Source: http://cdclv.unlv.edu/archives/nc2/ariev_silver.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 22:19:23+00:00

Document:
The most effective definition of "the intelligentsia" might read: “Russian intellectuals who are generally opposed to the government.” But even Russia’s traditionally powerful government has collapsed at times, leaving a vacuum of authority. This was precisely the historical situation at the beginning of the twentieth century. It made an indelible impression both upon thinkers, such as Rozanov, and on politicians, such as Lenin.
I do not want to dwell on politics, but upon culture, and what happened to it when “authority collapsed” and the artistic intelligentsia had no one to oppose but itself.
Chronologically, this period can be dated from the death of Alexander III, when the hearty Russian emperor was timidly succeeded by his mousy son, inarticulate and prone to outbursts of virtue.
This new Russian culture which emerged during the reign of Nicholas I was later named “the Silver age.” Its formal beginning is frequently associated with the publication of Briusov’s three anthologies entitled The Russian Symbolists in the years 1894 and 1895. Its conclusion is marked by the deaths of Blok and Gumeliev, and the subsequent exile of the age’s greatest artistic representatives by the Bolsheviks, in 1922. The end of the Silver age was fixed in time by the appearance of Mikhail Gershenzon and Viacheslav Ivanov’s A Correspondence Between Two Corners in 1921. Alexander Kushner even offered the exact date of the age’s demise -- the day that Osip Mandelstam wrote his poem “A Concert at the Train Station,” also in 1921. Such ‘unscientific’ declarations nevertheless serve to sharpen public perception of a given phenomenon.
In order to localize these events historically, let us designate the twelve-year period that marked the collapse of the imperial house (between 1905 and 1917) as a gap between two historical epochs.
Socially and politically, this was a time when the Russian revolutionary movement, initiated during the second half of the nineteenth century by such representative figures as N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. K. Mikhailovsky, G. V. Plekhanov, and others, was swiftly and decisively developed by their successors in the direction of revolutionary extremism which ultimately led to the nationwide turbulence of 1917. A part of the intelligentsia separated itself from this stormy tide and rose above it; these people were disenchanted with positivist ideas in general and their vulgar Russian interpretation in particular. This group of intellectuals was also evolving rapidly, but in the direction of various religious and metaphysical orientations. Three fundamental texts define the stages along this path: The Problems of Idealism (1902), Landmarks (1909, reprinted many times since), and From the Depths (1918--confiscated and suppressed by the Bolsheviks).
Yet even this variously educated and talented group did not express the full spectrum of the intelligentsia’s highest yearnings; in part, it even opposed them, responding to any discussion of cultural or even social progress with barely concealed irritation. These neophytes not only preferred religious asceticism and the light of mystical a priori truths to the social life of the beginning of the century, but even set the two in direct opposition to one another.
While people of a more artistic bent appreciated their spiritual connection with this group of thinkers (particularly Nikolai Berdiaev), they nevertheless led more disorganized, bohemian lives. It comes as no surprise that some of them (Alexander Blok, Vsevolod Meierhold, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and pretty much all of the futurists) eventually allowed themselves to be seduced by the energy of the revolution. People of the Silver age had no definitive criteria besides a common rejection of positivist institutions.
Paradoxically, despite all of these bohemian trappings, the Silver age was the first to witness the professionalization of creative work. This was in part, at least, the result of the artists’ utter lack of interest in anything except creative pursuits.
Whatever spiritual crises people of the Silver age may have undergone, whatever moral dead ends they might have come to, they remained organically tied to the Landmarks circle rather than to Marxism. Whenever one speaks of symbolism, the first movement of the Silver age, characterized by the work of D. S. Merezhkovsky, Fiodor Sologub, Viacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely, or the aforementioned Blok, one cannot disengage it from the problematics bequeathed to the entire Silver age by Dostoyevky and Vladimir Soloviev, both of whom had resisted, in their time, the masses of “martyrs for a brighter tomorrow” who had fallen to the temptations of revolutionary ideology. The oppositional movements which arose outside of symbolim in the 1910s, such as acmeism (Nikolai Gumiliev, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Gorodetsky, et al) and futurism (the Burliuk brothers, Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, and others), turned out to be links in a single chain reaction. In the end everything splintered into cubofuturists, egofuturists, various “poets’ guilds,” and then there were imagists and even nothing-ists. . . .
