Silver Age. Symbolism

Symbolism (from Greek simbolon - sign, symbol) - a movement in European art of the 1870s - 1910s; one of modernist movements in Russian poetry at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries. Focuses primarily on expression through symbol intuitively comprehended entities and ideas, vague, often sophisticated feelings and visions.

The word itself "symbol" in traditional poetics it means “multi-valued allegory,” that is, a poetic image that expresses the essence of a phenomenon; in the poetry of symbolism, he conveys the individual, often momentary ideas of the poet.

The poetics of symbolism is characterized by:

transmission of the subtlest movements of the soul;
maximum use of sound and rhythmic means of poetry;
exquisite imagery, musicality and lightness of style;
poetics of allusion and allegory;
symbolic content of everyday words;
attitude to the word as a cipher of some spiritual secret writing;
understatement, concealment of meaning;
the desire to create a picture of an ideal world;
aestheticization of death as an existential principle;
elitism, focus on the reader-co-author, creator.

summary of other presentations

“Poets of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry” - Silver Age of Russian Poetry. Russian "Silver Age". Alone among a hostile army. Acmeist poets. Poets are futurists. Conscious meaning of the word. Fundamental question. A slap in the face to public taste. Representatives of symbolism. Symbol.

“Directions of poetry of the Silver Age” - Acmeist poets. Acmeism. Futurism. Silver age of Russian poetry. Futuristic collections and manifestos. Vladimir Solovyov. The emergence of Acmeism. The emergence of symbolism. Main directions of the Silver Age. Aesthetics of Acmeism. Symbolist poets. Aesthetics of symbolism. Features of symbolism. Acneism. Way of thinking. Symbolism. Aesthetics of futurism. The concept of the "Silver Age". Features of Acmeism. Futurist groups.

“Poems of the Silver Age poets” - Osip Emilievich Mandelstam. Poetry of Mandelstam. Gumilev and Akhmatova. The sophistication of Russian slow speech. Futurism. Dictionary. Name the poets of the “Silver Age”. Bely Andrey. Annensky Innokenty Fedorovich. Pasternak Boris Leonidovich. Severyanin Igor. Khlebnikov Velimir. Romantic aestheticization of the Northerner. Poets of the Silver Age. Attitude to the Motherland. Practical work. Akhmatova. Gippius Zinaida Nikolaevna.

“Anthology of Silver Age Poetry” - Vadim Shershenevich. Symbolist poets. Harbingers. Foliage. Osip Mandelstam. Konstantin Konstantinovich Sluchevsky. Nikolay Gumilyov. Vladimir Mayakovsky. Centrifuge. Alexander Blok. Igor Severyanin. Peasant poetry. Vladislav Khodasevich. Acmeists. Basic principles of Acmeism. Sergey Yesenin. Innokenty Annensky. Futurists. Oberiu. Imagists. Prisoner. Symbolists. Daniil Kharms.

"Poetry of the Silver Age" - Silver Age. Silver age of Russian poetry. Modernism. Alexander Blok. Features of literary trends. Futurism. The purpose of creativity of modernist poets. Existentialism. Electronic educational resources. Figurative expression. Symbolism. Relation to previous cultures. Acmeism. Attitude to the word. Decades have passed.

“Characteristics of the poetry of the Silver Age” - Writers who were not part of literary groups. Futurism. Symbolism. Acmeist poets. Poetry. The emergence of various literary movements. What do we expect from modern literature. The poetry of the “Silver Age” develops a fundamentally new concept. The poets feel the leitmotif of their “lostness.” The feat of the female heart, the shadow of male evil, the brilliance of the universal sun. The term “silver age” itself arose by analogy with the golden age.

2. Symbolism as a literary movement. Senior symbolists: circles, representatives, different understandings of symbolism.

Symbolism- the first and most significant of the modernist movements in Russia. Based on the time of formation and the characteristics of the ideological position in Russian symbolism, it is customary to distinguish two main stages. Poets who made their debut in the 1890s are called “senior symbolists” (V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, D. Merezhkovsky, Z. Gippius, F. Sologub, etc.). In the 1900s, new forces joined symbolism, significantly updating the appearance of the movement (A. Blok, A. Bely, V. Ivanov, etc.). The accepted designation for the “second wave” of symbolism is “young symbolism.” The “senior” and “younger” symbolists were separated not so much by age as by the difference in worldviews and the direction of creativity.

The philosophy and aesthetics of symbolism developed under the influence of various teachings - from the views ancient philosopher Plato to the contemporary symbolists of the philosophical systems of V. Solovyov, F. Nietzsche, A. Bergson. The symbolists contrasted the traditional idea of understanding the world in art with the idea of constructing the world in the process of creativity. Creativity in the understanding of the symbolists is a subconscious-intuitive contemplation of secret meanings, accessible only to the artist-creator. Moreover, it is impossible to rationally convey the contemplated “secrets”. According to the largest theoretician among the Symbolists, Vyach. Ivanov, poetry is “the secret writing of the ineffable.” The artist is required not only to have super-rational sensitivity, but also to have the subtlest mastery of the art of allusion: the value of poetic speech lies in “understatement,” “hiddenness of meaning.” The main means of conveying the contemplated secret meanings and a symbol was called upon.

Category music- the second most important (after the symbol) in the aesthetics and poetic practice of the new movement. This concept was used by symbolists in two different aspects - general ideological and technical. In the first, general philosophical meaning, music for them is not a sound rhythmically organized sequence, but a universal metaphysical energy, the fundamental basis of all creativity. In the second, technical meaning, music is significant for symbolists as the verbal texture of a verse permeated with sound and rhythmic combinations, that is, as the maximum use of musical compositional principles in poetry. Symbolist poems are sometimes constructed as a bewitching stream of verbal and musical harmonies and echoes.

