The turn of the 19th-20th centuries is a special time in the history of Russia, a time when life was being rebuilt, and the system of moral values \u200b\u200bwas changing. The key word of this time is crisis. This period had a beneficial effect on rapid development of literature and received the name of the "Silver Age", by analogy with the "Golden Age" of Russian literature. This article will examine the features of Russian symbolism that arose in Russian culture at the turn of the century.
In contact with
Definition of the term
Symbolism is direction in literature which was formed in Russia at the end of the 19th century. Together with decadence, it was a product of a deep spiritual crisis, but it was a response to the natural search for artistic truth in the direction opposite to realistic literature.
This trend has become a kind of attempt to get away from contradictions and reality in the field of eternal themes and ideas.
Homeland of symbolism became France. Jean Moreas in his manifesto “Le symbolisme” for the first time gives the name to a new movement from the Greek word symbolon (sign). A new direction in art was based on the work of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, "The Soul of the World" by Vladimir Solovyov.
Symbolism has become a violent reaction to the idealization of art. Its representatives were guided by the experience that their predecessors had left them.
Important! This current appeared in difficult times and became a kind of attempt to escape from harsh reality into an ideal world. The emergence of Russian symbolism in literature is associated with the release of a collection of Russian Symbolists. It included poems by Bryusov, Balmont and Dobrolyubov.
Main signs
The new literary trend was based on the work of famous philosophers and tried to find in the human soul a place where you can hide from a frightening reality. Among the main features of symbolismin Russian literature distinguish the following:
- The transmission of all secret meanings should be done through symbols.
- The basis is mysticism and philosophical work.
- The multiplicity of meanings of words, associative perception.
- The works of the great classics are taken as a sample.
- It is proposed to comprehend the diversity of the world through art.
- Creating your own mythology.
- Particular attention to the rhythmic structure.
- The idea of \u200b\u200btransforming the world through art.
Features of the new literary school
The forerunners of the new symbolism considered A.A. Feta and F.I. Tyutcheva. They became those who laid something new in the perception of poetic speech, the first features of the future course. The lines from Tyutchev’s poem “Silentium” became the motto of all Symbolists in Russia.
The greatest contribution to understanding the new direction was made by V.Ya. Bryusov. He considered symbolism a new literary school. He called it "hint poetry", the purpose of which was designated as follows: "Hypnotize the reader."
Writers and poets come to the fore the personality of the artist and his inner world. They destroy the concept of new criticism. Their teaching is based on domestic positions. Particular attention was paid to the predecessors of West European realism, such as Baudelaire. At first, both Bryusov and Sologub imitated him in their work, but later they found their perspective on literature.
The objects of the outside world became symbols of some inner experiences. Russian Symbolists took into account the experience of Russian and foreign literature, but it was refracted by new aesthetic requirements. This platform has absorbed all the signs of decadence.
The heterogeneity of Russian symbolism
Symbolism in the literature of the coming Silver Age was not a phenomenon internally homogeneous. At the beginning of the 90s, two currents stood out in it: the older and younger poets were symbolists. A sign of the older symbolism was its special outlook on the social role of poetry and its content.
They claimed that this literary phenomenon was a new stage in the development of the art of the word. The authors were less concerned about the content of poetry and believed that it needed to be updated artificially.
Younger representatives of the movement advocated philosophical and religious understanding of the world. They opposed the elders, and agreed only that they recognized the new design of Russian poetry and were inseparable from each other. General themes, images united critical attitudeto realism. All this made possible their cooperation in the framework of the magazine "Libra" in 1900.
Russian poets differently understood the goals and objectivesrussian literature. The older Symbolists believe that the poet is a creator of exclusively artistic value and personality. The younger ones interpreted literature as life-building, they believed that the world, which had outlived itself, would fall, and it would be replaced by a new one built on high spirituality and culture. Bryusov said that all previous poetry was “poetry of flowers,” and the new reflects shades of color.
A wonderful example of the differences and similarities of Russian symbolism in the literature of the turn of the century was the poem by V. Bryusov “Younger”. In it, he addresses his opponents to the young-symbolists and laments that he cannot see the mysticism, harmony and possibilities of purifying the soul in which they so holyly believe.
Important! Despite the confrontation of two branches of the same literary direction, all the symbolists were united by themes and images of poetry, their desire to get away from.
Representatives of Russian Symbolism
Among the senior adherents, several representatives were particularly distinguished: Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov, Dmitry Ivanovich Merezhkovsky, Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont, Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius, Fedor Kuzmich Sologub. Developers of the concept and ideological inspirers of this group of poets bryusov and Merezhkovsky were considered.
"Young symbolists" were represented by such poets as A. Bely, A.A. Block, V. Ivanov.
Examples of New Symbolist Themes
For representatives of the new literary school was the theme of loneliness is characteristic. Only in the distance and complete solitude is the poet capable of creativity. Freedom in their understanding is freedom from society in general.
The theme of love is rethought and viewed from the other side - “love is a sizzling passion”, but it is an obstacle to creativity, it weakens the love of art. Love is that feeling that leads to tragic consequences, makes you suffer. And on the other hand, she is portrayed as a purely physiological attraction.
Symbolist Poems discover new topics:
- The theme of urbanism (chanting of the city as a center of science and progress). The world is presented as two of Moscow. Old, with dark paths, new is the city of the future.
- The theme of anti-urbanism. The chanting of the city as a certain rejection of former life.
- Theme of death. It was very common in symbolism. Motives of death are considered not only in personal terms, but also in space (death of the world).
Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov
Symbol theory
In the field of the artistic form of the poem, the Symbolists have taken an innovative approach. He had obvious connections not only with previous literature, but also with Old Russian and folklore. Their creative theory was established on the concept of a symbol. Symbols are a common technique both in folk poetry, and in romantic and realistic art.
In oral folklore, a symbol is an expression of a person’s naive ideas about nature. In professional literature - a means of expressing a social position, attitude to the world or a specific phenomenon.
