Some Brie-head interviewed over here at ShatterColors Literary Review. I guess he edits the magazine or something. So he’s interviewing himself in his own magazine?  And he publishes himself in his own magazine? Hell, I don’t know. I’m tired after running a hill workout. Then I read this, making me more tired. He’s one literary dude, though. Very literary, no doubt.

Robert Scott Leyse (14 bucks he prefers you use all three names) says some really un-sightful things here.

Like he says that he attended a “writing event.” Sounded like he had a hell of a good time, too. In his words, I thought, “What does a gathering of clowns spouting pretentious rubbish and thirsting to have their asses kissed have to do with writing?”

Touche, Robert Scott Leyse. “Thirsting to have their asses kissed” is an excellent image, or maybe just a mixed metaphor/dating service for burros. Either way, I love a man who can recognize a clown in disguise (or were the writers wearing their red noses and giant shoes?).  Reminds me of the grandmother in Flannery O’ Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Grannie wears very clean underwear and knows exactly how to identify “Good Men.” Only takes her a few minutes, too. (Unfortunately, she is soon executed, along with the entire family she leads directly to their collective doom.)

I’ll just jot down this epic poem here, la-dee-da….

One problem I have with Robert Scott Leyse is that the people I meet at “writing events” are scared of clowns. Also they are self-deprecating, witty, humble, interesting, well-read, grinders at the page after page, and know how to drink a shit-load of quality ale. (Those that don’t drink beer I maybe never meet.)

Possibly we attend different conferences?

As an editor Robert Scott Leyse prefers, “love stories, at whatever stage of a relationship…”

Hey! I do too, maybe. So good call, maybe.

Then Robert Scott Leyse reveals his true internal thrumming, as he drops the dark and stormy nights of his intellect onto flash fiction.

Egads! Run for the big tent, you clowns!

On flash fiction (you can hear the disgust steeping in his bottom lip like a tobacco chaw): “It’s a writing exercise, useful in learning the virtues of succinctness of expression. As for it being a viable form… Basically, some corner-cutting smartass thought, “Hey, why waste these writing exercises? Why not doll them up in fancy terminology — call them ‘flash fiction,’ ‘flashers,’ or ‘impromptus’ — and persuade people they’re real stories? That way, I’ll be able to churn out three or four or five of them a night!” Needless to say, I neither read nor publish writing exercises.”

I adore that last sentence. Cutting, shall we say. In fact, fuck it, all short forms are actually writing exercises, especially those damn sonnet things. I mean how can 14 lines be “viable”? Yo, parable, fable, mythology, psalm, and all you annoying hieroglyphics, please go away or at the very least add a whole lot of words, OK? Can we get some more words, seriously? Back up the fucking WORD truck, beep-beep-beep. MORE, MORE, like in a legislature or a contract.

And, yes, you pegged me, Robert Scott Leyse, since I do write and read flash fiction, I am indeed a “corner-cutting smartass.”

[But Impromptus? That sounds like a type of water dwelling dinosaur in a children's book. Dude, don't bring that one out in public, just a friendly tip.]

Speaking of “corner-cutters,” and since I just spent a semester with a grad student researching a bit of the inexhaustible history of flash fiction as a genre, other corner cutting clowns would include:

Margaret Atwood, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Dave Eggers (a ton here), David Foster Wallace, Tara L. Masih, Pu Songling, Kim Chinquee, J. G. Ballard, Jim Harrison, Kobo Abe, Primo Levi, Angela Carter, Max Steele, Barry Graham, Umberto Eco, H. H. Munro, Don Delillo, Mervyn Peake, Anton Chekhov, Kurt Vonnegut, Andrei Bely, W.B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Luigi Pirandello, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, John Steinbeck, George Orwell, Ander Monson, Mark Twain, Marianne Gingher, Wu Jingzi, Dubus (x 2), Vladimir Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, Molly Gaudry, Agatha Christie, Dr. Seuss, Jaroslav Hasek, Samule Beckett, Jeff Noon, Matt Bell, Aesop, Deb Olen Unferth, Patricia Highsmith, Emily Bronte, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, John Updike, Jill Christman, Julian Barnes, Richard Wright, Sherman Alexie, Sara Teasdale, Shane Jones, Diane Williams, Jesus H. Christ, Blake Butler, Maya Angelou, W. G. Sebald, Edmund White, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Carver, Carolyn Forche, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Buddha, Dorothy Parker, Tao Lin (oh, fuck him [I kid]), Carol Bly, Russell Banks, John David Lovelace, Krishna, Richard Brautigan, Ezra Pound, Scott Garson, Michael Kimball, Jewel, Robert Olen Butler, Gertrude Stein, Alexander Pushkin, Joseph Young, Emile Zola, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, Michael Martone, Hart Crane, Tania Hershman, Joyce Carol Oates, John Edgar Wideman, Rose Terry Cooke, Plato, Katherine Anne Porter, Kate Chopin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez.

hanging out, corner-cutting...

I could go on, but it gets ridiculous the number of authors in the canon, and outside the canon, and shooting from a cannon (a la Hunter S.), that have worked in this genre, and didn’t I just say I was tired, and also I need my typing finger for clowning tomorrow morning.

I just got to clown, yo.

Wouldn’t want to be with that “impromptu” crowd, anyway, would you? What’s next, you start valuing other forms of brevity, like say oysters, shots of bourbon, sudden kisses, short films, or the well-cut diamond?

A writing exercise? Flash fiction is to a writing exercise as a haiku is to a pretzel. Something. I disagree, Robert Scott Leyse. And what if a flash WAS a writing exercise? What if someone wrote a story in the shape of an apartment building (Georges Perec) or as a travel guide (Martone) or I don’t know a freaking examination. On and on…or can stories only be one way, “love stories, at whatever…” etc.