Symbolism enriched Russian poetic culture with many discoveries. The symbolists gave the poetic word a previously unknown mobility and ambiguity, and taught Russian poetry to discover additional shades and facets of meaning in the word. Their searches in the field of poetic phonetics turned out to be fruitful: K. Balmont, V. Bryusov, I. Annensky, A. Blok, A. Bely were masters of expressive assonance and effective alliteration. The rhythmic possibilities of Russian verse have expanded, and the stanzas have become more diverse. However, the main merit of this literary movement is not associated with formal innovations.

Symbolism tried to create a new philosophy of culture and, after going through a painful period of revaluation of values, sought to develop a new universal worldview. Having overcome the extremes of individualism and subjectivism, the symbolists at the dawn of the new century raised the question of public role artists, began to move towards the creation of such forms of art, the experience of which could unite people again. At external manifestations elitism and formalism, symbolism was able in practice to fill the work with the artistic form with new content and, most importantly, to make art more personal, personalistic. Symbolism is characterized by:

Form of decadence,

Worship of individualism

Personal preaching.

The poet must strive to depict the path of ascent to other worlds. The knowledge of realists does not penetrate into these worlds. They have a rational, horizontal understanding of the world. So-called causal connections. 3 stages of development: 1.1890s The period of decadence. First manifesto Lecture by Dm. Merezhkovsky “On the causes of the decline and new trends in Russian literature.” The basic principles are as follows: - mystical content - symbolism of images - the concept of two worlds (earthly world, empirical - reality; another world - superreality). Merezhkovsky, Gippius (Anton Krainy), Nikolai Minsky. At this time, the first symbolist magazine appeared - “World of Art”.2. 1900s The rise of Russian symbolism. All major manifestos appear. Magazines: "Libra", " New way", "Apollo", "Questions of Life", "Golden Fleece" (aimed at antiquity). Balmont, Bryusov, Sologub, Ivanov.3.1910s. The crisis of Russian symbolism. The current gives way to Acmeism. Also called Parnassian poets (Parnassus is a Greek mountain where muses and poets lived; nearby is Mount Gerrikon, where inspiration existed).

Senior Symbolists." The older Russian Symbolists (1890s) initially met with mostly rejection and ridicule from critics and the reading public. As the most convincing and original phenomenon, Russian symbolism declared itself at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the advent of a new generation, with their interest in the nationality and Russian song, with their more sensitive and organic appeal to Russian literary traditions. The first signs of the symbolist movement in Russia were Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s treatise “On the Causes of Decline and New Trends in Modern Russian Literature” (1892), his collection of poems “Symbols”, as well as Minsky’s books “In the Light of Conscience” and A. Volynsky “Russian Critics” . During the same period of time - in 1894–1895 - three collections “Russian Symbolists” were published, in which poems of their publisher, the young poet Valery Bryusov, were published. This also included the initial books of poems by Konstantin Balmont - “Under the Northern Sky”, “In the Boundless”. In them, too, the symbolist view of the poetic word gradually crystallized.

The symbolism of D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius was of a distinctly religious nature and developed in line with the neoclassical tradition. Merezhkovsky's best poems included in collections Symbols ,Eternal companions, were built on the “homogenization” with other people’s ideas, were dedicated to the culture of bygone eras, and gave a subjective revaluation of world classics. In Merezhkovsky's prose based on large-scale cultural and historical material (the history of antiquity, the Renaissance, National history, religious thought of antiquity) - the search for the spiritual foundations of existence, the ideas that move history. In the camp of Russian Symbolists, Merezhkovsky represented the idea of neo-Christianity, looking for a new Christ (not so much for the people as for the intelligentsia) - “Jesus the Unknown.”

In the “electric”, according to I. Bunin, poems of Z. Gippius, in her prose there is a gravitation towards philosophical and religious issues, the search for God. Strictness of form, precision, movement towards classicism of expression, combined with religious and metaphysical emphasis, distinguished Gippius and Merezhkovsky among the “senior symbolists”. Their work also contains many formal achievements of symbolism: music of moods, freedom of conversational intonations, the use of new poetic meters (for example, dolnik).

If D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius thought of symbolism as the construction of artistic and religious culture, then V. Bryusov, the founder of the symbolic movement in Russia, dreamed of creating a comprehensive artistic system, a “synthesis” of all directions. Hence the historicism and rationalism of Bryusov’s poetry, the dream of the “Pantheon, the temple of all gods.” A symbol, in Bryusov’s view, is a universal category that allows one to generalize all truths and ideas about the world that have ever existed. V. Brusov gave a concise program of symbolism, the “testaments” of the movement in a poem To the young poet :

Affirmation of creativity as the goal of life, glorification of the creative personality, aspiration from the gray everyday life of the present into bright world imaginary future, dreams and fantasies - these are the postulates of symbolism in Bryusov’s interpretation. Another, scandalous poem by Bryusov Creation expressed the idea of intuition, unaccountability of creative impulses.

The neo-romanticism of K. Balmont differed significantly from the work of D. Merezhkovsky, Z. Gippius, V. Bryusov. In the lyrics of K. Balmont , singer of vastness - the romantic pathos of elevation above everyday life, a view of poetry as life-creativity. The main thing for Balmont the symbolist was the celebration of the limitless possibilities of creative individuality, a frantic search for means of its self-expression. Admiring the transformed, titanic personality affected the intensity of life sensations, the expansion of emotional imagery, and an impressive geographical and temporal scope.