Adherents of the new literary trend rethought the meaning and content of the symbol. They understood it as a hieroglyph in a different reality, which is created by the imagination of an artist or philosopher. This conditional sign is not realized by reason, but by intuition. Based on this theory, the Symbolists believe that the visible world is not worthy of the artist’s pen, this is just a plain copy of the mystical world, by penetration into which the symbol becomes.
The poet acted as a cryptographer, the hiding meaning of the poem for allegories and images.
The picture of M. V. Nesterov "Vision to the youth Bartholomew" (1890) often illustrate the beginning of the symbolist movement.
Features of rhythms and paths used by symbolists
Symbolist poets considered music the highest form of art. They strove for the musicality of their poems. For this traditional and non-traditional techniques were used. They perfected the traditional ones, turned to the reception of euphonia (phonetic capabilities of the language). It was used by the Symbolists in order to give the poem a special decorative, pictorial and harmonious character. In their poetry, the sound side dominates the semantic, the poem draws closer to music. The lyrical work is deliberately saturated with assonances and alliterations. Humility is the main goal of creating a poem. In their creations, symbolists, as representatives of the Silver Age, turn not only to, but also to the exclusion of line breaks, syntactic and lexical division.
Active work is also being done in the field of the rhythm of the poem. Symbolists focus on folk system of versification, in which the verse was more fluid and free. An appeal to the verlibre, a poem that does not have a rhythm (A. Blok “I came rosy from the frost”). Thanks to experiments in the field of rhythm, the conditions and prerequisites for the reform of poetic speech were created.
Important! Symbolism considered the musicality and melodiousness of the lyrical work to be the basis of life and art. The verses of all poets of that time with their melody very much resemble a musical work.
Silver Age. Part 1. Symbolists.
Silver Age Literature. Symbolism. C. Balmont.
Output
Symbolism as a literary movement did not last long; it finally fell apart by 1910. The reason was that Symbolists deliberately cut themselves off from life. They were supporters of free poetry, did not recognize pressure, so their work was inaccessible and incomprehensible to the people. Symbolism took root in the literature and works of some poets who grew up on classical art and the traditions of symbolism. Therefore, features of extinct symbolism are still present in literature.
Theoretical Provisions symbolismas a new trend were formulated in the works of many authors. In particular, in the article by K. Balmont "Elementary words about symbolist poetry" (1890), in the work of Vyach. Ivanov's "Thoughts on Symbolism" (1912) and others. The theoretical basis of symbolism was the book of the famous Russian writer, poet, literary critic D. Merezhkovsky "On the causes of the decline and on the new trends of modern Russian literature" (1893). In it, the author names three main elements of the new trend: mystical content, symbols, and the expansion of artistic sensibility.
1. Mystical content
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European civilization was in crisis in both the social and spiritual spheres. At this time, positivism was called into question - positive sciences with their reliable facts, accurate concepts, scientific conclusions and laws. Positive, positive knowledge was declared a rude, insufficiently subtle tool for knowing the essence of being. Interest in the irrational, mysterious, mystical, subconscious increased.
This is especially evident in the example of philosophy, psychology:
- at this time, the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) creates his theory of psychoanalysis, argues that the mental processes that occur in our consciousness are predetermined at the subconscious level, motivated by the subconscious;
german idealist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) speaks of the secondary nature of the mind, its subordination to the will and instincts: “Your body has more reason than your best wisdom” (“So said Zarathustra”);
french philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) argues that true knowledge is achieved not by reason, but by intuition: "Our thought, in its purely logical form, is not able to imagine the real nature of life. Life created it (thought. - V.K. ) in certain circumstances for influencing certain objects; thought is only a manifestation, a type of life - how can it embrace life? Our mind is incorrigibly arrogant; he thinks ... he has all the essential elements for knowing life. the nature of life is known not by reason, but by a much deeper and more powerful one - intuition "(" Creative Evolution ").
Interest in the Plato-Kant line, idealistic philosophy, has increased in society. In the V-IV centuries BC Plato (the ancient Greek philosopher) compared reality around a person with a cave, where only glare, shadows from the world of a genuine, huge, surreal, but inaccessible to the perception of the human mind penetrate. A person, according to Plato, can only guess from these shadows-symbols about what is happening outside the cave. But, existing in the everyday, real, phenomenal world, a person at the same time feels a connection with the world of being, surreal, noumenal, trying to penetrate into it, to go beyond the limits of the "Platonic cave". Confirmation can serve as a poem by the famous Russian philosopher, theologian, poet and literary critic V. Solovyov "Dear friend ...":
My dear friend, you don’t see, That everything we see is only a reflection, only a shadow From the invisible eyes? My dear friend, you don’t hear, What everyday noise is crackling - Only a reflection of the triumph of Triumphant consonances? My dear friend, you don’t feel, What is the only thing in the whole world - Only that heart to heart Says in silent greetings? 1895D. Merezhkovsky expressed these crisis moods, feelings of the late XIX-early XX centuries in the following words: “And now modern people are defenseless, face to face with indescribable darkness ... Wherever we go, wherever we hide a dam of scientific criticism, with our whole being we feel the closeness of mystery, the ocean. " This mystery of the world, the realm of the subconscious, that is, the mystical content, and declares Merezhkovsky the main subject of new art. Another symbolist poet, V. Bryusov, states: "... the creation of art is the door to eternity that has been attached."
Read also other articles on the topic “Russian Symbolism”.
One of the many areas of art, originated in France and gaining momentum at the end of the nineteenth century throughout the world, was called "symbolism". What is, what are the features of this style and how it attracts creative personalities - let's try to make out further.
History of occurrence
It is a mistake to believe that symbolism as a direction in aesthetics began to exist only at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rather, on the contrary, this is one of the oldest image styles that has received decent design only by this time. The rationale for this statement originates from the origin of the name - “symbolism” - from the word “symbolism” - the use of allegorical expressions, allegorical illustrations and symbols. These categories are found in art from ancient times. Very often they were used for religious purposes, where all the canons have their own symbolism and are very dependent on the perception of a particular person, and conveyed in this way the representations of individuals.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, symbolism in art took on its current form, and showed its greatest manifestation in Russia. Thus, artists, poets and musicians expressed their vision of the deepest problems of society, protests. It was impossible to speak directly about this - it was threatened with severe punishment, therefore it was the transmission of thoughts through allegories and symbols that became the most accessible way of finding like-minded people.