But let us not forget that behind all this motley diversity lay an initial meaning; an a priori unity could be glimpsed.
A similar evolution took place in the visual arts -- from the nineteenth century Peredvizhniki to the “Art World,” which in turn splintered into the more local groups such as “The Jack of Diamonds,” “The Blue Rose,” and the “Donkey’s Tail”. . . . In the realm of music, the Silver age leaned heavily on the names of Alexander Skriabin and Igor Stravinsky. . . .
In terms of world history, the analogue to the Silver age is not, of course, the mythical “Golden” and “Silver” ages, but rather the “Silver Latin” period in Rome, the time of Tacitus, Seneca, and Martial.
This comparison, though not essential, is important in that all the artists of Russia’s “Silver age” lived with a passion for distant associations, chose the category of “accordance” as its aesthetic measure, and was thoroughly enamored of quotations, since it sought the a priori, age-old truths.
Culture, if not stronger than politics, is at least more enduring, more encompassing. It is a precise measure with which to evaluate the potential of this or that social stratum or structure. And in this sense, the dawning of Nicholas II’s reign reflected its cultural twilight. One of the Silver age poets describes the coronation ceremonies in 1895 thus: “Those days when brilliant style and empire were synonymous are gone, never to return. The role of Lomonosov or Derzhavin is now being played by Viktor Krylov, a crafter of popular plays and rote, mediocre verse. Beneath these ancient arches we are now subjected to the watery lines of ‘In Imitation of Koltsov’. . . .”  The assumption here is that depicting courtly life leaves no room for any discussion of the period’s true cultural values.
In these years of “the last reign” culture lost its interest in the institutions of power, and found itself free from having to cooperate with them. Its uncontrollable upward momentum was fraught with the degradation of official authority, which, before Nicholas II, had traditionally been fairly high in Russia.
Yet even aristocratic culture, which had established itself in the service of the Romanovs, was suffering a period of confusion at the end of the nineteenth-beginning of the twentieth centuries, whether it remained in dialogue with imperial figureheads or opposed them. All the talk of “twilight,” “the end of time,” and “decadence,” had some real foundation.
The Silver age was a response both to this democratic degradation and to emancipation in general. Born in the democratic spirit of the epoch, it could not help but to oppose the emasculated authoritarian regime and, more generally, the entire arrogant world of social inequality. Yet this opposition had a strange quality; it could not imagine victory, and felt a secret empathy with the old times which were passing into oblivion. It perceived the end of the imperial, Petersburg-centered period of Russian history as its own end, and thus built its own culture on a foundation of eschatological foreboding, the myth of finality, the symbolism of twilight. . . .
However, democratization in Russia is inevitably accompanied by social cataclysms and general intellectual disorder.
Silver age culture, while acknowledging democratization as “immanent” (and making full use of it), immediately revolted “transcendentally” against this “new order.” It began to perceive itself as a system of spiritual and artistic values even more esoteric than those of the recent past; theirs was an art which did not want to leave democracy but which nonetheless distanced itself within the circumference of its scattered light, from life in general, from the simplicity and warmth of organic human existence. Thus a new and torturous awareness of elitism permeated this attempt at cultural creation, which lacked the necessary cultural safeguard of hierarchy.
The process by which Silver age culture came into being is antimonic by nature: while fighting for its freedom and upholding civil liberties, this culture simultaneously fights for the right to be esoteric, and thereby for the chance to repress its profane surroundings. It acquires precisely this repressive (in the spiritual realm, of course), elitist quality. At the same time this culture’s loftiness dictates an even greater necessity: the necessity of absolute opposition to the outside world as soon as that world becomes repressive itself -- that is, when the old hierarchical, autocratic social order is restored (in Russia, by the Bolshevik takeover).