F. Sologub continued the line of research begun in Russian literature by F. Dostoevsky on the “mysterious connection” of the human soul with the disastrous beginning, and developed a general symbolist approach to understanding human nature as an irrational nature. One of the main symbols in Sologub’s poetry and prose was the “unsteady swing” of human conditions, the “heavy sleep” of consciousness, and unpredictable “transformations.” Sologub’s interest in the unconscious, his deepening into the secrets of mental life gave rise to the mythological imagery of his prose: so the heroine of the novel Little devil Varvara is a “centaur” with a nymph’s body covered in flea bites and an ugly face, the three Rutilov sisters in the same novel are three moiras, three graces, three harites, three Chekhov sisters. Comprehension of the dark principles of mental life, neo-mythologism are the main signs of Sologub’s symbolist style.

Huge influence on Russian poetry of the twentieth century. influenced the psychological symbolism of I. Annensky, whose collections Quiet songs And Cypress casket appeared at a time of crisis, the decline of the symbolist movement. In Annensky's poetry there is a colossal impulse to renew not only the poetry of symbolism, but also all Russian lyric poetry - from A. Akhmatova to G. Adamovich. Annensky's symbolism was built on the “effects of revelations”, on complex and, at the same time, very substantive, material associations, which makes it possible to see in Annensky the forerunner of Acmeism. “A symbolist poet,” wrote the editor of the Apollo magazine, poet and critic S. Makovsky, about I. Annensky , - takes as a starting point something physically and psychologically specific and, without defining it, often without even naming it, depicts a series of associations. Such a poet loves to amaze with an unexpected, sometimes mysterious combination of images and concepts, striving for the impressionistic effect of revelations. An object exposed in this way seems new to a person and, as it were, experienced for the first time.” For Annensky, a symbol is not a springboard for a leap to metaphysical heights, but a means of displaying and explaining reality. In Annensky’s mournful-erotic poetry, the decadent idea of “prison”, the melancholy of earthly existence, and unquenched eros developed.

2. Symbolism as a literary movement. Senior symbolists: circles, representatives, different understandings of symbolism.

The philosophy and aesthetics of symbolism developed under the influence of various teachings - from the views of the ancient philosopher Plato to the philosophical systems of V. Solovyov, F. Nietzsche, A. Bergson, contemporary to the symbolists. The symbolists contrasted the traditional idea of understanding the world in art with the idea of constructing the world in the process of creativity. Creativity in the understanding of the symbolists is a subconscious-intuitive contemplation of secret meanings, accessible only to the artist-creator. Moreover, it is impossible to rationally convey the contemplated “secrets”. According to the largest theoretician among the Symbolists, Vyach. Ivanov, poetry is “the secret writing of the ineffable.” The artist is required not only to have super-rational sensitivity, but also to have the subtlest mastery of the art of allusion: the value of poetic speech lies in “understatement,” “hiddenness of meaning.” The main means of conveying the contemplated secret meanings was the symbol.

Symbolism tried to create a new philosophy of culture and, after going through a painful period of revaluation of values, sought to develop a new universal worldview. Having overcome the extremes of individualism and subjectivism, the symbolists at the dawn of the new century raised the question of the social role of the artist in a new way and began to move towards the creation of such forms of art, the experience of which could unite people again. Despite the external manifestations of elitism and formalism, symbolism managed in practice to fill the work with the artistic form with new content and, most importantly, to make art more personal, personalistic.

Symbolism is characterized by:

Form of decadence,

Worship of individualism

Personal preaching.

3 stages of development:

1.1890s The period of decadence. First manifesto Lecture by Dm. Merezhkovsky “On the causes of the decline and new trends in Russian literature.” The basic principles are:

Mystical content

Symbolism of images

The concept of dual worlds (the earthly world, the empirical world - reality; the other world - superreality). Merezhkovsky, Gippius (Anton Krainy), Nikolai Minsky. At this time, the first symbolist magazine, “World of Art,” appeared.

2. 1900s The rise of Russian symbolism. All major manifestos appear. Magazines: “Libra”, “New Path”, “Apollo”, “Questions of Life”, “Golden Fleece” (aimed at antiquity). Balmont, Bryusov, Sologub, Ivanov.

3.1910s The crisis of Russian symbolism. The current gives way to Acmeism.

Also called Parnassian poets (Parnassus is a Greek mountain where muses and poets lived; nearby is Mount Gerrikon, where inspiration existed).

Senior Symbolists." Senior Russian Symbolists ( 1890s) at first they were met with mostly rejection and ridicule from critics and the reading public. As the most convincing and original phenomenon, Russian symbolism declared itself at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the advent of a new generation, with their interest in the nationality and Russian song, with their more sensitive and organic appeal to Russian literary traditions. The first signs of the symbolist movement in Russia were Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s treatise “On the Causes of Decline and New Trends in Modern Russian Literature” (1892), his collection of poems “Symbols”, as well as Minsky’s books “In the Light of Conscience” and A. Volynsky “Russian Critics” . During the same period of time - in 1894–1895 - three collections “Russian Symbolists” were published, in which poems of their publisher, the young poet Valery Bryusov, were published. This also included the initial books of poems by Konstantin Balmont - “Under the Northern Sky”, “In the Boundless”. In them, too, the symbolist view of the poetic word gradually crystallized.