The hallmarks of symbolism
The use of symbols in art implies the embodiment and transmission of thoughts, feelings and ideas in a generally accepted human form. This movement develops as a contrast to realism and impressionism, which reached the first level in the art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
For symbolism, the common features that appear in all forms of art are mystery, allegory, and deep inner meaning. This comes from the very concept of “symbol” (sign) - its meaning is ambiguous, and it can convey completely opposite thoughts with its essence, while the image used in creating works before symbolism is a single concept.
The ideas of symbolism and its aesthetics
Symbolism in painting, theater, literature and music obeyed general laws, conveyed a certain idea, since this direction in art cannot be characterized by concrete features, like other types. Charles Baudelaire (French poet) insisted that it was symbolism that manifested itself most in painting - and this was facilitated by the main points of the paintings - colors, lines, plot. Everything could serve as a subtle hint.
The aesthetic principles of this trend gave rise to romanticism, as well as a partial share of the idealistic theories of the great thinkers of that time - Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Nietzsche - and as a result found their present form symbolism. What is unusual took his followers from philosophers? The work of philosophers influenced the Symbolists' awareness that beyond the visible world of things there is a real, true world that is only reflected through objects. From their works, as well as from the principles of romanticism, a world of symbolism flowed - a world of dreams and visions.
The ideal tool for concealing or, conversely, for transmitting the innermost - thoughts, feelings - became a symbol. In this way, symbolism is converted to the spiritual realm. Thus, the followers of symbolism have radically changed not only individual features of the arts, but also the very attitude towards them.
Symbolism in music
According to most followers, symbolism in art received the greatest manifestation in the musical field. It is the sound reproduction of thoughts that is most allegorical and allows you to feel the spiritual world of the creator. In addition, the listener is able to put his impressions and his own meaning into musical scales.
A prominent representative of symbolism was the famous composer of the transition period - Scriabin. His works “read” the impulses of combining the subtle world of human soul experiences and the grand impulses of reality. The main idea of \u200b\u200bhis work was the divine essence of creativity as the shortest path to simple human happiness.
Symbolism style painting
In painting, the features of symbolism are easily guessed by the feelings depicted in the paintings. So, in these canvases it is almost impossible to detect positive emotions. This is due to the internal demand for symbolism to convey to the masses thoughts about the imperfection of the world.
The background of the paintings, as a rule, is blurred and sustained in calm tones of the same type, and the image itself is generalized and very simple. In this case, clear contours of small elements are observed. The plot is mysterious, each detail is a certain symbol, which requires study and guesswork. Images in the style of symbolism send the contemplator's thoughts to other sources, require a broad outlook and trust in their feelings.
Well-known representatives who practiced symbolism in painting were Vasnetsov, Yuon, Klimt and others.
Representatives of Symbolism in World Literature
As already mentioned above, the use of symbolism in its current form has received a revival in nineteenth century France. Bright representatives in the literature were Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé, who based their works on the style of "symbolism". What is the mysterious thing they conveyed to readers in encrypted form?
Charles Baudelaire in his works conveys with the help of signs the duality of life - madness and genius, love and hate, external and internal impulses. All these correspondences are conveyed in his desire to combine, synthesize all known forms of art.
Stefan Mallarmé in the guise of symbolism conveys important thoughts and feelings that, in his opinion, literature should convey to the reader. The poet Paul Verlaine practiced the same thing. In his opinion, music is the pinnacle of all art, and in it, as nowhere else, the presence of symbolism is noticed. Consequently, poetry, if she wants to reach the hearts, must be musical. And he managed to convey this perfectly.
Symbolism style literature
Symbolism is very vividly and richly represented in the literature of the Silver Age. The followers of this style reproduced reality in prose and poetry as an incessant stream of sensations, which was transformed into a single image only in the reader's mind. Of great importance for determining a holistic picture was the world of human sensuality and sensations. So from the insignificant symbols, signs and hints, the true meaning of the works is collected.
Symbolism in the literature of the Silver Age received a great contribution from the Russian poets of the transitional period - the late nineteenth - early twentieth centuries. These are Bely, Blok, Ivanov, as well as many other famous writers. The world of matter is portrayed by them as a mask through which the true spiritual world shines through. All described situations, phenomena and forms of everyday life receive a double meaning and intend to convey the conventions of the real world.
The transformation of symbolism in time and directions
In modern forms, such as modernism, academism and post-impressionism, symbolism acquired its continuation and development. What is it and what basics did he convey to these styles? Art Nouveau is widely represented in music and the visual arts. Masters of this direction are trying to fill a completely familiar form with spiritual content, find a certain symbolism in ordinary objects and phenomena, combine and contrast color and form in the rhythm of composition and drawing. This is the basis of symbolism.
Academism is often found in literary forms of manifestation of creativity. Here, “eternal” motives are embodied through the word and convey a combination of commonplace and deep emotional experience. In this form, sculptors of art of the early twentieth century transmitted encrypted messages to the viewer, and to read them, they required not only knowledge of the history of this work, but also an understanding of the features of the period of that time, a broad outlook and high flair.
Symbolism is a cultural phenomenon that first declared itself in France in the 1870-80s as a problem of updating the poetic language. This topic was devoted to “Literary manifesto. Symbolism ”published by J. Moreas on September 18, 1886 in Figaro; as far back as August 1885, Moreas, on the basis of his acquaintance with the poems of P. Verlaine, S. Mallarmé and the authors he sponsored from 1880, argued that "the so-called decadents primarily seek in their work the Idea of \u200b\u200bthe Existing and the Symbol of the Eternal". Then (or in parallel) symbolism through poetry connected itself in different countries (primarily France, Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy, Poland, Spain) not only with prose, dramaturgy, criticism and literary criticism, but also other arts (painting, music, opera house, dance, sculpture, book and interior design) and modes of humanitarian knowledge (philosophy, theology), as well as with reflection on the theme “end-beginning of the century” (decadence-modernism), “death of the gods ”, The crisis of individualism (under the influence of secularization and the formation of mass culture). The presence in the symbolism of a cultural dimension associated with the myth of "transition" prevents the exact finding 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 also splits what is in reality (among the Gonkurov brothers, Verlaine, J.K. Guismans, G.de Maupassant, in the 1880s Zola) coexists.
