900), who combined the religious-mystical approach (with strong eschatological overtones) with political Lib-

9 Of the seven authors of Vekhi, four (Berdiaev, Bulgakov, Frank, and Struve) had been contributors to Problems of Idealism.

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eralism, and to whom Russian religious-philosophical revival of the early twentieth century was very much indebted.

In the same period fall the pioneering efforts of such writers as Vasilii Rozanov (1856-1919), Akim Volynskii (pseudonym of A. L. Flekser, 1863-1926), Sergei Andreevskii (1847-1920), and others, to reappraise the heritage of Russian literature, to re- evaluate the reputations of many a writer to whom the dominant social-utilitarian criticism of the nineteenth century had affixed this or that label, with a plus or a minus sign. Rozanov's penetrating studies of Gogol and Dostoevsky; Volynskii's books on Dostoevsky and Leskov and his outspoken debunking of such idols of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia as Belinskii, Chernyshevskii, and Pisarev, parallel with the emphasis laid on such an unfashionable literary critic as Apollon Grigoriev (all this in Volynskii's volume Russian Critics); Andreevskii's rediscovery of such a major poet of the Pushkin period as Baratynskii; Soloviev's famous essays on Tiutchev and Fet — all these were important stages in the rapidly proceeding unfreezing of the Russian minds. This work of re- evaluation of the literary reputations of the past was to be con- tinued later by the leading poets of Russian Symbolism (Briusov, Zinaida Hippius, Blok, and others).

There were parallel developments in visual arts — a reaction against the pedestrian realism of the dominant peredvizhniki group,10 and the programmatic or illustrative art with a social mes- sage, went hand in hand with the growing interest in the contem- porary movements in Western European art — in particular, the English Pre-Raphaelites and the French Impressionists and their offshoots. At the very end of the century, this desire to renovate Russian art and to put it abreast of Western movements found its vehicle in the magazine Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art), founded in 1898 by Sergei Diaghilev, of future Ballets Russes fame. Diaghi- lev gathered round him a group of talented young artists who later formed the World of Art group and did much to revolutionize both Russian art and Russian art criticism — men like Alexander Benois, Konstantin Somov, Eugene Lanceray, Nicholas Roerich,

10From Peredvizhnye vystavki (Ambulant Exhibitions).

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Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, and others. These men were also responsi- ble for a new approach to the past legacy of Russian art, for "dis- covering" the hitherto neglected world of the Russian icon (the work done in this respect by the art historian Igor Grabar and by the critic Paul Muratov was particularly important, but much credit also goes to the wealthy collectors from the old merchant families, such as Ostroukhov, Riabushinskii, and others) and for reassessing the little-known art of the Russian eighteenth century. Some of the leading artists of this new school, like Benois and Somov, were clearly influenced by this eighteenth-century art and also drew upon it for their subject matter, whereas others, like Roerich, were to some extent influenced by the Russian icon paint- ing and drew upon Russian folklore and Oriental motifs.

The World of Art combined interest in arts with that in literature and stood in the vanguard of modern literary movement. The close alliance between literature and fine arts became a hallmark of Russian periodicals at this time, and the World of Art tradition was carried on by such publications as Vesy (The Scales, 1904- 1909), Zolotoe Runo (The Golden Fleece, 1906-1909), Apollon (Apollo, 1909-1917), and the short-lived Sofia (1914). It is also characteristic of all these periodicals, devoted to both arts and letters, that they followed closely all the latest trends and move- ments in Western Europe and were at the same time concerned with propagandizing Russian art, both old and modern, in the West. Both Vesy and Apollon had regular Western collaborators.

In the drama and the theater new paths were also blazed from the 1890's on. In 1898, the Moscow Art Theatre, founded by Konstantin Stanislavsky, today one of the best-known names in the history of the modern theater, initiated with his Sea Gull a series of Chekhov productions, which were to bring it its fame (only three years earlier, The Sea Gull had met with complete fiasco on the traditional stage in St. Petersburg). Chekhov, who in his dramatic innovations was to some extent influenced by con- temporary European drama (by Ibsen and Maeterlinck, in particu- lar), became in turn important in influencing the drama outside Russia, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. So did, too, some of