The symbolism of D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius was of a distinctly religious nature and developed in line with the neoclassical tradition. Merezhkovsky's best poems included in collections Symbols,Eternal companions, were built on the “homogenization” with other people’s ideas, were dedicated to the culture of bygone eras, and gave a subjective revaluation of world classics. In Merezhkovsky’s prose, based on large-scale cultural and historical material (history of antiquity, the Renaissance, national history, religious thought of antiquity), there is a search for the spiritual foundations of existence, the ideas that move history. In the camp of Russian Symbolists, Merezhkovsky represented the idea of neo-Christianity, looking for a new Christ (not so much for the people as for the intelligentsia) - “Jesus the Unknown.”

Affirmation of creativity as the goal of life, glorification of the creative personality, aspiration from the gray everyday life of the present into the bright world of the imaginary future, dreams and fantasies - these are the postulates of symbolism in Bryusov’s interpretation. Another, scandalous poem by Bryusov Creation expressed the idea of intuition, unaccountability of creative impulses.

In the theory and artistic practice of the “senior symbolists”, the latest trends were combined with the inheritance of the achievements and discoveries of Russian classics. It was within the framework of the symbolist tradition that the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Lermontov (D. Merezhkovsky L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, M.Yu. Lermontov. Poet of Superhumanity), Pushkin (article by Vl. Solovyov The fate of Pushkin; Bronze Horseman V. Bryusov), Turgenev and Goncharov ( Books of Reflections I. Annensky), N. Nekrasov ( Nekrasov as a poet of the city V. Bryusova). Among the “Young Symbolists”, A. Bely became a brilliant researcher of Russian classics (book Gogol's poetics, numerous literary reminiscences in the novel Petersburg).

Symbolism is a cultural phenomenon that first declared itself in France in the 1870s and 80s as a problem of updating the poetic language. The “Literary Manifesto” was devoted to this topic. Symbolism”, published by J. Moreas on September 18, 1886 in “Figaro”; back in August 1885, Moreas, based on his acquaintance with the poems of P. Verlaine, S. Mallarmé and the authors he had patronized since 1880, argued that “the so-called decadents, first of all, seek in their creativity the Idea of the existent and the Symbol of the imperishable.” Then (or in parallel) symbolism connected itself through poetry different countries(primarily France, Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy, Poland, Spain) not only with prose, drama, criticism and literary criticism, but also with other arts (painting, music, opera house, dance, sculpture , book and interior design) and modes of humanitarian knowledge (philosophy, theology), as well as reflection on the theme of “the end-beginning of the century” (decadence-modernism), “the death of the gods,” the crisis of individualism (under the influence of secularization and the emergence of mass culture) . The presence in symbolism of a cultural dimension associated with the myth of “transition” prevents the precise determination of its historical and literary boundaries and certain features of poetics. The linear opposition of symbolism to the naturalism of E. Zola, the poetry of “Parnassus” explains little in it and, moreover, fragments what is in reality (in the Goncourt brothers, Verlaine, J.C. Huysmans, G. de Maupassant, in the 1880s Zola) coexists.

Symbolism does not so much provide a systematic answer to a number of literary, worldview or social issues (although sometimes it tries to do this following the example of Russian symbolists - Vyach. Ivanov, A. Bely), but in the word and through the word it listens and peers into certain things known only to itself signals and signs, articulates questions, gives relief to the deep, disembodies and regroups - introduces into the sphere of the unclear, twilight, iridescent, what F. Nietzsche, a key figure in symbolism and the embodiment of its paradox, called the situation of “blurring of contours.” In this broad sense, writers of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries belong to symbolism as an open cultural era. All of them, each in their own way, experience the fermentation of culture that they distinguish as a contradictory unity of loss and gain. At the center of symbolism is the myth of the tragic gap between appearance and essence, “to be” and “to seem,” connotation and denotation, external and internal shape words. Symbolism insisted that the image of the world as a whole, external to the artist, does not coincide with personal lyrical revelation about the deep state of the world. Hence the idea of symbolist genius as higher type nature, “supernaturalism”, such a nature of creativity, which is isolated from nature “in general” and produces meaning in itself, as an absolute creative given, “beyond good and evil.”

The division of nature, outlined by symbolism, affirms the gift of capturing in events, things, the “ready-made word” that enters the creative consciousness and thereby physiologicalizes, animates, a certain preconsciousness, “music,” an attitude towards expression. Those. there is a symbol, it is the poet himself as the medium of a certain verbal a priori. He “does not use” the word - “does not narrate,” “does not explain,” “does not teach,” he is in the word and the word in it, the quintessence of his humanity precisely as creativity, verbality, art (“second” nature). A symbol in this sense is not so much a ready-made meaning, a message, as a negative effort-signal about the inertia of the world, which without the artist, without being reflected in his word, seems to not exist, is not transformed by beauty (in in this case- the mystical-erotic languor of the word, the spontaneous energy of the creative impulse, the concentration of “the only exact words in the only exact place). The symbolist does not quite know what he is talking about: he generates and directs the word into the channel, opens towards the energy of the word like a flower (Mallarmé’s image from the preface to R. Gil’s “Treatise on the Word”, 1886), and does not invent words and rhymes. By the very fact of his existence in the word, the name-word, the symbolist affirms the acquisition of true reality, true time, identical to the creative act, understood as formation, suggestiveness, dance, ecstasy, breakthrough, ascent, epiphany, gnosis, prayer.