Symbolism does not so much provide a systematic answer to a number of literary, philosophical or social questions (although sometimes it tries to do it following the example of Russian symbolists - Vyach. Ivanov, A. Bely), but in the word and through the word, it listens and peers into certain ones only to him alone signals and signs, articulates questions, gives relief to the deep, disbodies and regroups - introduces into the sphere of obscure, twilight, iridescent, what F. Nietzsche, the key figure in symbolism and the embodiment of his paradox, called the situation "erosion 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 and each in their own way experience the fermentation of culture that they distinguish as a contradictory unity of loss-gain. In the center of symbolism is the myth of the tragic gap between appearance and essence, “to be” and “seem”, connotation and denotation, the external and internal form of the word. Symbolism insisted that the image of the world as a whole external to the artist does not coincide with personal lyrical revelation of the deep state of the world. Hence the notion of symbolist genius as the highest type of nature, "supernaturalism", such a nature of creativity, which is isolated from nature "in general" and produces meaning in itself, as an absolute creative given, "on the other side of good and evil."
The separation of nature, outlined by symbolism, asserts the gift to catch in events, things, the "finished word" entering the creative mind and thereby physiologizing, animating, some kind of preconsciousness, "music", the installation of expression. Those. there is a symbol, this is the poet himself as a medium of some 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 (the “second” nature). A symbol in this sense is not so much a ready-made meaning, a message, as a negative effort-signal about the inertness of the world, which without an artist, not reflected in his word, as if does not exist, is not transformed by beauty (in this case, the mystical-erotic languor of the word the elemental energy of a 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 (the image of Mallarmé from the preface to the Treatise on the Word by R. Gil, 1886), and does not invent words and rhymes. By the very fact of its existence in a word, a name-word, the Symbolist asserts the acquisition of true reality, genuine time, identical with a creative act, understood as becoming, suggestiveness, dance, ecstasy, breakthrough, ascent, epiphany, gnosis, prayer.
Common to the designation of creative “mystery” (“dreams”, “beauty”, “pure poetry”, “impersonality of writing”, “point of view”, “art for art”, “eternal return”) is the idea of \u200b\u200b“music”. Associated with the work of R. Wagner (one of the first acts of French symbolism was the publication in January 1886 of eight “Sonnets to Wagner” by Mallarmé and his students) and his dream of synthesizing the arts (Gesamtkunstwerk) modeled on ancient Greek tragedy, music became a designation of “the spirit of music” , the unconsciousness of the word, "words in the word" and its further differentiation in the poet. Bringing secrets to consciousness, awakening from a dream of life, the phenomenon of beauty is a deeply tragic topic about a poet who either dies from singing or sings from death (V. Khodasevich. “Through the wild roar of catastrophes ...”, 1926-27). Hamlet - one of the central mythology of symbolism (by Nietzsche, Mallarmé, J. Laforgue, O. Wilde, G. Fon Hoffmannsthal, R. M. Rilke, K. Gamsun, A. Blok, I. Annensky, B. Pasternak, T. S. Eliot, J. Joyce ) “The world that has gone out of the rut” (“Hamlet”, 1, V) is a world that, in the poet’s opinion, has lost its aesthetic authenticity (that is, it has become bourgeois, deeply plebeian and vulgar, exposed everything, including creativity, for sale, he declared the poet "madman") and turned into a kind of decoration, false value, evil infinity. It must be redeemed by an artist who boldly takes on the personal atonement for the aesthetic sin of the world and goes for the sake of abolishing tricks for a kind of patricide and suicide, a sacrificial renunciation of the universally significant.
A symbol is not a cipher, not an allegory (as is often mistakenly believed), but “life”, the very matter of creativity, the sparks of which the symbolists feel in themselves, and therefore try to verbalize - to separate from themselves, to express, to make an “icon”, a sign of the eternal. This is the ambitiousness, but not the ingenuity of symbolism, occupied simultaneously with the "alchemy" of the word and its engineering, finding the "objective correlate" (Eliot). We are talking about the refinement of the fabric of creativity and the ultimate concentration of style, which brings to the center of poetry not the result, but the “swimming” behind it, which in any of its manifestations (diving deep, illumination, “screaming”, automatic writing, on the one hand, and romances without words, arabesque, wonderful clarity, “silence”, on the other hand) is associated with violence over his muse and the tear of Dionysus-Orpheus for the sake of “purity” of sound and tone. The romantic irony associated with fantasy and belief in being created is replaced by specific naturalism: “love-hate”, self-estrangement, the ambivalence of the opposition between “I” and “not-I”, “man” and “artist”, “life” and “ fate ”,“ artist ”and“ burgher ”,“ being ”and“ nothingness ”,“ word ”and“ dead word ”. Motives for the search for love within death, genius as a disease, love of fate, Pan's death, outlined in the philosophy of A. Schopenhauer, the work of the “cursed poets”, Wagner’s operas (Tristan and Isolde, 1859), are reinforced in the work and life of Nietzsche and getting through it to the Symbolists, they affirm the exclusively tragic and predominantly bastard character of modern idealism as the illusionism of "being to nothingness."