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the principles that underlay the theatrical work of Stanislavsky's Art Theatre. For its part, the Moscow Art Theatre familiarized Russian audiences with such playwrights as Ibsen, Hamsun, Haupt- mann, and Maeterlinck. Soon, however, the Stanislavsky's theater itself came to be looked upon by many people as old-fashioned. Its presentation of Chekhov's "atmospheric" plays in the slice-of-life manner and hi a minor key was the last word in the "de-theatral- ization" and "de-conventionalization" of the theater. A reaction against this trend came from different sides and at different levels: Leonid Andreev's symbolical-romantic melodramas (The Life of Man, Anathema, and so forth); Gorky's attempts (as in Lower Depths) to infuse a broader social meaning and a breath of optimism into the Chekhovian drama; Fedor Sologub's and Zinaida Hippius's endeavors to combine symbolism and realism; Blok's essays in lyri- cal drama (The Puppet Show and The Stranger, with their superb romantic irony) and in verse tragedy (The Rose and the Cross)-, Innokentii Annenskii's and Viacheslav Ivanov's revival of ancient Greek myths (in Annenskii's case, with a strong modern flavor). All this took place in the drama, at the same time as, in the theater, Meyerhold and especially Nicholas Evreinov were turning to ex- periments that were based on principles diametrically opposed to that of Chekhov's and Stanislavsky's de-conventionalization of the theater — namely, the "theatralization" of life. All this can be seen as an attempt to lead the Russian theater out of the Chekhov- ian impasse. Two outstanding theatrical directors who were later to play an important part in the early post-Revolutionary period, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov, came to assert the principle of the primacy of the theatrical director not only over the actors (Stanislavsky had also asserted this, although he com- bined it with the important role assigned to the actors' ensemble as distinct from individual actors), but also over the author. Hence, the liberties which Meyerhold was to take later with the plays of such classical writers as Gogol and Ostrovskii.

In poetry, the period before 1912 was dominated by Symbolism. Just as French Symbolism had been a reaction against Parnassian- ism and Naturalism, so its Russian namesake (which owed much

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of its inspiration to French Symbolism) was a reaction against civic-minded Realism. An anticipation of it will be found in Merezhkovskii's book of poems, significantly entitled Simvoly (Symbols, 1892). In his previously mentioned essay of 1893, Merezhkovskii referred to the French Symbolists. Somewhat earlier they had been the subject of a special article by Mme Zinaida Vengerov in Vestnik Evropy. From this article the average Russian reader (Vestnik Evropy was a widely read Liberal monthly) learned about the whole modern movement in French literature. But the beginnings of Russian Symbolism as a literary school in its own right date from 1894-1895 when Valerii Briusov (1873-1924), who was then twenty-one, and his friend A. Miropolskii-Lang published three slender volumes under the title Russian Symbolists. They contained some original verse and prose, and translations from Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Maeterlinck. There was very little, if any- thing, of intrinsic value in these little volumes of avant-garde writ- ings (the only author to make subsequently a name for himself was Briusov), but their appearance was symptomatic. The defini- tions of Symbolism and its intent, which Briusov gave in the first two issues, were derived directly from Mallarme: "The object of Symbolism is to hypnotize as it were the reader by a series of juxtaposed images, to evoke in him a certain mood . . .*'; "The purpose of poetry is not 'objective description,' but 'sugges- tion' . . ."; "The poet conveys a series of images . . . [which are] to be looked upon as signposts along an invisible road, open to the imagination of the reader. It follows then that Symbolism can be described as ... poetry of allusions"; and so forth. Primacy of intuition over reason, a refusal to accept a reality which is but a distortion of the real but unattainable world —these fundamental tenets were accepted by the young Russian disciples of Verlaine and Mallarme and became the common stock of the new movement. The mission of the poet was seen in the revealing, beyond the realm of senses, of the world of higher reality. De realibus ad realiora was the slogan proclaimed later by one of the principal theoreticians of Russian Symbolism, Viacheslav Ivanov (1866- 1949).