Common to the designations of creative “mystery” (“dream”, “beauty”, “pure poetry”, “impersonality of writing”, “point of view”, “art for art’s sake”, “eternal return”) is the idea of “music”. Associated with the work of R. Wagner (one of the first actions of French symbolism was the publication in January 1886 of eight “Sonnets to Wagner” by Mallarmé and his students) and his dream of a synthesis of arts (Gesamtkunstwerk) on the model of ancient Greek tragedy, music became the designation of the “spirit of music” , unconsciousness of the word, “word within a word” and its further differentiation in the poet. Bringing the secret to consciousness, awakening from the sleep of life, the manifestation of beauty - a deeply tragic theme about a poet who either dies from singing, or sings from death (V. Khodasevich. “Through the wild roar of catastrophes ...", 1926-27). Hamlet is one of the central mythologies of symbolism(in Nietzsche, Mallarmé, J. Laforgue, O. Wilde, G. von Hofmannsthal, R. M. Rilke, K. Hamsun, A. Blok, I. Annensky, B. Pasternak, T. S. Eliot, J. Joyce ). “A world gone out of its way” (“Hamlet”, 1, V) is a world that, in the poet’s opinion, has lost its aesthetic authenticity (i.e. it has become bourgeois, has become deeply plebeian and vulgar, has exposed everything, including creativity, for sale, declared the poet a “madman”) and turned into a kind of decoration, false value, bad infinity. He must be redeemed by the artist, who boldly undertakes the personal atonement of the aesthetic sin of the world and, for the sake of the abolition of appearances, commits a kind of parricide and suicide, a sacrificial renunciation of the universally significant.

A symbol is not a code, not an allegory(as is often mistakenly believed), but “life”, the very matter of creativity, the sparks of which symbolists feel in themselves, and therefore try to verbalize - to separate from themselves, to express, to make an “icon”, a sign of the enduring in the transitory. This is the ambition, but not the abstruseness of symbolism, which is simultaneously engaged in the “alchemy” of the word and its engineering, in finding the “objective correlate” (Eliot). We are talking about the refinement of the fabric of creativity and the utmost concentration of style, which brings to the center of poetry not the result, but “swimming” behind it, which in any of its manifestations (diving deep, insight, “scream”, automatic writing, on the one hand, and romances without words, arabesque, beautiful clarity, “silence”, on the other) is associated with violence against his muse and the torn apart of Dionysus-Orpheus for the sake of “purity” of sound and tone. Romantic irony associated with fantasy and faith in the existence of the created is replaced here by specific naturalism: “love-hate”, self-alienation, ambivalence of opposition between “I” and “not-I”, “man” and “artist”, “life” and “ fate”, “artist” and “burgher”, “being” and “non-being”, “word” and “dead word”. The motives of seeking love within the limits of death, genius as a disease, love of fate, the death of Pan, outlined in the philosophy of A. Schopenhauer, the work of the “damned poets”, the operas of Wagner (“Tristan and Isolde”, 1859), are strengthened in the work and life-creativity of Nietzsche and , getting through it to the symbolists, they affirm the exclusively tragic and predominantly this-worldly nature of modern idealism as the illusionism of “being towards non-existence”.

In setting the ultimate price of the creative act, or “superhumanity”, symbolism is revealed as overcoming positivism. By asserting a new type of idealism, symbolism blurs the boundaries of “historical” Christianity and likens self-knowledge in creativity and the philosophy of language to the search for God. This search for God in personal language can be correlated with Christianity more or less directly (in the poetry of P. Claudel, the late Eliot) or figuratively (the theme of Christ as an artist in Wilde’s “De profundis”, 1905, and “Doctor Zhivago”, 1957, by Pasternak) , be a public position (criticism of the irreligiousness of the Russian intelligentsia in “Vekhi”, 1909), and also interpreted in terms of religious modernism (the works of D. Merezhkovsky, N. Berdyaev), mystical anarchy (passion for theosophy in W.B. Yeats, Bely, heresies and Rosicrucianism by Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov; belief in universal power mysterious forces, capable of transforming the world, by E. Verhaeren), parodic (the motif of condescension-ascension in the play “Axel” by Villiers de Lisle-Adam, 1885-87; Jean-Christophe as John the Baptist of the “burning bush” of art by R. Rolland; the search for the Grail in “ The Magic Mountain", 1924, T. Mann), but can also refute it from positions either anti-God (Nietzsche, A. Rimbaud), individualistic (“cult of the unit” and the heroic call “be who you are” in the dramas of G. Ibsen ; theme of the “abyss of the naked soul” in the novels of S. Przybyszewski), aesthetic (S. George), neo-pagan (late Rilke, D.H. Lawrence, E. Pound, starting from the 1920s), soil-based (the poetry of R. Dario, A. Machadoi-Ruiz) or declaring an emphasized indifference to religion through stoic devotion to Poetry (contrasted with the “great Nothing” and “everything flows” in A. France, Mallarmé, P. Valery, M. Proust), impressionistic decorativism (the poetry of M. Dautenday , G. Pascoli).