In setting to the ultimate price of a creative act, or “superhumanity,” symbolism is revealed as overcoming positivism. In affirming a new type of idealism, symbolism erodes the framework of “historical” Christianity and likens self-knowledge in creativity and the philosophy of language to God-seeking. This search for God in a personal language can be correlated with Christianity more or less directly (in the poetry of P. Claudel, late Eliot) or figuratively (the theme of Christ as an artist in Wilde's De profundis, 1905, and Doctor Zhivago, 1957, Pasternak) , be a public position (a criticism of the irreligiousness of the Russian intelligentsia in Vekhi, 1909), as well as be interpreted in terms of religious modernism (the works of D. Merezhkovsky, N. Berdyaev), mystical anarchy (fascination with Theosophy by W.B. Yeats, Bely, heresies and Rosicrucianism at Blok, Vyach. Ivanov; faith in the universal power of mysterious forces capable of transforming the world, at E. Verharn), parody (motive of condescension and ascent in the play Axel by Villiers de LilAdad, 1885-87; Jean-Christophe as John The forerunner of the “indefinable canopy” of art by R. Rolland, the search for the Grail in “Magic Mountain”, 1924, T. Mann), but it can also refute it from the positions of the godless (Nietzsche, A. Rembo), individualistic (“unit cult” and heroic call "be who you are" in dram ah G. Ibsen; the theme of “the abyss of a naked soul” in the novels of S. Pribyshevsky), aesthetic (S. George), neopagan (late Rilke, D.G. Lawrence, E. Pound, since the 1920s), soil science (poetry R. Dario, A .Machadoi-Ruiz) or who declare underlined indifference to religion through the stoic devotion to Poetry (opposed to the “great Nothing” and “everything flows” by A. Franc, Mallarmé, P. Valerie, M. Proust), impressionist decorativeism (poetry of M. Dautendey, J. Pascoli).
The symbolist’s tool of self-knowledge was not only the search for Beauty (under-embodied, painfully slipping away, turning into its opposite - “secret crack”, “devil”, “heart of darkness”, “abyss”, “throwing dice that will never abolish the case”, “ we cry for a child at the Royal Doors ”,“ waves of the nausea of \u200b\u200botherworldly, ”indifference of“ azure ”and“ whiteness ”), meaningful as a tragic paradox of the nature of creativity, but also a vision of progress and its industrial and ideological institutes of a chimerical superstructure over the body of society. At depth, she longs to sublimate her repressed, scolded, dormant drives to some point and satisfy the impulses of the "holy spring", biological retaliation (the fateful revenge of the "bottom" - "top", "womb" - "head", "elements" - “Order”, “feminine and maternal principle” - “masculine and paternal”, Dionysianism - Apollonism), everything primitive and spontaneous on the surface, passing through the filters of reason, ideology, civilization, can become its opposite - self-eating revolution (“Gods crave” , 1912, France), caricature and grotesque (The Little Demon by F. Sologub, teacher Gnus and Rosa Frelich by G. Mann, the “great mother” by Molly Bloom by Joyce), the tragicomedy of “Eternal Return” (Ulysses, 1922 , Joyce), the nightmare of history (The Process, 1915, F. Kafka), the insoluble and promise of death contradiction (Ashenbach in the short story Death in Venice, 1913, T. Mann), the tragic impossibility of love (Pan, 1894, Hamsun).
With the motive of splitting nature, symbolism of prose includes the motive of "another country." This is the “magic screen” of imagination, allowing you to play the timeless drama of love and death on the stage of a conditional historical plot (The Fiery Angel, 1907-08, V. Bruyeyova), the decadent fantasy (the image of Princess Eliayali in The Hunger, 1890, Gamsun) , isothermal dimension (“second space” in Petersburg, 1913-14, Bely; initiation into a kind of chivalry in the “Magic Mountain” by T. Mann), “road inward” (theme of the Steppe Wolf, 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 “And the Sun Rises”, 1925, E. Hemingway to chess in “Luzhin's Defense” , 1929-30, V. Nabokova).
Both in symbolist poetry (Byzantium in Yeats's poems) and in symbolist theater (late Ibsen, M. Meterlink, E. Dyuzhardin, Villiers de Lil Adan, E. Rostan, Ieyts, A. Schnitzler, Hoffmannsthal, late Yu.A. Strindberg , G. D'Annunzio, L. Pirandello, S. Vyspiansky, Blok, early M. Tsvetaeva) the presence of space in space indicates a movement towards the awakening of consciousness (opening, revelation, removing covers, overcoming a certain glass barrier), which is interpreted as a struggle against by yourself, with the "dream" of life. It is directed not so much by the original text of the play as by the director (the era of symbolism in the theater was determined by O. Lunier-Po, M. Reinhardt, G. Craig, A. Appia, V. Komissarzhevskaya, V. Meyerhold in the late 1900s - 10th ) and its installation on the bright theatricality - the rejection of the "prosaism" of the play, the illusory unity of the stage, the service character of the performance. Meterlink’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 opening up to his inner sense, provided rich scenic opportunities. This concerned playing out the paradoxes (on the sight of the blind, the health of madmen, the identity of love and death, the conflict between love-habit and love-calling, the truth of the soul and the conventionality of morality), the introduction of the elements of the “plastic theater” in psychodrama, fantasy, miracles, “fairy tales” ", One-act dramatic poems or symbolic interpretation of Ibsen, the discovery of the miraculous in everyday life (line" The Blue Bird ", 1908, Meterlinka). Encountering the external and the internal (Meterlink's concept of “two dialogs”), movement and counter-movement in the form of waves whimsically reflected in itself, and thereby of an unprepared meaning, the symbolist theater, like symbolism as a whole, nods toward the discovery of the “other” in “ given ”, giving at the same time“ different ”and“ given ”a variable, rather than a fixed value.
The symbol in symbolism is therefore correlated with all the stylistic programs of the turn of the 19th-20th century (naturalism, impressionism, neo-romanticism, neoclassicism, imagism, vorticism, surrealism, expressionism, futurism), which are not only overcome one for the other, but vary in different combinations. This is indirectly expressed, for example, in the title of Bely’s autobiography “Why I became a symbolist and why I didn’t stop being at all phases of my ideological and artistic development” (1982) or in “negative dialectics” (constant overcoming of oneself, parody and self-parody) the creative fate of Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Bloc, Joyce. “Ulysses” - an application for the creation of a book of books, “I”, containing all the collective unconscious literature (in which, if necessary, any kind of novel can be revealed from the time of 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, related to its further impracticability, the disappearance of even the slightest, almost at the level of a phoneme, ability to find a poetic self and achieve alienation of the" I "from the" other I ", the general body of literature , all kinds of "finished words."