Obviously, radical revolutionary social groups viewed the “end” as a “beginning,” and no “cultural degradation” perturbed them; in fact, it came in handy. And these groups in themselves, no matter how many papers they wrote, whatever flurry of printed matter they may have produced at the beginning of this century, however many songs were sung, still had nothing whatsoever to do with the Silver age.
Those of the Silver age considered themselves the “last” people, while the revolutionaries were “other.” It is crucial to capture the separate, solitary character of this culture’s existence.
Let me repeat: though it was born of the worldwide process of democratization and acknowledged the natural necessity and inevitability of this process, spiritually the Silver age culture rejected it.
Above all, this culture is antinomic, not dialectic. Its most consistent antirevolutionary “landmark” direction was, at the same time (and this is now utterly ignored) in no way an intellectually and socially antidemocratic drive; it struggled against radicalism, against revolution. Democracy and revolution only rarely stipulate each other (or, otherwise put, the enfeebled development of democracy is frequently stipulated by a revolutionary situation).
The Landmarks anthology speaks to the intelligentsia, cautioning it away from extremist ideology. This is its own sort of “guidebook,” with the sole designation and responsibility to bring the intelligentsia to a new consciousness, connecting knowledge with faith, theory with practice, “reality-as-truth” with “reality-as-justice.” This problem, unlikely to be resolved by the “landmark” participants themselves, was just as perplexing to the people of the Silver age.
This is how Silver age culture perceived itself, reacting sharply to the diffusion of nineteenth-century culture’s “grand style,” in Russia as well as the world at large, which was brought about by the democratic privatization of reality.
In practical terms, the Silver age was quite an esoteric production, pushing toward the destruction of symbol, the disembodiment of reality, and the apprehension of light (“Fiat lux!”) in direct correlation with its descent into darkness.
Blok addresses these words to himself.
Such experiences are indeed unusual and even esoteric. Yet we have this esoteric nature to thank for the survival of Silver age culture up until our time; in our eyes, at the end of the century and of the millennium, the Silver age is a unified metaphysical whole, which has acquired all the qualities of that “grand style” (inspired by world culture and open to the problems of modernity) which it had longed for so fiercely in the past. Neither symbolism, nor acmeism, nor futurism, taken separately, could make any claim of such scope.
And no one came forward to admit that he had failed to find this “ultimate reality” in art. The existing revealed its finiteness without crossing over into existence.
Another existence is unexpectedly revealed?
This break, the gap between epochs gave absolutely each and every person in Nicholas’s empire a free, though somewhat ephemeral chance to “turn the course of history” into the desired channel. Of course, the thinking person was hardly up to such a grandiose undertaking; let alone the poets. . . .
Nothing around, nothing is quite “it.” This very true apophatic argument, so valued in the Orthodox tradition as proof of God’s existence (nothing which can be thought or perceived can give one an adequate understanding of him) simultaneously and analogously served as a proof of Russia’s existence, which, as we know from Tiutchev, “the mind cannot grasp.” For the Silver age artists, the disappearance of Russian reality from their field of vision was a sort of miraculous hint at its ideal existence, wherever it might be glimpsed--in the past or in the future.
Of course, these apophatic frames of mind were often fraught with the possibility of sliding down into the bosom of Russia’s traditional nihilism, to which many Silver age artists succumbed, including the lyricists. Yet Russian nihilism is practically the dark flip-side of Orthodox apophatism.
The apophatic spirit of the Silver age asserted the possibility of immeasurable freedom in the interpretation of everything existing on earth, yet at the same time did not deprive the artist of hope for the unspeakable grandeur of his unconscious impulses and intentions, hope for some link between the “transcendental” and the “immanent,” despite the lack of a “logical bridge” between them (to use S. N. Bulgakov’s expression).