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Another leading representative of early Russian Symbolism, Kon- stantin Balmont (1867-1942), said that whereas the Realists were tied to concrete reality beyond which they saw nothing, the Sym- bolists were cut off from it and saw hi it only their dream — "They look at life through a window." Balmont also developed his philos- ophy of the moment, "momentalism": "Moments are always unique. The life I live is too quick, and I know no one who loves moments so much as I do ... I yield myself to the moment," he wrote in a preface to one of the most characteristic volumes of his verse, Goryashchie zdaniia (Burning Edifices, 1904). This cult of the moment, this glorification of a fleeting, momentary experience, is the keynote of much of Balmont's prerevolutionary poetry.

Another Symbolist poet, Zinaida Hippius (1869-1945), the wife of Merezhkovskii, who sought inspiration in the poetry of Baratynskii and Tiutchev rather than in the French Symbolists, compared poetry to prayers. Andrei Bely (pseudonym of Boris Bugaev, 1880-1934), who became toward 1910 one of the princi- pal theoretical exponents of Symbolism, wrote: "All art is sym- bolic, whether recent, old, or future. What is then the significance of modern Symbolism? What new message did it bring us? None. The school of Symbolism merely reduces to a unity the statements of artists and poets to the effect that the meaning of beauty is in the artistic image and not in the emotion which that image arouses in us; and certainly not in the rational interpretation of that image. A symbol cannot be reduced either to emotions or to discursive concepts; it is what it is."

If of French Symbolism it has been said that "Du point de vue technique . . . le symbolisme a tente et r6ussi Faffranchissement du vers frangais — sous toutes ses formes," with regard to Russian Symbolism one should speak not so much of the "emancipation" of the Russian verse as of the simultaneous restoration of pristine standards (those of the Golden Age) and complete renovation. The complexity and richness of the poetic world of Symbolism defy a brief analysis. Such poets as Balmont, Briusov, Sologub, Viaches- lav Ivanov, Zinaida Hippius, Innokentii Annenskii (whose full stat- ure as a poet became clear only after his death and who, of all

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the poets of this period, stood closest to some of their French mas- ters), Baltrushaitis, Blok, and Bely, represented different facets of Symbolism. Not all of them were equally indebted to the French. This debt was particularly obvious in the case of Annenskii and Briusov, both of whom translated Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mal- larme (Annenskii also translated Laforgue and some lesser poets of that period; Briusov came to be strongly influenced by Ver- haeren). It was less so in the case of Sologub, although he also paid tribute to the French Symbolists by translating them. Balmont was much more eclectic — his favorite poets were Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe, and he also did a great deal of translating from Spanish. (Poe and Baudelaire, like Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Scho- penhauer's ideas on music, meant much to nearly all the Russian Symbolists. Baudelaire's "Correspondances," with its "forest of symbols" and the notion of synesthesia, became a kind of credo for them). Zinaida Hippius owed much more, as has been men- tioned before, to her Russian masters, Tiutchev and Baratynskii — the former came to be regarded by all the Symbolists as their fore- runner, a kind of Symbolist avant la lettre.11 As for Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, they owed much more to another Symbolist avant la lettre (even though he had headed the chorus of those who derided and parodied Briusov's first experiments in a new man- ner) — namely, Vladimir Soloviev and his mystical philosophy — as did also Viacheslav Ivanov (but in his case there was also a par- ticularly strong influence of Nietzsche). Blok also had affinities with some earlier Russian poets in the Romantic tradition — in particu- lar with Zhukovskii, Lermontov, Fet, and Polonskii — and both he and Bely, at one stage of their poetic development, were very much inspired by the Russian accents of some of Nekrasov's "civic" poetry. In the case of Blok especially, but also of Bely and Ivanov, German influences played a greater part than the French.

Generally speaking, it soon became possible to distinguish be- tween two main currents in Russian Symbolism: the purely aes- thetic, represented by Briusov and Balmont, which depended much

uSee, for example, V. Ivanov, "Zavety simvolizma," Apollon, No. 8 (1910), pp. 5-9.

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more on foreign models and was concerned above all with formal, technical, prosodic innovations; and the metaphysical or religious one, represented by Blok, Bely, and Ivanov, and to some extent Zinaida Hippius (Sologub occupied a place apart). Blok, Bely, and Ivanov have come to be described often as the "younger Symbol- ists" (Blok and Bely were actually younger; Ivanov, who was older than Briusov, made his entry into Russian literature much later).