The search for a symbol in relation to the non-normative style open by the romantics and the declared era of symbolism of "revaluation of values", "death of the gods" radically changed the concept of mimesis that dates back to Aristotle. The imitation of the ideal expediency of the cosmos, the Idea, gives way to idealism "on the contrary" - supernaturalism, imitation of the personal nature of creativity. Symbolism raises the question of all-round religiosity, moves in the conditions of universal variability open by romanticism from one unreliability of creativity to another. The ideal of symbolism is the primary materiality of the world, acquired in the poetic word and created by it, but outside it is either fatally distorted, or lost, or never existed.
The era of symbolism (1870-1920) completes the actualization and codification of romanticismmaking it the mythology of the crisis of civilization a central problem of Western culture. If in some countries symbolism was revealed in terms of the 19th century and the worldview of the “end” (different romanticism of the decadence styles: naturalism, impressionism, decadence), then in others it was revealed in terms of the 20th century and the worldview of the “beginning” (different neo-romanticism of the styles of modernism and its ideas “ breakthrough "life-building, primitive, deconstruction, avant-garde, installation). Common to the styles of the era of symbolism, varying by the method of negation and affirmation, various approaches to finding the authenticity of a word (set before itself), it then correlates with the “top” (“spirit”) and “bottom” (“flesh”), “external” and “internal”, then overcoming such dualism on a third way of “impersonality of writing”, decorative style, perspectivism (in H. Ortegy-Gasset) 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 one’s own language at all costs and not to mix with anyone in the “name-word”. First of all, symbolism is a problem of language, “poetry”, sparks of a word as a self, words in a word. The reconquest 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” was often called by the contemporaries of symbolism the religiosity of creativity, beauty, theurgical transformation of the world, ascent, “pure poetry”, “art for art ", Demonism. At the same time, they had in mind the heightened fear of poetic nonexistence, the death of Orpheus (either torn to pieces by the "compact majority" alien to poetry and the harsh light of her loneliness and freedom, then absorbed by the Dionysian element, awakened by the poet in himself, then punished by nature for that he, unnaturally thinning himself, became unviable) and even the impossibility of poetry, and thus the “European night”, “the decay of the atom”. Whatever external signs the symbolist associates his word with, he always peers into himself and anatomizes his personal experience (“killing”, as Wilde believes, the one he loves, that is, himself), his over-knowledge, devoting creativity to tragedy - the torment of the word and his eternal authenticity, the departure of the poet (leaving, as it seemed to Mallarmé, the lyrical “gravestones”), “the everlasting confession of idealism” (Pasternak B. Collected Works: 5 volumes, 1991, Volume 4).
In the sequence of denials, symbolism from something very personal, from the pose of two or three “damned poets” (decadents), from several circles (they include numerous salons, academies, collections) and a series of formalisms became a school and a literary generation, then - a conflict of several generations ("romantics" and "classics", senior symbolists and young-symbolists, "Germans" and "romance"). Constantly returning to herself in a new capacity, but without changing individualism and the idea of \u200b\u200ban overload of creativity, symbolism contributed to the formation of a non-Euclidean, somewhat random, literary space. Without a literary center, enveloping literature, interweaving in a variety of styles, including “archaic” and normative styles, symbolism abolished the continuous vertical of the history of literature and its division into eras of the “great style”, and created a new type of cultural education. This is not a spatio-temporal completeness, but irregularly designated itself on the scale of "world literature" (and its characteristic "philosophy of formation", the plurality of literary voices, the dispersal of the literary universe) of irregular form, which designates itself in the horizontal section of time, which has but in different countries and the work of different writers, the different pace of actualization. The presence of uneven (as if curved, wave-like) literary time makes it difficult to see the symbolism of the general plan.
Symbolism in the USA
In the United States, symbolism is absent in the historically adjacent literary space of the 1880s-90s. But this does not mean that he is not there at all; Having synthesized symbolic, post-symbolic and counter-symbolic solutions, the original American symbolism, having reconstructed the general-West configuration of symbolist literature, could well be found in the works of R. Frost, H. Crane, W. Stevens, W. K. Wimsat, Hemingway, W. Faulkner. Each subsequent symbolism changed the idea of \u200b\u200bthe previous one and pushed some texts out of its gravity, making their authors the forerunners of symbolism, “symbolists outside symbolism”, even antipodes of symbolism (the rigid characteristics of 19th-century romanticism given by T.E. Hume, Pound, Eliot ; the perception of the poetry of Blok and Vyach.Ivanov of the 1900s by acmeists of the 1910s), while others, often clearly non-symbolic, attracted to it. Before symbolism, Baudelaire was a romantic of the middle of the century (and in some ways a specific classicist), after that he was a "post-romantic", then a "decadent", then a "symbolist", then a "modernist" - a variable scale of the French (and through it the Western) poetry from E.A. Po to W.H. Auden and G. Benn. Through each literary point in the era of symbolism, several literary lines can be drawn. So already mature Zola 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 expanding into a spectrum and the line begins to describe circles, returning to itself. In 1928, Khodasevich was forced to note: “In essence, it has not even been established what symbolism is ... Its chronological boundaries are not outlined: when did it begin? when did it end? In fact, we don’t even know the names ... a sign of classification has not yet been found ... this is not a connection of people of the same era. They - their own, “involuntarily brothers” - in the face of their contemporaries-strangers ... That's why ... they are so easy and enter into different alliances that for them all the “strangers”, in the final analysis, are equal. People of Symbolism “do not interbreed” ... I would also dare to say that there is something mysterious in that for a Symbolist, a writer and a person are a circle and a polygon, both described and inscribed into each other ”(V. Khodasevich Symbolism. Collected Works: V 4 volumes, 1996. Volume 2). Literary monuments in symbolism give way to "eternal companions", the simultaneity of voices, each of which is characterized by a fragment characteristic given by F. Schlegel in Critical Fragments (No. 22): “The subjective embryo of an emerging object.” Valerie ironically remarked in his Notebooks (1894-1945) that symbolism is a collection of people who believe that the word "symbol" makes sense. 