Characteristically, Bulgakov published in a periodical, and then in a separate edition (1917) his book “A Light Not of Evening,” right at the close of the Silver age; the book’s main theme was “the divinity of Nothingness,” that is, the “negative theology” of apophatism. Just as legitimate is the most famous philosophical treatise of the entire Silver age --” The Pillar and the Profession of Truth” (1914) by Pavel Florenskii -- which addresses at its core the problem of antinomy in the Christian faith as a whole.
An arrogance with regard to the future is, perhaps, nobler than empty utopianism, yet they are alike at their core. Aside from eschatologism, the Silver age offered nothing sensible in response to progressivism. And this is quite understandable; those who promise the public a spot in heaven recall Nietzsche’s “will to power” and proclaim “conciliarism” and “the construction of life” as a means to overcome the malaise of the fin de siecle and the furtive, “secret” fear of the end of time.
All of these theoretical remarks are made despite that just position which states that any rational generalizations about the realm of art are slippery things indeed. In this case the fullness of knowledge can eat away at any conception. Specifically, in Silver age culture one might point out the deliberate bourgeois orientation of Vasilii Rozanov, the day-to-day commonness of Fiodor Sologub, Andrei Bely’s impulses in this direction. . . .
All of these “elements” turned out to be distant not only from “civilization,” but from Christianity as well. Regarding the “most real,” that a priori truth of the Silver age, the “element” was nothing more than its pantheistic, if not pagan, equivalent.
Blok distanced himself from his “man-as-artist” and projected him into the future because he was all too well aware of his own mortality, of the fact that he was the “terminal branch” on the tree of his kind.
This was generally a crucial element of Silver age self-awareness; everyone thought of himself as the “last poet.” These people created and realized the romantic myth that they were the “last,” “sunset” generation of Russia’s passing culture. Precisely because it foresaw and witnessed the “end,” this generation thirsted for all manners of “beginnings.” Its “life-building” grew forth from eschatological experiences, and its culture was realized as a sort of “variation on the theme of the end.” A similar “variation” resounded, according to Tynenov, in Blok’s poem “The Twelve,” which linked this entire culture.
This was indeed evidence of the end -- the end of what we now call the “Petersburg period of Russian history.” To put it differently and more definitively, this was decadence.
Once could compose an “alphabet” of the participants in the Silver age similar to the “alphabet” of the Decembrists. The list would not be too long.
For the Silver age artists, the unconscious was a guide unrivaled in its intrepid reason. “When one is clearly aware of duality merging into one in human nature, and moral becomes phenomenal,” Andrei Bely concluded, perfectly logically.  Many people reached this very same conclusion. In fact, it was assumed that everyone did.
Philosophically, this morality could be understood as the “apotheosis of rootlessness,” as a triumph over both materialistic and idealistic monism. “Life and the world are too fragmented” (“Zu fragmentarisch ist Welt und Leben”), Lev Shestov states in an epigraph from Heine.
Those Silver age authors whose dualism was founded in the experience of “fragmentation” and “the easy life” were no less dramatic than those who experienced it in their quiet studies as a legacy of sacred history or classical philosophy (the selfsame Shestov and Viacheslav Ivanov).
Among the symptoms of liberation, “spiritual simplicity” and the “rehabilitation of the flesh” were just as provocative as the seduced Viacheslav Ivanov’s attempts to bring about “the Transfiguration of the world” by means of art from his lofty tower.
One must acknowledge the concept of “correspondence” as a dominant strain in Silver age culture, for this age hoped to unify thoroughly the inner and outer realities, life and art. “Correspondence” was the perfect image of antinomy, imitating the link between essence and existence, between the “real” and the “most real.” This is a dynamic symbol of the dualism that is rooted in culture, pointing up both the impossibility of ever overcoming it and all of the culture-building, productive strivings in that direction.
This system of “correspondences” was to have paved the road from secularized culture to a universal Christian realism. Theology provided the framework for attaining knowledge of God’s existence through the ultimate absolute. This was, in fact, at the heart of the search for “correspondences.” It was a grandiose attempt, but belated; art was turning away from Christian “realism” toward “nominalism.” It parted ways with theology much as philosophy had parted ways with it. Viacheslav Ivanov’s attempt to correct the situation from within, as well as the proliferation of religious thinkers in the “Landmarks” circle, “multiplied essences” more than works of art.