This metaphysical current in Russian Symbolism aspired to be something more than a literary school. Its principal exponents, Bely and Ivanov (Blok was not much of a theoretician, and in any case soon came to differ with the other two), spoke of "a new con- sciousness," of "mythmaking," of the "theurgical meaning of poetry." The inner crisis in Russian Symbolism came to a head in 1910 when Blok and Ivanov, on the one hand, and Briusov, on the other, engaged in a controversy in the newly founded "Academy of Verse." For Blok, Symbolism at this point was really a thing of the past, and he was soon to desert it and to wander away in a frantic search for closer ties with real life. Symbolism's aloofness from life, its engrossment in abstract profundities, began to frighten him. "Back to the soul, not only to 'man,' but to 'the whole man' — with his spirit, soul, and body, with the everydayness — three times so," he wrote in his diary in 1911.12 And again, in 1912, "What we need is reality, there is nothing more terrifying in the world than mysticism."13 Ivanov also began to speak of "realistic sym- bolism," though what he meant by it was not the same thing and was not dictated by that craving for real life by which Blok was actuated. Bely alone stuck obstinately to his guns, as may be seen from the numerous articles contributed by him in 1912 to the new periodical, Trudy i Dni (Works and Days), founded by him and Ivanov and in which Blok took but little part.14 For Bely, Blok had even become a traitor to the common cause.

12 Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1963), Vol. VII, p. 79 (entry dated October 30).

MIbid., p. 134 (entry dated March 19). "This periodical, founded for the explicit purpose of defending and

preaching "true" Symbolism, had a short life. Bely published in it a number of important articles, some under his own name, others under the pseudonym Cunctator.

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At the same time the stronghold of Symbolism came to be attacked from outside. In 1910, one of the talented poets who had remained on the periphery of the Symbolist movement, Mikhail Kuzmin (1875-1936), published in Apotton an article entitled "Prekrasnaia iasnost" ("Beautiful Clarity"). It called upon his fel- low writers to come down to earth from the nebulous metaphysical heights of Symbolism. Two years later, two younger poets, Nicho- las Gumilev (1886-1921) and Sergei Gorodetskii (b. 1884), launched a new movement to which they gave the name of Acmeism (from the Greek word akme, meaning "high point"). Gumilev, who had been a disciple of Briusov and of the French Parnassians, became the theoretician and the maitre d'ecole of the new group. The principal tenets of Acmeism were stated by Gumilev and Gorodetskii in two separate articles published in the first issue of Apollon for 1913.15 Gorodetskii's association with the movement was more or less accidental, but Gumilev's article came to be looked upon as the manifesto of the new school. To the Symbolists' empha- sis on the hidden, associative, musical elements in poetry (Verlaine's "De la musique avant tout chose"), the Acmeists opposed the elements of sense and logic in the art of words. To Ivanov's and Bely's inclination to view the poet as a prophet, a mythmaker, and to stress his passive, mediumistic nature, Gumilev opposed the conception of the poet as a skilled, conscious craftsman; the literary organization founded by him and his consorts was accord- ingly named "Poets' Guild" (Tsekh Poetov). Up to a point, the movement can be seen as part of the general European trend toward neoclassicism, which in France was associated with Jean Moreas, himself a leading ex-Symbolist, and in England with T. E. Hulme. Although it is highly doubtful whether Gumilev was at that time familiar with the ideas and writings of Hulme, or even knew his name (later he was to display some interest in him), he must have known the name and the work of Moreas; and though we have no direct evidence of it at present, it is quite likely that the two

13 Gumilev's article was entitled "Nasledie simvolizma i akmeizm" ("Acmeism and the Heritage of Symbolism"). It was published in Apollon, No. 1 (1913), and reprinted posthumously in Pis'ma o russkoi poezii (Petro- grad, 1923), pp. 37-42.