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 of Symbolism, revealing in their “reflections” the principles of their creative aesthetics: Mallarmé (“The Crisis of Verse”, 1895; “The Secret in poetry ”, 1896); “Ranting”, 1897), R. de Gourmont (“masks”, 1896-98; “Culture of ideas”, 1900; “Problems of style”, 1902), Proust (“Imitation and mixture”, 1919; “Against St. Bev ", 1954); Valerie (“The Position of Baudelaire”, 1924 ”“ Letter on Mallarm ”, 1927;“ Pure Poetry ”, 1928;“ The Existence of Symbolism ”, 1938), Wilde (“ Thoughts ”, 1891), Yeats (“ Poetic Symbolism ”, 1900; “General introduction to my poems”, 1937), Hume (“Romanticism and Classicism”, 1913; “Reflections”, publ. 1924), Eliot (“Hamlet and his problems”, 1919; “Tradition and creative personality”, 1919; “The Purpose of Poetry and the Purpose of Criticism”, 1933), Pound (“A Serious Artist”, 1913; “Retrospective”, 1918; “Provocations”, 1920), Hoffmannsthal (“Poetry and Life”, 1896; “Poet and Our Time”, 1907; “Honore de Balzac”, 1912), Rilke (“Post Rodin”, correspondence with Tsvetaeva), Annensky (“Books of Reflections”, 1906-09), Blok (“On the Current State of Russian Symbolism”, 1910; “The Tragedy of Humanism” ”, 1919), Bely (“ Symbolism ”, 1910;“ Meadow green ”, 1910), Vyach. Ivanova (from“ The Two Elements in Modern Symbolism ”, 1908, to“ Simbolismo ”, 1936), Ellis (“ Russian Symbolists ” , 1910); Khodasevich (Symbolism, 1928; Necropolis, 1939), Parsnip (Symbolism and Immortality, 1913; Paul-Marie Verlaine, 1944).
The desire to “inflate” the “world fire of creativity” in oneself and, through constantly overcoming oneself (others in oneself), realize the project of absolute freedom of creativity (in this many symbolists identified themselves with political radicalism and saw themselves as avant-garde), to become everything and everything, “native and universal ”,“ Far and near ”, the current of the tree of culture and life (the image of Vyach. Ivanov in“ Correspondence from two angles ”, 1921), and even the“ airplane ”(by T. Marinetgi), to some extent realized by symbolism. Upon reaching the planned utopian breakthrough, he was involved in a series of revolutions, coups, civil wars. However, at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, 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 when Goethe rejected the exemplary and conventionalism of classicism at the beginning of the 19th century, was unimaginable, and the ousting of “high literature” from the center of cultural life by the masses art (primarily cinema), which involved not only a low educational level of the viewer and manipulation of them through various cliches, but also the possibility of technical reproduction of even the most unique work of art. This defeat of individualism was also emphasized by hostility to the elitist art of totalitarian power, which restored on a state scale the principles of a kind of normative creativity.
Having made literary history a symbol (“vortex” by Yates, a system of circles by Vyach. Ivanov and Bely), The era of symbolism posed in its own way unsolvable tasks for humanitarian thought of the 20th century. If the Soviet theory of literature reduced symbolism to something private and decadent (at the same time G. Lukac, who lived in the USSR in the 1930s, was involved in symbolism in the works “Soul and Form”, 1911; “Theory of the novel”, 1916), it’s usual sticking out for themselves the specifically interpreted “realism” and making it the central event of the turn of the 19-20th century, and independent Western Marxists (V. Benyamin) and post-Marxists (T. Adorno), not accepting symbolist aesthetics and little interest in the specifics of symbolism, wrote primarily about S. Baudelaire, as a herald of modernism and one of the creators of the idea of \u200b\u200b“negative dialectics,” positivistic literary criticism, having collected significant material, did not find structural approaches to it, and, believing symbolist self-definitions, straightened symbolism (strictly separating it from naturalism and “modernism” ), reduced outside France to the sphere of directed French influence, and also assigned to him the image of "dreams" and "mysticism." Moreover, after the Second World War, interest in symbolism and those who developed its intuitions in philosophy (German hermeneutics) fell temporarily for political reasons. Characteristic in this regard are omissions of the most important names in R. History of Contemporary Criticism (1991) by R. Welleck and militant liberal criticism of irrationalism by R. Rorty (Pragmatism, Relativism and Irrationalism, 1980). In the West, the historical and literary study of symbolism in recent decades has been replaced by a general study of the theory of symbol (“Theories of Symbol” by Ts. Todorov, 1977; “Philosophy of the Symbolic in Literature” by H. Edams, 1983) and representation.
The word symbolism came from French - symbolisme, from the Greek symbolon, which in translation means - a sign, an identification mark.
direction in European and Russian art of the 1870-1910s. Focused primarily on artistic expression through the symbol. In an effort to break through visible reality to "hidden realities", the superemporal ideal essence of the world, its imperishable beauty, the Symbolists expressed rejection of bourgeois and positivism, longing for spiritual freedom, a tragic foreboding of world social changes, trust in centuries-old cultural values \u200b\u200bas a unified beginning. The main representatives. P. Verlaine, P. Valerie, A. Rimbaud, M. Metterliik, A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, F. Sologub, P. Gauguin, M.K. Čiurlionis, M. Vrubel, etc.