The artistic vision of the Silver age grasps and records the randomness and disorder of life, the accident of existence, the world’s randomness. As in Okkam’s time, faith found itself outside the boundaries of logical speculation. The system of “correspondences” allows the absurd to be perceived as the imaginary.
The Silver age artists felt this longing deeply, and expressed it in the following summation: There are higher values in this world, but in itself the world is fragmented and unexamined. Only one culture can truly be studied in depth. It is by itself a subject for study; we can only understand that which we create ourselves. The higher values, however, are not made by us.We seek their “correspondences” collectively. Yet we only find them alone.
Of course, many poets were able use the “keyboard of mysterious correspondences” initially defined by Charles Baudelaire -- especially those who were partial to the European, and particularly German Romantic movement. In general the experience of similarity, the link between otherwise distant signs and feelings, could be considered the base of any poetic work. The term itself came to the Silver age through French mediation, while holding to the course of Platonic tradition in terms of content. “Correspondences” (“Correspondances”) -- a key poem in Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil -- was translated into Russian repeatedly, perhaps most notably in 1912 by Konstantin Balmont.
This interpretation of Akhmatova’s poetry is quite noteworthy: it demonstrates once again the illusion of separating acmeism and symbolism. It is especially curious that among the symbolists, the most astute study of “correspondence” was being conducted by Viacheslav Ivanov, whom Akhmatova most decidedly disliked. For her part, Akhmatova acknowledged Baudelaire’s undeniable influence on the master of acmeism himself, Gumiliev.
Of course, it is not merely a matter of sympathies and antipathies, of particular principles or a familiarity with Baudelaire; the final mystical choir sings of “correspondences” in Faust, and they are readily apparent in Goethe’s paraphrase of Swedenborg at the beginning of the tragedy -- “the world of spirits is always close, and the door is unlocked.” All of this is like a tuning fork held up to the poetic moods of the Silver age. In this case, the essential question is fascinating: What does a particular culture choose from among the world’s experiences to identify as its own?
Silver age culture witnessed the emergence of various conceptions of “correspondence” as a specific and fundamental category in a way that no previous age, at least in terms of Russian art, ever had. Correspondence” was rooted in the actual experience of the world, not simply in poetics. That so many were bewitched by these “correspondences” underscores the wholeness of this culture and smooths over those differences among the symbolists, acmeists, and futurists which opposed one another in the literary (and often in the socio-political) realm.
The Silver age agrees with Pushkin in its firm belief that sensory perception is not necessarily the same as knowledge. So much the better for poetry, which would have no place in a world of unchanging conceptions. Yet only one level of sensory perception was also inadequate; the progenitors and creators of the Silver age were drawn by their cultural erudition toward the comprehension of “supra-sensory objects”--that is, “ideas” in the Platonic sense of the word.
Creation must originate in emptiness. As Zinaida Gippius liked to say, “The most important things are the ones that no one knows anything about.” “And really, what can we understand, with our puny little heads?” asks a random pastor in one of Rozanov’s works.
And yet somehow it is not surprising that the “mystical anarchist” Georgii Chulkov eventually developed in the direction of the Orthodox faith, or that the despairing poet Georgii Ivanov later wrote of the “eternal light.” The gap between Russian nihilism and Russian apophatism is narrow.  To paraphrase Igor Smirnov’s paraphrase of Dostoyevsky, Georgii Ivanov might be called “a nihilist in the loftiest sense of the word.”  There is no limit to negative judgments simply because there are no words which might adequately express intuitions about God.
“Either those worlds exist, or they don’t” -- here we have the original apophatic-nihilist expression of the entire Russian Silver age.
