Russian symbolism was a movement in ideas, writing, and art that was most common during the late 1800s and early 1900s. It started independently from symbolism in Western Europe and focused on making things seem unfamiliar and exploring the mystical ideas of Sophiology.
Literature
The Russian symbolist movement was mainly influenced by Russian thinkers such as Fyodor Tyutchev, Vladimir Solovyov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and to a lesser degree by Western writers like Paul Verlaine, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Other influences included Oscar Wilde, D'Annunzio, Joris-Karl Huysmans, the operas of Richard Wagner, the dramas of Henrik Ibsen, and the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.
By the mid-1890s, Russian symbolism was mostly a set of theories and had few famous writers. It was not until Valery Bryusov appeared that symbolist poetry became a major part of Russian literature. The early Russian symbolism movement included:
Though many of these writers were no longer well-known by the mid-20th century, the symbolist movement had a strong impact. This was especially true for Innokenty Annensky, whose final collection of poems, Cypress Box, was published after his death in 1909. Sometimes compared to the "accursed poets," Annensky translated the poetic style of Baudelaire and Verlaine into Russian. His own work used unique sounds, mysterious references, unusual words, and descriptions of colors and smells. His influence on the acmeist school of Russian poetry (including Akhmatova, Gumilyov, and Mandelstam) was very important.
Russian symbolism became popular in the first decade of the 20th century. Many new writers began creating poetry in the symbolist style. These writers were especially inspired by the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. Vyacheslav Ivanov, a poet and scholar who studied ancient Greek and Roman texts, returned to Russia from Italy to form a group in St. Petersburg called the Dionysian Club. He aimed to use old-fashioned language in Russian poetry.
Maximilian Voloshin, best known for writing about the Russian Revolution, started a poetry gathering at his home in Crimea. Jurgis Baltrušaitis, a friend of the composer Alexander Scriabin, wrote poems with mystical themes and musical sounds. He was active in Lithuania.
Among the new generation, two poets, Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, became the most famous of the Russian symbolist movement. Alexander Blok is often considered one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century. He was compared to Alexander Pushkin, and the time known as the "Silver Age" of Russian poetry was sometimes called the "Age of Blok." His early poems were very musical and full of sound. Later, he experimented with unusual rhythms and uneven beats. His later poems often showed a struggle between an ideal vision of beauty and the harsh reality of industrial cities. His work used unique color and spelling to express meaning. One of his most famous poems, The Twelve, described the march of twelve Bolshevik soldiers through Petrograd in a style that resembled religious writing.
Andrei Bely tried to combine prose, poetry, and music in his work, as seen in the title of one of his early books, Symphonies in Prose. However, he is best known for his later work, the modernist novel Petersburg (1911–1913), which explored philosophical and spiritual themes with an unusual storytelling style. Vladimir Nabokov ranked this novel second among the greatest 20th-century novels, after James Joyce’s Ulysses. Other important works include Symbolism (1910), a book that helped redefine the goals of the symbolist movement, and Kotik Letaev (1914–1916), which follows the early development of a baby’s awareness.
The city of St. Petersburg became a major symbol for the second generation of Russian symbolists. Blok’s poems about the city painted a vivid picture of a "city of a thousand illusions" and a doomed world filled with merchants and middle-class people. Natural forces, such as sunrises, sunsets, light, darkness, lightning, and fire, were shown as signs of a major event that would change the world. The Scythians and Mongols often appeared in the poets’ works as symbols of future wars. Because of the symbolist movement’s focus on the end of the world, many poets, including Blok, Bely, and Bryusov, saw the Russian Revolution as the next step in their nation’s history.
By the 1910s, Russian symbolism was losing its influence in literature as younger poets moved toward the acmeist movement, which avoided the extremes of symbolism, or joined the futurists, a group that rejected traditional art styles.
Despite criticism from the Soviet government, symbolism continued to influence poets like Boris Pasternak. In 1958, a critic named Viktor Pertsov criticized Pasternak’s poetry, calling it "decadent" and "filled with the old-fashioned ideas of symbolism."
More recently, Robert Bird noted that Russian symbolism was more closely connected to German Romanticism and 19th-century Russian writers than to French symbolism. He described symbolism as a way of thinking, not just an art movement. Russian symbolists believed that creativity was a continuous process and that art, philosophy, religion, and myth were deeply connected. The mixing of ideas at Vyacheslav Ivanov’s group, called the "Tower," showed how symbolist beliefs were lived out in society.
Visual arts
One of the most important Russian symbolist painters was Mikhail Vrubel, who became famous for a large mosaic-like painting called The Demon Seated (1890). He became mentally ill while working on another painting, The Demon Downcast (1902), which was dynamic and sinister.
Other symbolist painters linked to the World of Art magazine included Victor Borisov-Musatov and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, who were influenced by Puvis de Chavannes; Mikhail Nesterov, who painted religious scenes from medieval Russian history; Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, known for his "urbanistic phantasms"; and Nicholas Roerich, whose paintings were described as mysterious or difficult to understand. In the late Soviet period, the tradition of Russian symbolism was revived by Konstantin Vasilyev, whose style was greatly influenced by the Russian neo-Romantic painter Viktor Vasnetsov, as well as Mikhail Nesterov and Nicholas Roerich.
Music and theatre
Alexander Scriabin was the leading symbolist composer. In his First Symphony, he praised art as a form of religion. Le Divin Poème (1902–1904) aimed to show "the evolution of the human spirit from pantheism to unity with the universe." Prométhée (1910), performed in 1915 in New York City, included carefully chosen color projections on a screen. In Scriabin's combined performances, music, poetry, dancing, colors, and scents were used to create "supreme, final ecstasy." Andrei Bely and Wassily Kandinsky shared similar ideas about the "stage fusion of all arts."
Regarding traditional theatre, Paul Schmidt, an influential translator, wrote that The Cherry Orchard and other late plays by Anton Chekhov were influenced by the Symbolist movement. The first production of these plays by Constantin Stanislavski was as realistic as possible. Stanislavski worked with the English theatre practitioner Edward Gordon Craig on an important production of Hamlet in 1911–12, which used symbolist monodrama as a basis for its staging. Two years later, Stanislavski received international praise for staging Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird at the Moscow Art Theatre.
Nikolai Evreinov was one of many writers who developed a symbolist theory of theatre. Evreinov believed that everything around us is "theatre" and that nature is full of theatrical behaviors, such as desert flowers imitating stones, mice pretending to be dead to escape cats, and the complex dances of some birds. For Evreinov, theatre was a universal symbol of existence.