Excellent definition
Incomplete definition ↓
SYMBOLISM
(Greek simbolon - symbol) is a literary and artistic trend in European art of the late XIX - early XX centuries, imbued with mysticism, mystery, the desire to comprehend new higher values \u200b\u200bwith the help of symbols, allegories, generalizations, special associativity. It arose as a result of the crisis of European culture in the second half of the 19th century, which pushed many artists on the path of flight from reality to subjectivity, mysticism. The desire to search for pure beauty and pure aesthetics has made symbolism a continuation of the line of romanticism and "art for art." The theoretical roots of symbolism date back to the philosophy of A. Schopenhauer and E. Hartmann, to the work of R. Wagner, to the philosophy of life of F. Nietzsche and intuitionism. The aesthetics of symbolism took shape in the works of French poets Stefan Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire, whose collection of poems "Flowers of Evil" became the first work of art of the new style. The term "symbolism" was first used in 1886 by the poet J. Moreas. The Symbolists believed that reason and rational logic could not penetrate the world of "hidden realities", "ideal essences" and "eternal beauty." Only art is capable of this - thanks to creative imagination, poetic intuition and mystical insight. Symbolists believed that a poetic symbol is a more effective knowledge of the world than an artistic image. They refused both faith in the primordial goodness of man and a belief in the possibility of a rational organization of society - the postulates of rationalism. He was accused of the crisis of modern European culture with its dominance of evil and vice. Symbolists called themselves singers of decadence, sunset and the death of bourgeois culture. Protesting against positivism, naturalism and rationalism, the Symbolists used the language of literature, painting, music, poetry, believing that it was the poet’s inner life embodied in poetic speech that was closest to the absolute, unreal world of eternal Beauty. Therefore, the Symbolists sought to free art from its intellectual content, from what is comprehended by reason, and not by feelings. They sought to search for elusive semantic connotations, psychological states, to discover correspondences and analogies. Therefore, in symbolism, the ambiguity of images, the play of metaphors and associations are widespread, reaching the deliberate ambiguity, encrypted content, exaggerated ecstasy of images. Also, the Symbolists considered the musical element to be the foundation of life and art. Therefore, they enriched poetry with the principles of musical composition, following Wagner, seeking the synthesis of various arts. The picture of the symbolist world was a system of symbols that are in a correlation of hierarchical co-ordination. This was largely reminiscent of the Neoplatonic and Christian symbolic concepts of peace and culture.
Symbolism quickly became a pan-European trend in art, but it was in Russia that it acquired the deep philosophical meaning set forth in the book by D. S. Merezhkovsky “On the causes of decline and new trends in modern Russian culture” (1893) and in the article by K. D. Balmont "Elementary words about symbolic poetry." Russian symbolism began at the end
XIX century as a consequence of the crisis of liberal and populist ideas, it was an expression of general decadent tendencies (works of D. Merezhkovsky, Z. Gippius). But from the beginning of the 20th century. he switches to experiencing the personality problem in history, its connection with “eternity”, with the universal “world process”. Symbolists love, melancholy, loneliness become an indicator of the general tragic state of the world. And symbolism is conceived as “life-creating”, going beyond the boundaries of art, as a matter of general cultural creation, designed to bridge the historical gap between people (A. Bely), between the artist and the people (Vyach. Ivanov). This connects symbolism with mysticism and occultism, making it a religious and philosophical course. The evolution of symbolism is associated with the transition from the generation of “senior symbolists” (D. Merezhkovsky, V. Bryusov, K. Balmont) to “younger symbolists” (A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov). In their work, the ideas of Vl. Soloviev about collegiality as a system of religious connection of people. These ideas were embodied in the discoveries of the Russian Symbolists in poetics - semantic polyphony, a reformatting of the song tune, updating the genres of lyrics, new principles of cyclization of poems.
Symbolism in literature was closely connected with symbolism in the theater, which proceeded from the idea of \u200b\u200bneo-romantic merging on the stage of all arts based on the musical principle. Symbolic directors sought to emphasize the role of subtext in the drama more strongly, to strengthen the musical rhythm of the performance, to make the performance a ritual action in which the viewer would be involved. Great importance was also attached to painting. The symbolist theater is characterized by a stylization of the dramatic forms of the past - ancient Greek tragedies, medieval mysteries, as well as the complete dictatorship of the director. The largest directors of the characters were P. Faure, O. M. Lunier-Po and J. Roucher in France, A. Appia in Switzerland, G. Craig in the UK, G. Fuchs in Germany, V. Meyerhold in Russia. For the symbolist theater they wrote Meter-link, Verharn, Ibsen. One of the most successful performances was Meterlink's Blue Bird, staged by Konstantin Stanislavsky on the Moscow Art Theater.
Symbolism in the visual arts was very heterogeneous and devoid of a single aesthetic program. Some features of symbolism (the desire to get away from oppressive everyday life, to comprehend the world in its eternal beauty, to find the purity of former art) were inherent in the work of the Pre-Raphaelists in England and neo-idealism in Germany. Until the end of the XIX century. symbolism in the visual arts was closely connected with literature, embodying literary allegories by the means of classicism, romanism, or by a mixture of different techniques. At the same time, artists often combine natural, natural forms with fantastic, surreal visions. In the late 1880s. E. Bernard and P. Gauguin declare themselves to be symbolists. From this moment on, the symbol is increasingly expressed not in the plot, but in the very form of the image. The new “symbolic” thinking is laid mainly in the work of post-impressionists and becomes determining for modernists who are trying to find a single system of symbols of the world, identify the symbolism of each color, and find the musical beginning in the rhythmic structure of drawing and composition. A direct analogy of painting with music is typical for the work of the Lithuanian artist and composer M.K. Čiurlionis. In Russia, symbolism in painting is associated with the work of V... Borisovamusatov, as well as many artists of the World of Art, in its ideological orientation opposite to symbolism in literature. Close to the literature of symbolism was the work of M. A. Vrubel. Symbolism has become a very complex and controversial phenomenon in the artistic culture of the turn of the XIX – XX centuries. It expressed the expectation of grandiose changes, and fear of them, a call for the destruction of bourgeois culture and religious mysticism. Symbolism had a great influence on the artistic trends of the 20th century. - expressionism, surrealism, futurism, etc.
Excellent definition
Incomplete definition ↓