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met in 1908, when Gumilev spent about a year in Paris and was a frequent visitor to the Closerie des Lilas. The name of Moreas was not mentioned in Gumilev's "manifesto," and there was no reference in it to the ecole romane or to the neoclassical reaction against Symbolism in France. In fact, the four names of writers invoked by Gumilev as those of the "masters" to look up to were quite different and had nothing to do with modern neoclassicism: Frangois Villon, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Theophile Gautier, of whom Gumilev was a great admirer and whose Emaux and Camees he translated into Russian. One can say perhaps that Acmeism lacked both real unity and firm theoretical foundations (verbal lucidity, craftsmanship, manliness, and zest for life were among the tenets its exponents advocated), but that it had some neoclas- sical characteristics is beyond doubt. It was later to have a number of camp followers and to exercise considerable influence on the developments in Russian poetry after 1917, but its true adherents before the Revolution were very few. They included, however, two major poets whose poetry, in the opinion of most people, is of greater value than that of Gumilev himself:16 Gumilev's first wife, Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), and Osip Mandelstam (1891- 1938). Both poets with sharply defined poetic individualities, they could hardly be described as Gumilev's followers, but their poetry certainly represented, in different ways, some essential aspects of Acmeism as understood and formulated by Gumilev. Both grew in stature as poets after the Revolution, despite the extremely un- favorable outward conditions and the vicissitudes of their personal life. Akhmatova survived all her ordeals and continued to write (though there were periods when she could not publish her poetry), but Mandelstam ended his life tragically in a concentration camp.

Another movement that arose in opposition to Symbolism, but was also largely its own offspring, was Futurism. It was a movement parallel to, but hi many ways different from, the Italian Futurism

16 In evaluating Gumilev as a poet it is necessary, however, to take into account the fact that his life was cut short at the age of 35, when he was executed for alleged participation in a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. His last volume of poetry, Ognennyi stolp (Pillar of Fire), published a month or so after his death, bore witness to his remarkably rapid growth as a poet.

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of Marinetti. Its very beginnings in Russia were in 1909. By 1912 it was represented by a number of small groups and coteries, bearing such names as Ego-Futurists, Cubo-Futurists, Centrifuga, and The Mezzanine of Poetry. Of these, the Cubo-Futurists came to play the most important role. As the name implies, they wanted to stress then: connection with Cubism in painting —the book of Gleizes and Metzenger on Cubism became one of their bedside books. Some of their experiments with words and verse led some students of Futurism to speak of their "verse Cubism," although the analogy seems rather remote and arbitrary.

The Cubo-Futurists were led by two poets who were also painters — David Burliuk (b. 1882) and Vladimir Maiakovskii (1894-1930). Burliuk made his home after the Revolution in New York and became better known as a painter, even though he con- tinued to write poetry in Russian and to preach Futurism. He is still alive, as is Alexei Kruchenykh (b. 1886), one of the early Russian Futurists still living in Russia. It was Maiakovskii, how- ever, who became the acknowledged leader of Russian avant-garde poetry. Connected with them was also Velimir Khlebnikov (1885- 1922), sometimes described as the Russian Rimbaud, the most original of the Futurists, and in the opinion of some people, a true poetic genius.

The Futurists proclaimed the absolute autonomy of art, its com- plete independence from life. In one of their early publications, they declared that, apart from its starting point which is to be seen in the creative impulse, poetry has nothing to do with the external world and is in no way coordinated with it. They saw their mission in "unshackling" words, in freeing them from subservience to meaning, and thus reaching through to "direct perception." Their slogan was the "word per se" or "self-valuable word" (samovitoe slovo). They propounded and tried to practice a new, universal language, which they dubbed trans-sense (zaumny jazyk, zauiri — Professor Chyzhevskyi has suggested as its best equivalent the word metalogical). In a way, this approach had already been antici- pated by the Symbolists, among whom Andrei Bely especially had freely indulged in coining words. The influence of Mallarme is

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equally apparent. Burliuk spoke of both the Russian and the French Symbolists, as well as the French poetes maudits, as the Futurists' masters, naming specifically Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Tris- tan Corbiere, and Jules Laforgue. But the Futurists said that whereas the Symbolists had tried both in theory and in practice to deepen the inner meaning of words, and saw the latter as im- portant not per se, but because they were an expression of a symbol, of the world, of existence, of the "soul of things," or of the mystical other world; they, the Futurists, regarded the form of words, their appearance, their sound as more important than their actual or po- tential meaning. Or, as Professor Markov put it, the "flesh" of the poetic word was more important than its "spirit."17 What mattered to them was not some new symbols, but a new organization of words. If words can be seen as tonic or graphic material, then they can be "stretched," or divided, or created anew. Hence the cult of form, the intoxication with words, and all sorts of verbal experiments, particularly in the work of Kruchenykh.