The tool of self-knowledge among the Symbolists was not only the search for Beauty (underembodied, painfully elusive, turning into its opposite - “a secret crack”, “the devil”, “the heart of darkness”, “the abyss”, “a throw of dice that will never abolish chance”, “ we cry a child at the Royal Doors,” “waves of unearthly nausea,” the indifference of “azure” and “whiteness”), interpreted as a tragic paradox of the nature of creativity, but also a vision in the signs of progress and its industrial and ideological institutions of a chimerical superstructure over the body of society. At the depths, it longs to sublimate its suppressed, desecrated, until some point dormant drives and satisfy the impulses of the “sacred spring”, biological retribution (the fatal revenge of the “bottom” - “top”, the “womb” - the “head”, the “elements” - “order”, “feminine and maternal principles” - “male and paternal”, Dionysianism - Apollonism), on the surface everything primitive and elemental, having passed through the filters of reason, ideology, civilization, is capable of becoming its opposite - self-eating revolution (“The Gods Thirst” , 1912, France), caricature and grotesque (“The Little Demon” by F. Sologub, teacher Gnus and Rosa Froelich by G. Mann, “great mother” Molly Bloom by Joyce), tragicomedy of “eternal return” (“Ulysses”, 1922 , Joyce), the nightmare of history (“The Trial”, 1915, F. Kafka), the insoluble and fatal contradiction (Aschenbach in the short story “Death in Venice”, 1913, T. Mann), the tragic impossibility of love (“Pan”, 1894, Hamsun).

With the motif of the splitting of nature, the motif of “another country” enters symbolist prose. This is also a “magic screen” of the imagination, which allows one to play out on the stage of a conventional historical plot the timeless drama of love and death (“Fire Angel”, 1907-08, V. Bryueova), decadent fantasy (the image of Princess Ilayali in “Hunger”, 1890, Hamsun) , isoteric dimension (“second space” in “Petersburg”, 1913-14, Bely; initiation into a kind of knighthood in “The Magic Mountain” by T. Mann), “road inward” (theme of “Steppenwolf”, 1927, G. Hesse ), perversion (narcissism of creative memory and the art of love "In Search of Lost Time", 1913-27, Proust), ritual and personal code (from bullfighting in "The Sun Also Rises", 1925, by E. Hemingway to chess in "The Defense of Luzhin" , 1929-30, V. Nabokov).

Both in symbolist poetry (Byzantium in Yeats's poems) and in symbolist theater (late Ibsen, M. Maeterlinck, E. Dujardin, Villiers de Lisle Adam, E. Rostand, Yeats, A. Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, late J. A. Strindberg , G. D'Annunzio, L. Pirandello, S. Wyspianski, Blok, early M. Tsvetaeva) the presence of space in space outlines a movement towards the awakening of consciousness (opening, revelation, removing the covers, overcoming a certain glass barrier), which is interpreted as a fight against yourself, with the “dream” of life. It is directed not so much by the original text of the play, but by the director (the era of symbolism in the theater was defined by O. Lunier-Poe, M. Reinhardt, G. Craig, A. Appiah, V. Komissarzhevskaya, V. Meyerhold in the late 1900s - 10s ) and its focus on bright theatricality - the rejection of the “prosaicism” of the play, the illusory unity of the stage, and the service nature of the performance design. Maeterlinck’s idea (treatises “Treasure of the Humble,” 1896; “Wisdom and Fate,” 1898) that life is a mystery in which a person plays a role incomprehensible to his mind, but gradually revealed to his inner feeling, provided rich scenic opportunities. This concerned the playing out of paradoxes (on the theme of the sight of the blind, the health of madmen, the identity of love and death, the conflict between love-habit and love-vocation, the truth of the soul and the conventions of morality), the introduction of elements of “plastic theater” into psychodramas, fantasies, miracles, “fairy tales” ”, one-act dramatic poems or symbolist interpretation of Ibsen, discovering the miraculous in the everyday (line of “The Blue Bird”, 1908, Maeterlinck). By pitting the external and the internal against each other (Maeterlinck’s concept of “two dialogues”), movement and counter-movement in the form of waves of whimsically reflected in itself, and thus unprepared meaning, the symbolist theater, like symbolism in general, nods to the discovery of the “other” in “ given,” while at the same time giving “other” and “given” a variable rather than a fixed meaning.

The symbol in symbolism is therefore correlated with all the stylistic programs of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries (naturalism, impressionism, neo-romanticism, neoclassicism, imagism, vorticism, surrealism, expressionism, futurism), which in it are not so much overcome one for the sake of the other, but in various combinations vary. This is indirectly expressed, for example, in the title of Bely’s autobiography “Why I became a symbolist and why I did not stop being one at all phases of my ideological and artistic development” (1982) or in “negative dialectics” (constant overcoming oneself, parodying and self-parodying) creative fate of Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Blok, Joyce. “Ulysses” is an application for the creation of a book of books, an “I” that contains the entire collective unconscious of literature (in which, if necessary, any type of novel can be identified from antiquity to the era of romanticism, naturalism, symbolism, expressionism), but in the future “ Finnegans Wake" (1939) - and a prologue to the recognition of the death of the novel, associated with its further impracticability, the disappearance of even the slightest, almost at the phoneme level, opportunity to gain poetic selfhood and achieve the alienation of the “I” from the “other I”, the general body of literature , all kinds of “ready-made words”.

The search for a symbol in relation to the non-normativity of style discovered by the romantics and the declared era of symbolism of “revaluation of values”, “death of the gods” radically changed the idea of mimesis, dating back to Aristotle. Imitation of the ideal purposiveness of the cosmos, the Idea, gives way to idealism “on the contrary” - supernaturalism, imitation of the personal nature of creativity. Symbolism poses the question of this-worldly religiosity negatively, moves in conditions of universal variability revealed by romanticism from one unreliability of creativity to another. The ideal of symbolism is the primary materiality of the world, found in the poetic word and created by it, and outside it either fatally distorted, or lost, or never existed.