Among representatives of Silver age culture, the intuitive knowledge of “transcendental goals” originates in their dramatic dissent from the premises of “immanent reason.” The latter honors the epoch’s “collective unconscious,” while the former can never agree with the “world’s gibberish,” which will not be removed and neutralized by any kind of transformation. The creator’s lot becomes self-immolation on the “unquenchable fire of unimaginable love” (Mayakovsky); yet not a day will pass that he does not laugh and admit that everything is but a “farce,” and that “cranberry juice” flows through his veins instead of blood (Blok). Here it takes but a single step to pass from self-immolation to self-parody. Parody does, in fact, reflect self-immolation, the closed circle which has no exit from the outset.
There is a common tendency to choose Blok as the figurehead who generalizes the Silver age.
The entire complicated historical evolution of the Silver age’s many streams was fraught with battles against imaginary foes (which are psychologically far more dangerous than real ones). One example is the contention between acmeism and symbolism. Their strange literary war was an attempt to force each side to be understood, and in turn to approach the opponent. At the very least, this was a war among “the initiated,” an enmity almost based upon love: “And in secret rapture I come face to face with--the enemy,” proclaimed Konstantin Balmont, eternally indignant toward his literary comrades-in-arms. Also characteristic is his poetry in the same well-known book, Let Us Be Like the Sun, which begins with the words “Though it is only in my soul, I will kill him.” Marina Tsvetaeva also comes to mind in this context with her widely read sketch “The Hero of Labor,” which was dedicated to Valerii Briusov, with an epigraph from Balmont. Similarly, the “love/hate” relationship between Andrei Bely and Blok was all too familiar, even to their own contemporaries.
Where am I? Where am I?
I am in the depths of all my mirrors.
Apophatic-nihilistic motives were apparent not only in the Silver age’s theoretical constructs, but more importantly in its creative work, uncontrolled by reason, such as Georgii Ivanov’s lyricism, his “light-bearing nihilism” (to use V. F. Markov’s expression). Since they were not obedient churchgoers, these artists were quite prone to Orthodox mysticism.
This “pathos of not accepting the world” which leads the artist to lose familiarity with “real life,” to ignore it, is simultaneously a token of the searingly harsh--and late--confessions to the momentary bliss of existence. This romantic, bitter experience heralds the passage from realistic settings in the artist’s mind to a nominalistic creative practice.
The artists of the Silver age discussed nothing so much as the “unuttered” and “unspoken.” All of their lyrical heroes had eyes which shined with “the impossible.” “Flight,” “elan” -- these coursed through everyone’s blood: Blok’s, Mayakovsky’s, Tsvetaeva’s. . . .
Yet in order to flourish on earth, one must produce something temporary--herein lies the drama. And the Silver age artist is captivated particularly by the ephemeral precariousness of his personal experience. His “singularity,” so to speak. Contrary to theoretical postulates, the new modern art was governed by a quite medieval nominalistic principle: “Every individual thing is mediated by one’s self, and nothing more” (Peter Aurelius).  Rather than “essences,” it turned out that “single things” were necessary to contemporary art. According to Okkam the “general” can only be intuited. “Universalities” are but “intentions of the soul.” Otherwise they would exist “not naturally, but only by convention.” Thus they were in Viacheslav Ivanov’s treatises. That is why they are so relevant to contemporary Communist utopian doctrines.
The symbolists, who were especially well-versed in philosophy, may insist that a thing’s essence is objectively meaningful, that ideas have prototypes or signify the ultimate degree of perfection, before which any individual thing is inferior. But the spiritual arbitrariness, willfulness, and Nietschean impulse characteristic of any decadent movement compelled Silver age artists precisely toward inferiority, to a confessional reflected in the “crystal of the lower realities,” as Viacheslav Ivanov gracefully put it. This position was seen as “unspoken,” “inexpressible,” “undeclared,” precisely because it lacked a truly “realistic” inner structure.
The rejection of the world is a rather ordinary postulate for Russian and various other romantics. But among the Silver age artists this rejection of reality often reflected a sort of scorn, a negligent attitude toward it. This rejection was touted metaphysically more than socially, and generally fell to the artists instead of being worked out consciously.