Maiakovskii, however, who was to become the post-Revolu- tionary leader of Russian Futurism — a t least so long as it was tolerated by the Party — was never particularly interested in pure verbal experimentation for its own sake; he never indulged in the extremes of "wordmaking" (slovotvorchestvo), contenting himself with all sorts of "shifts" (sdvigi) in the language — phonetic, mor- phological, semantic, rhythmical. His principal innovations were in the realm of prosody: he tended to substitute pure tonic verse for the traditional syllabotonic pattern of Russian classical poetry; in this he had some predecessors among the Symbolist poets (in their use of the so-called dol'niki), but he adopted much more revolutionary procedures, went far beyond his predecessors, and in his accentual verse created a truly new instrument. Characteristic for Maiakovskii was also the deliberate "de-poetization" of vocab- ulary and imagery and the use of vulgarisms and colloquialisms, though alongside these he also used archaisms and Church- Slavonicisms, often for contrasting or satirical effects.

"Vladimir Markov, "The Province of Russian Futurism," The Slavic and East European Journal, VIII, No. 4 (Winter 1964), 403.

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Although the Italian Futurism of Marinetti had a distinctly urbanistic flavor, the same cannot be said of Russian Futurism as a whole. Two of its prominent representatives, Khlebnikov and Vasilii Kamenskii (1884-1961), had even a strong anti-urban bias. In Khlebnikov's poetry and in his historiosophic conception, there were elements of Utopian romanticism, and he had very strong anti-Western and pro-Asiatic leanings. His verbal experiments, unlike those of some other Futurists, were closely related to his philological studies and his interest in the history of the Russian language and in linguistics in general. His neologisms were often rooted in the linguistic soil of the Russian language. Maiakovskii, on the other hand, was in this respect closer to Western Futurism. In his poetry urban motifs played an important part even before the Revolution, but his urbanism was of a social rather than a technological character, and even before 1917 his poetry had a clearly revolutionary orientation. For Maiakovskii the art of the future, of which all the Futurists spoke, was closely bound up with the coming sociopolitical upheaval, and in his person the alliance between the Bolshevik Revolution and Futurism came as some- thing quite natural in the first post-Revolutionary years.

If I have spoken so far mainly of poetry, it is because this period was indeed dominated by poetry to quite an unusual extent, and because it was in poetry above all that new paths were blazed, first by the Symbolists and then by their successors.

But the period was also rich in prose fiction. Here, however, the scene was not monopolized, or even completely dominated, by the innovators. Much of the new prose fiction, which was to depart from the earlier tradition, came in fact from the poets who played an important part in the Symbolist movement: the historical-phil- osophical novels of Merezhkovskii; the novels and stories by Briu- sov and Sologub (including the latter's Melkii bes (The Petty Demon, 1907), which Mirsky describes as the best Russian novel since Dostoevsky); and the remarkable novels of Andrei Bely (who is sometimes seen as a predecessor of James Joyce), especially his Petersburg (1913), with their close ties with his poetry (this is even more true of his earlier prose works, which he designated "sym-

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phonies" and which in their diction and technique of writing stand on the borderline between poetry and prose).

But along with this Symbolist production in prose fiction, a num- ber of writers continued, mostly in the realm of the short story (though there were also some novels), the nineteenth-century "realistic" tradition. It is enough to name Gorky (1868-1936), Bunin (1870-1953), Kuprin (1870-1938), Shmeliev (1873-1950), and Boris Zaitsev (b. 1882). At the same time, some of the younger writers attempted to renovate this tradition, to instill new blood into it, and earned for themselves the name of Neo-Realists. The foremost among them were Alexei Remizov (1877-1957) and Alexei N. Tolstoi (1882-1945), and among the still younger ones Eugene Zamiatin (1884-1937), most of whose work belongs, however, to the early post-Revolutionary period. It was Zamiatin who, speaking of his work and of that of some of his masters, gave a good definition of Neo-Realism as distinct both from old-fash- ioned Realism and from Symbolism: the Neo-Realists can be seen as the link between the prerevolutionary literature and much of what was best and most original in the Soviet literature of the 1920's. Remizov certainly exercised a great influence on many young Soviet writers, but so did also Andrei Bely. In general, one can say that both Symbolism and Neo-Realism had a great seminal significance for the so-called Soviet literature until the advent (or the imposition) of "Socialist Realism," just as post-Revolutionary poetry before 1930 developed as an extension and an offshoot of the poetic schools of the prerevolutionary Second Golden Age.