The era of symbolism (1870-1920) completes the actualization and codification of romanticism, making his mythology of the crisis of civilization the central problem of Western culture. If in some countries symbolism was revealed in terms of the 19th century and the worldview of the “end” (various romanticism of the styles of decadence: naturalism, impressionism, decadence), then in others - in terms of the 20th century and the worldview of the “beginning” (various neo-romanticism of the styles of modernism and its ideas “ breakthrough” of life-building, primitiveness, deconstruction, avant-garde, montage). What is common to the styles of the era of symbolism, varying by the method of negations and affirmations, are different approaches to finding the authenticity of the word (put before itself), is that it correlates with the “top” (“spirit”) and the “bottom” (“flesh”), the “external” and “internal”, then with the overcoming of such dualism on a certain third path of “impersonality of writing”, decorative style, perspectivism (in J. Ortegia-Gassett) - is the experience of separating the nature of creativity from nature in general. The goal of symbolist creativity is connected with the desire to speak in one’s own language at all costs and not to mix with anyone in the “name language.” Symbolism is, first of all, a problem of language, “poetry,” the sparks of the word as self, the word within the word. The conquest of the uncreated, artificial from the obviously created, the maximum reduction of the distance between the activity of the creative unconscious and consciousness, between “art” and “life”, contemporaries of symbolism often called the religiosity of creativity, beauty, theurgic transformation of the world, ascension, “pure poetry”, “art for art’s sake” ", demonism. To no less a degree they had in mind the heightened fear of poetic non-existence, the death of Orpheus (either torn to pieces by the “compact majority”, alien to poetry and the harshness of the light of its loneliness and freedom, now absorbed by the Dionysian element awakened by the poet in himself, now punished by nature for the fact that he, having unnaturally thinned himself, became unviable) and even the very impossibility of poetry, and thereby the “European night”, “the disintegration of the atom”. No matter what external signs a symbolist associates his word with, he always peers into himself and anatomizes personal experience(“killing,” as Wilde believes, the one he loves, that is, himself), his superknowledge, devoting his creativity to tragedy - the torment of the word and its eternal inauthenticity, the departure of the poet (leaving behind, as it seemed to Mallarmé, lyrical “tombstones”), “the ever-cut-off confession of idealism” (Pasternak B. Collected Works: In 5 volumes, 1991, Volume 4).

In a sequence of negations, symbolism from something very personal, from the pose of two or three “damned poets” (decadents), from several circles (including numerous salons, academies, meetings) and a series of formalisms became a school and a literary generation, then - a conflict of several generations (“Romantics” and “Classics”, older Symbolists and Young Symbolists, “Germans” and “Romantics”). Constantly returning to itself in a new quality, but without changing individualism and the idea of supercharged creativity, symbolism contributed to the formation of a non-Euclidean, somewhat random, literary space. Having no literary center, skirting literature, intertwining itself with a variety of styles, including “archaic” and normative ones, symbolism abolished the continuous vertical of the history of literature and its division into eras of the “grand style”, and created a new type of cultural education. This is not a spatio-temporal completeness, but an asynchronous one that has defined itself on the scale of “world literature” (and its inherent “philosophy of becoming,” the plurality of literary voices, the scattering of the literary universe) irregular shape education that defines itself in a horizontal sense of time, which also has different rates of actualization in different countries and in the works of different writers. The presence of uneven (as if curved, wave-like) literary time makes it difficult to see the overall plan in symbolism.