If in 1892 the poet declared his “magnificent contempt for cowards and slaves,”  all of them rather distinct, then Anna Akhmatova removes all civic measure from this sentiment and translates it into an existential plan. In a poem dedicated to the memory of Mikhail Bulgakov, she marvels that her contemporary “. . .carried the magnificent contempt/through to the very end.” The object of this “magnificent contempt” remains unnamed not only because of the threat of censure, but because to name him would belittle the entire experience.
In the new poetic age, Pushkin’s golden words took on an imperceptible moonlit reflection, dusted with Silver. This begs the question, however: By the dark of night, might this “Silver” have turned to “gray”?
Russia’s “damned poet” is also, and even more essentially, a “damning poet,” who rejects the world in its entirety rather than this or that specific social order. He deals not with history, but with eternity. And he lives not by the dull light of day, but by luxurious nocturnal starlight.
And is it really necessary to be saved at all, if life is already prolonged in verse, if love conquers death, if at the end of suffering there is joy and in general, the poets of the new Renaissance are out there vociferously and “by the grace of God” (as Andrei Bely modestly put it) chopping the daubed (“budetliane”?? what is that?) from their pedestals?
Indeed, nothing could save them: not Blok’s undeniably brilliant insights and impulses, not the secret hope imbedded in them for the birth of a new culture, free of the old “civilization”’s fetters, nor faith in the all-conquering spirit of the people and Orthodox unity.
Language did become wordier; it took an entire century to sort out. . . .
The Silver age artists immanently became refined sinners, but nevertheless in a transcendental way -- with the redemptive promise. At these heights they expiated the sins of Russian culture.
Civilization broke loose in Russia. As one of the first to grow weary of it, Blok hoped that the elements might carry him to other, free worlds, worlds where man is not bound by the eternal “All of this has happened, everything has been done before. . . . ” For a romantic artist, to possess something is already to be satiated with it. And even more terribly, any sort of knowledge. . . .
For the artist, the profane, demonic temptation of possession is that, once satiated, he is liberated and free.
From satiation with art to freedom. This lot was drawn by many besides Blok.
Alas, this profane “world” decidedly did not belong to the men and women of the Silver age. Is this not why they so ferverently encroached upon the ideal world?
This is the question posed by the Silver age: Does culture save man, or does it damn him? That is, can life be positively transformed on the foundations of culture? Symbolism and futurism saw “life-building” as their goal while acmeism excluded it from its program, yet all three currents are inspired by these problematics and see them as initial points of departure.
In the Silver age, “life-building” and its rejection turned into “life-collapsing.” From the twentieth century perspective this “negative perception” became the dominant existential experience of the artist. It turned out to be universal, directly linked to the conditions of personality’s existence in the modern world.
This paper was translated from Russian by Masha Barabtarlo.
1. E. G. Etkind, “Edinstvo ‘Serebrianogo Veka,’” Zvezda vol. 12 (1989).
2. Semion Frank, in Vekhi ( Moscow: 1909), second edition, p. 210.
3.Georgii Ivanov, Sobranie Sochanenii vol. 2 ( Moscow: 1994) p. 404.