Let me repeat: the literary scene in Russia between 1890 and 1914 was characterized by great richness and variety (and this was also true of the other arts). There was an abundance of periodicals of high quality, both literary-artistic and general, in the purely and uniquely Russian tradition of the tolstye zhurnaly ("fat" monthly reviews), representing a wide range of viewpoints in politics as well as in arts — f r o m the Liberal (and after 1910, Liberal-Con- servative) Russkaia Mysl\ edited by my father, P. B. Struve, on the right, carrying on the tradition of Landmarks and at the same time opening its pages to all that was best in new literature (Blok, Briu-

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sov, Sologub, Akhmatova, Gumilev, and Viacheslav Ivanov were all among its regular contributors); through the highly respectable Vestnik Evropy, orthodox Liberal in politics and stodgily con- servative in artistic matters; through the populist Russkoe Bogat- stvo, artistically speaking just as conservative; and down to the social-democratically oriented Sovremennyi Mir, a little more lively and modem on the literary side. A little later, two new "fat" monthly reviews made their appearance, both of them tending to- ward the Left in politics and favorable to Modernism in the arts. One was Zavety, which stood close to the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and the literary policies of which were inspired by the well-known critic Ivanov-Razumnik (1878-1945); the other was Severnye Zapiski, vaguely Radical (but nonparty) from the political point of view and of very high literary quality, competing with Russkaia My si' in attracting some of the best poets and prose writers of that time.

In speaking of the literary scene during this period, one cannot leave out the high level of much of its literary criticism and literary scholarship. Some younger Soviet scholars owe a great debt of gratitude to some of the surviving representatives of that period. And the relatively high level of Soviet literary criticism in the 1920's and early 1930's is an inheritance of the same period. Unfortu- nately, much of the literary scholarship and literary criticism of that period remains taboo; little of it is reprinted and is there- fore inaccessible to the present-day Soviet reader. The critical tradi- tion of the Second Golden Age had to be carried on by the Russians in exile, but this could be done only on a very reduced scale and was doomed to a speedy end.

It is almost as bad with the imaginative literature of the Symbol- ist era. True, the prestige of Blok stands very high, and there have been two complete editions of his works, the latest, in eight volumes, published between 1960 and 1964,18 and a great number of "selected" editions. This is due largely, if not entirely, to the fact that Blok was one of the few major writers to welcome the October

18 An unnumbered ninth volume was added to this edition in 1965; it contains Blok's "Notebooks."

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Revolution of 1917 (his subsequent bitter disillusionment with it is glossed over by his Soviet biographers and students of his work). The same is true of Briusov, though not quite to the same extent even though Briusov's "acceptance" of the Bolshevik Revolution was much more thorough. But the situation is quite different with most of the other writers of the Symbolist and post-Symbolist pe- riod. Sologub's novel The Petty Demon was reissued, after a long interval, in 1933. It was next published in 1958 somewhere in Siberia, with a cautionary note from the publishers to the effect that the novel, which "shows masterfully the rotting of the bour- geois-gentry society," will be read by Soviet readers as "a docu- ment and monument of that capitalist order of things, at which, as V. I. Lenin said, our grandchildren will look as at some oddity." None of his other novels have been reissued since before the Revolution, and none of his poetry since 1936.

Andrei Bely's Petersburg was last published in 1935. His other prerevolutionary novel, The Silver Dove, was never reissued in Russia after 1917. A small volume of his poetry appeared in the late 1930's and soon went out of print. And it was only in 1966 that Bely was granted the honor of being included in the "large series" of the collection known as "The Poet's Library." Writers like Merezhkovskii, Viacheslav Ivanov, Zinaida Hippius, Remizov, Balmont, Kuzmin, Gumilev, and several others are virtually un- known to the general public in the Soviet Union. It is true that some of their poetry is included in some recent anthologies used as col- lege textbooks, but the selections are onesided, unsatisfactory, and incomplete, as are all the references to them in various histories of literature, encyclopedias, and other reference works.19