Symbolism in the USA

In the USA, symbolism is absent in the literary space of the 1880-90s, historically adjacent to France. But this does not mean that he is not there at all; Having synthesized symbolist, post-symbolist and counter-symbolist solutions, the original American symbolism, having reconstructed the general Western configuration of symbolist literature, may well be found in the 1910-20s in the works of R. Frost, H. Crane, W. Stevens, W. C. Wimsatt, Hemingway, W. Faulkner. Each subsequent symbolism changed the idea of the previous one and pushed some texts out of the sphere of its attraction, making their authors the forerunners of symbolism, “symbolists outside symbolism,” even the antipodes of symbolism (rigid characteristics of “romanticism” in the 19th century, given by T. E. Hume, Pound, Eliot ; perception of the poetry of Blok and Vyach. Ivanov of the 1900s by the Acmeists of the 1910s), and others, often clearly non-symbolist, were attracted to it. Before symbolism, Baudelaire was a romantic of the mid-century (and in some ways a specific classicist), after that he was either a “post-romanticist”, then a “decadent”, then a “symbolist”, then a “modernist” - a variable scale of French (and through it Western) poetry from E.A. Poe to W.H. Auden and G. Benn. Several literary lines can be drawn through each literary point in the era of symbolism. Thus, Zola’s already mature novels have many dimensions (romantic-naturalistic, impressionistic-naturalistic, naturalistic-naturalistic, symbolist-naturalistic). On the other hand, the “new” in symbolism transforms the entire chain of the “old” and the point, instead of unfolding into a spectrum and a line, begins to describe circles and return to itself. In 1928, Khodasevich was forced to note: “In essence, it has not even been established what symbolism is... Its chronological boundaries have not been outlined: when did it begin? when did it end? We don’t even really know the names... the sign of classification has not yet been found... this is not a connection between people of the same era. They are their own, “involuntarily brothers” - in the face of their foreign contemporaries... That’s why... they enter into different alliances so easily, because for them all “strangers” are, in the end, equal. People of symbolism “do not interbreed”... I would also dare to say that there is something mysterious in the fact that for a symbolist a writer and a person are a circle and a polygon, simultaneously described and inscribed in each other” (Khodasevich V. Symbolism. Collected Works: In 4 volumes, 1996. Volume 2). Literary monuments in symbolism give way to “eternal companions”, the simultaneity of voices, each of which is suitable for the characteristics of the fragment given by F. Schlegel in “Critical Fragments” (No. 22): “the subjective embryo of a becoming object.” Valery ironically noted in his Notebooks (1894-1945) that symbolism is a collection of people who believe that the word “symbol” has meaning. Nevertheless, it was the symbolists themselves, who, regardless of their specialization, became “reasoning poets” and creators of the philosophy of language, turned out to be the best commentators on symbolism, revealing in “reflections” the principles of their creative aesthetics: Mallarmé (“The Crisis of Verse”, 1895; “The Mystery in poetry", 1896); “Rantings”, 1897), R. de Gourmont (“masks”, 1896-98; “Culture of Ideas”, 1900; “Problems of Style”, 1902), Proust (“Imitations and Mixture”, 1919; “Against Sainte-Beuve ", 1954); Valery (“The Situation of Baudelaire”, 1924; “Letter about Mallarme”, 1927; “Pure Poetry”, 1928; “The Existence of Symbolism”, 1938), Wilde (“Designs”, 1891), Yeats (“Poetic Symbolism”, 1900; “General Preface to My Poems”, 1937), Hume (“Romanticism and Classicism”, 1913; “Reflections”, published 1924), Eliot (“Hamlet and His Problems”, 1919; “Tradition and Creative Individuality”, 1919; “The Purpose of Poetry and the Purpose of Criticism”, 1933), Pound (“The Serious Artist”, 1913; “Retrospective”, 1918; “Provocations”, 1920), Hofmannsthal (“Poetry and Life”, 1896; “The Poet and Our Time”, 1907; “Honoré de Balzac”, 1912), Rilke (“Oposte Rodin”, correspondence with Tsvetaeva), Annensky (“Books of Reflections”, 1906-09), Blok (“About current state Russian symbolism", 1910; “The Tragedy of Humanism”, 1919), Bely (“Symbolism”, 1910; “Green Meadow”, 1910), Vyach. Ivanov (from “Two Elements in Modern Symbolism”, 1908, to “Simbolismo”, 1936), Ellis (“ Russian Symbolists", 1910); Khodasevich (“Symbolism”, 1928; “Necropolis”, 1939), Pasternak (“Symbolism and Immortality”, 1913; “Paul-Marie Verlaine”, 1944).

The desire to “fan” in oneself a “world fire of creativity” and through constant overcoming oneself (others in oneself) to realize the project of absolute freedom of creativity (in this many symbolists identified with political radicalism and saw themselves as avant-gardeists), to become everything and everyone, “native and universal ”, “far and close”, the current of the tree of culture and life (the image of Vyach. Ivanov in “Correspondence from Two Corners”, 1921), and even an “airplane” (in T. Marinetga), to some extent realized by symbolism. Upon achieving the utopian breakthrough he had planned, he found himself involved in a whole series of revolutions, coups, civil wars. However, at the turn of the 1920-30s, symbolism, instead of further expanding the “horizons” of creativity, was forced to state “silence”. Among the many reasons for the “European night” were the sharp politicization of society, the tragic exhaustion of the possibilities of subjectivism and “novelty” in creativity, which, with the rejection of exemplary and conventional classicism at the beginning of the 19th century, seemed boundless to Goethe, as well as the displacement of “high literature” from the center of cultural life by mass art (primarily cinema), which presupposed not only a low educational level of the viewer and manipulation through various kinds of clichés, but also the possibility of technical reproduction of even the most unique work of art. This defeat of individualism was also emphasized by the hostility to the elitist art of the totalitarian government, which restored the principles of a kind of normative creativity on a state scale.

Having made literary history a symbol (“vortex” in Yeats, a system of circles in Vyach. Ivanov and Bely), The era of symbolism posed, in its own way, insoluble problems for the humanitarian thought of the 20th century. If the Soviet theory of literature reduced symbolism to something private and decadent (at the same time, G. Lukács, who lived in the USSR in the 1930s, was involved in symbolism in the works “Soul and Form”, 1911; “The Theory of the Novel”, 1916), it is customary for themselves, highlighting specifically interpreted “realism” and making it the central event of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, and independent Western Marxists (W. Benjamin) and post-Marxists (T. Adorno), not accepting symbolist aestheticism and having little interest in the specifics of symbolism, wrote primarily about Charles Baudelaire as the herald of modernism and one of the creators of the idea of “negative dialectics”, positivist literary criticism, having collected significant material, nevertheless did not find structural approaches to it and, believing symbolist self-definitions, straightened symbolism (rigidly separating it from naturalism and “modernism” ), reduced outside France to the sphere of directed French influence, and also assigned to him the image of “dream” and “mysticism.” Moreover, after the Second World War, interest in symbolism and those who developed its intuitions in philosophy (German hermeneutics) fell for a while for political reasons. Characteristic in this regard are the omissions of the most important names in R. Welleck’s “History of Modern Criticism” (1991) and the militant liberal criticism of irrationalism in R. Rorty (“Pragmatism, Relativism and Irrationalism”, 1980). In the West, the historical and literary study of symbolism in recent decades has been replaced by general study theory of symbol (“Theories of Symbol” by Ts. Todorov, 1977; “Philosophy of the Symbolic in Literature” by H. Adams, 1983) and representation.

The word symbolism comes from French - symbolisme, from the Greek symbolon, which translated means - sign, identification mark.