4. Nikolai Berdiaev, Sobranie Sochinennii vol. 4 ( Paris: 1990) p. 556.
5. Fiodor Stepun, “Viacheslav Ivanov,” in: Lydia Ivanovna, Vospominanie: Kniga ob Otse ( Paris: 1990) p. 374-375.
6. V. V. Rozanov, O Pisatelstve i Pisateliakh ( Moscow: 1995) p. 356.
7. V. V. Rozanov, O Pisatelstve i Pisateliakh ( Moscow: 1995) p. 356.
9. Viacheslav Ivanov, Borozdy i Mekhi ( Moscow: 1916), p. 143.
10. Alexander Blok, Sobranie Sochinenii vol. 3 (Moscow-Leningrad: 1960), p. 298.
12. V. Piast, Vstrechi (Moscow: 1997), p. 200.
13. Viacheslav Ivanov, Lik i Lichiny Rossii ( Moscow: 1995), p. 52.
14. Emma Gerstein, “Lishniaia Liubov”: Novyi Mir vol. 11 (1993), p. 159.
15. Alexander Blok, Sobranie Sochinenii vol. 6 (Moscow-Leningrad: 1962), p. 115.
16. Viacheslav Ivanov and M. O. Gershenson, “Perepiska iz Dvukh Uglov” (Petersburg: 1921), p. 29.
17. N. N. Punin, Vospominania, Dnevniki (Reminiscences, Diaries). Never published.
18. Vladimir Ilyin, Esse o Russkoi Kulture (St. Petersburg: 1997), p. 12.
19. Sergei Esenin, Sobranie Sochinenii vol. 2 (Moscow: 1966), p. 12; Tikhon Churlin, Vesna Posle Smerti (Moscow: 1915), p. 63.
20. Aleksander Blok, Sobranie Sochinenii vol. 5, p. 212.
21. V. V. Rozanov, O Pisatelstve i Pisateliakh, p. 264.
22. Osip Mandelstam, Kamen (Leningrad: 1990), p. 85.
23. Andrei Bely, Simvolism kak Miroponimanie ( Moscow: 1994), p. 251.
24. Viacheslav Ivanov, Stikhotvorenia. Poemy. Tragedia vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: 1995), p. 102.
25. Quoted from Anna Akhmatova, Desiatye Gody (Moscow: 1989), p. 224.
27. Innokentii Annensky, Stikhotvorenia i Tragedii (Leningrad: 1990), p. 103.
28. Alexander Blok, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 5, p. 427.
29. Fiodor Stepun, “Viacheslav Ivanov” in Sovremennye Zapiski no. 62 ( Paris, 1936), p. 232.
30. Georgii Ivanov and Irina Odoievtseva, Briefe an Vladimir Markov, 1955-1958 (Koln-Weimar-Wien: 1994), p. 17.
31. See I. P. Smirnov, Psikhodiakhronologika (Moscow: 1994), p. 107.
32. I. P. Smirnov interprets the link between nihilism and apophatism in the following way: “If nihilism... is a state of mind which denies this or that realm of existence (? existentialism? ekstensionalnost), then apophatism takes on as its subject the denial of this acknowledgement, as (ekstensional? existentialism?) without intention... To put it more simply, the difference between nihilsim and apophatism is that in the first case, rejection stems from the thinker, while in the latter, it appeals to him. . . .” (Psikhodiakhronologika, p. 111).
33. I. P. Smirnov discusses “nihilism in the loftiest sense of the word” in relation to Dostoyevsky’s The Demons (Psikhodiakhronologia, p.111).
34. Alexander Blok, Sobranie Sochinenii vol. 5, p. 432.
36. Fiodor Stepun, Vstrechi i Razmyshlenia (London: 1992), p. 197.
38. F. M. Dostoyevsky, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii vol. 5 ( Leningrad: 1973), p. 197.
39. Viacheslav Ivanov, Rodnoe i Vselenskoe ( Moscow: 1994), p. 91.
41. Nikolai Berdiaev, Sobranie Sochinenii vol. 1, p. 35.
42. Viacheslav Ivanov, Rodnoie i Vselenskoie, p. 53.
45. Georgii Ivanov, Sobranie Sochinenii vol. 1, p. 576.
46. Quote from Bogoslovie v Kulture Srednevekkovia ( Kiev: 1992), p. 56.
47. A. M. Zhemchuzhnikov, “Kon Kaliguly” in Poety 1880-1890 Godov (Moscow-Leningrad: 1964), p. 143.
48. Viacheslav Ivanov, Rodnoie i Vselenskoe, p. 22.
49. Alexander Blok, Sobranie Sochinenii.
50. A. S. Pushkin, Sobranie Sochinenii vol. 4 ( Moscow: 1975), p. 326.
51. Alexander Blok, Sobranie Sochinenii vol. 3, p. 209.
52. F. M. Dostoyevsky, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii vol. 5, p. 123.
53. Alexander Blok, Sobranie Sochinenii vol. 5, p. 431.

References: V. 
 V. 
 V. 
 V. 
 V. 
 V.