Even today, in the post-Stalin period, when so much of the old 19 Particularly disgraceful in this respect is the last volume of the ten-

volume History of Russian Literature (Istoriia russkoi liter atury), pub- lished under the auspices of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. This volume appeared in 1954, a year after Stalin's death, and still reflects all the charac- teristics of the Stalinist age. It covers the period 1890-1917. The chapter on Symbolism, Acmeism, and Futurism, entitled "Poetry of Bourgeois Decadence" (pp. 764—799) (from which are excluded Briusov, Blok, Maia- kovskii, treated separately in earlier chapters), is divided among five authors, all of them known for their other studies in the literature of this period: A. Volkov, V. Orlov, N. Stepanov, A. Fedorov, and I. Eventov.

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cultural tradition has been, or is being, restored, the great cultural wealth of the modern Russian Renaissance is neglected or dismissed with hostility and contempt (usually accompanied and supported by "telling" quotations from Lenin), and Russian culture, including literature, is all the poorer for this break in continuity. There is, however, much encouraging evidence that the younger generation in the Soviet Union is taking an ever greater interest in this period, which official Soviet historians have either crossed out of history or are studiously distorting, and particularly in its literature and thought. And one constantly hears of literary works of this period circulating privately and clandestinely.

IN OCTOBER 1966, when the text of this lecture was being prepared for the press, the Soviet journal Voprosy Literatury (Problems of Literature) published an article by the well-known literary scholar Vladimir N. Orlov, author of a book on Alexander Blok and of several others, entitled "On the Threshold of Two Epochs (From the History of Russian Poetry at the Beginning of Our Century)." This article represents an abridged version of Orlov's introduction to the forthcoming volume in the "small series" of the Poet's Library, to be called Poets of the Early XX Cen- tury. Orlov discusses Russian Symbolism and its significance in general (with numerous references to Gorky's opinions of it) and then devotes separate sections to five individual poets, repre- senting in the main the post-Symbolist period: Maximilian Volo- shin (1877-1932), Kuzmin, Gumilev, Mandelstam, and Khodase- vich (1886-1939). It is clear from the text that all these poets will be included in the volume for which Orlov has written this intro- duction. For most of them, this will mean a literary resurrection after a period of long neglect and oblivion. A statement on page 124 of Orlov's article suggests that among other poets to be included in the volume will be Balmont, Sologub, Annenskii, and Viacheslav Ivanov.

The following passage is characteristic of Orlov's approach to

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the literature of the period under discussion. After quoting some sentences from Blok's introduction to his poem "Retribution," Orlov writes: "The period of reaction, to use Blok's formula, 'devastated the minds.' It left a visible imprint on the work of most of the Symbolists and their immediate successors — Voloshin, Kuz- min, Gumilev, Mandelstam, and Khodasevich, who withdrew from great themes and burning questions into aestheticism, mannerism, exoticism, passeism, bookishness, into the dark recesses of their own minds. All of them bore witness to being astonishingly blind and deaf to the tragic, dreadful, and comforting things that were happening at that decisive moment in Russia and in the whole world. Of course, one should not paint the epoch all with one paint. Speaking of Russian poetry alone, we must not forget that it was precisely in those years, which lie between the two revolutions, that were written the third volume of Blok's lyrical poetry, Andrei Bely's Ashes, the best poetry of Bunin, and that in those years Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak came out with their first books, that Khlebnikov was writing, that Maiakovskii and Esenin made their appearance . . . But those are the high peaks."

Acmeism is dismissed by Orlov as a current that was "not only cachectic but in fact a sham one." Gumilev's manifesto is described as "highfalutin" and "snooty," and is compared to a mountain that gave birth to a mouse, the mouse being poetry that was "thin, petty, extraordinarily pretentious" and "affected by a terrible disease — an atrophy of all sense of time." Since Orlov does not specify what poetry and by what poets he has in mind, the reader has to deduce that he is speaking of the work of such poets as Akhmatova, Gumilev, and Mandelstam (all of them leading Acmeists), although later, despite some reservations, he has some very different things to say even about Gumilev and Mandelstam.20

^Voprosy Literatury, No. 10 (1966), pp. 123-124.

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