[A red fox just loped across my backyard. Is it limping or loping? I mean loping is like attitude. Limping you probably got car-struck crossing highway 69]

Oh hell, I digress, and if you read this blog you know where I will digress to, like a ship drifting to harbor…1.) preheat oven. 2.) slice corn tortillas. 3.) Add cheese and “impromptu” toppings.

Well, I just had some kick ass nachos. It felt good. It didn’t take long, they are often listed as appetizer…so eat my board shorts (those are the very, very, very long shorts, sir, I think you will like them), Mr. Robert Scott Leyse.

(BTW, here is an exam, a writing exercise, as you would say.)

Well, what can you do? Not human at all, is it, the flash fiction above…drivel, really.

No, no, know.

Now?

I am going to go relax in the bath.

I will not! For me, a hot shower. I said hot.

And quick.

And good.

*

Beer prices are going up. (again)

Here’s what the D-bag at Budweiser says: “The environment is very favorable, we think.” (He means for price increases.)

Here is the D at MillerCoors: “We have seen very strong pricing to date this year, and we are projecting a favorable pricing environment moving forward.”

Can you believe people who work at a brewery talk like this? I am done with these fools. Can you smell the cynicism in the voices of these guys? It’s micro-brew only now (was heading percentage-wise that way anyway). I mean I feel like I am buying my beer from an attorney, and he’s laughing right in my face. Going home and telling his wife about all the suckers he found today in his “pricing environment.”

*

Kind words from The Prettiest Girl in School about Eggs here. Thank you for reading!

*

S

This is Part II (of…II) of our review of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. The first, which you can read by clicking here or scrolling down for about two seconds, focused on Bely’s use of an amorphous narrative voice to foster an atmosphere of instability.

Let’s go all the way back to the prologue, in which Bely established his earlier theme of narrative instability with his opening question, “What is this Russian Empire of ours?” Bely concludes the prologue by opening up another key theme: the relationship between fiction and reality. The prologue closes with the idea that “Petersburg not only appears to us, but actually does appear—on maps: in the form of two small circles, one set inside the other, with a black dot in the center; and from precisely this mathematical point, which has no dimension, it proclaims forcefully that it exists…”. Bely here states that Petersburg’s existence is affirmed by its appearance on a map; the map validates the city as more than just the construction of a solipsistic mind. This argument contains the implication that Petersburg’s actual appearance in brick and stone could be illusionary, could just be “cerebral play.” But make it a dot on a map, in a book, and the city’s existence is forcefully proclaimed, its buildings and prospects becoming real and tangible.

It’s the same argument Bely will make about the characters and events of his novel, albeit one complicated by the fact that those characters and events, unlike the city of Petersburg, do not actually exist and in fact are the construction of a solipsistic mind. Bely works around this by using his narrative voice to muse on the function of fiction through snide side commentary and metanarration. This conceit is best expressed in the novel’s first chapter through Apollon Apollonovich’s interactions with the “idle shadow” of the stranger. “[I]dle shadow” is a significant way of referring to the stranger by the narrative voice because the stranger does not exist: “The shadow arose by chance in the consciousness of Senator Ableukhov and acquired its ephemeral being there.” Our impulse is thus to disregard the stranger’s “existence,” to view it as reflective of Apollon Apollonovich’s mental state more than anything else. But the NV presses on by making the comparison between Apollon Apollonovich’s conscious construction of the stranger and Bely’s concurrent construction of Apollon Apollonovich: “But the consciousness of Apollon Apollonovich is a shadowy consciousness because he too is the possessor of an ephemeral being and the fruit of the author’s fantasy: unnecessary, idle cerebral play.” Note the repetition of “idle,” which serves to make the comparison more explicit; the senator’s relationship with the stranger then becomes analogous to our relationship to the senator.

Further, the phrase “cerebral play” is all over the novel, the implication being that the novel exists merely as the cerebral play of its author. Bely seems to counter this idea a few short sentences later, when the NV says the author has hung “pictures of illusions all over” and should “take them down as quickly as possible.” The NV quickly rejects its own idea, though: “But the author will not do so: he has sufficient right not to.”

Through the narrative voice and this breaking of the fourth wall, Bely argues for the worth of fiction. The stranger is a construction of Apollon Apollonovich’s mind, but that doesn’t prohibit him from having an impact on the life of the senator. Likewise, Apollon Apollonovich’s fictive existence doesn’t mean he can’t be influential in our lives. This “contorted ontology”—a phrase I’m stealing from Timothy Langen—is a defense of Bely’s very art form: “Once his brain has playfully engendered the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists, really exists. He will not vanish from the Petersburg prospects as long as the senator with such thoughts exists, because thought exists too.” The actual existence of the stranger is confirmed merely by his presence in the mind of Apollon Apollonovich; it follows that Apollon Apollonovich’s actual existence is confirmed by his presence in our minds: “The aged senator will, oh yes, he will, pursue you too, dear reader, in his black carriage. And henceforth you will never ever forget him!” Our memory of Apollon Apollonovich will be enough to sustain his being. The recording of his life on the pages of the novel, then, is akin to the dotting of Petersburg on a map: Its existence on the page is what validates its existence in reality. The whole novel is “cerebral play,” but it’s cerebral play with a purpose. And hence Apollon Apollonovich becomes a “real shadow,” one that points to a substantive being, one that will follow us, one that we’ll never ever forget.

Bely furthers this confusion of what is real and what is artifice through his employment of symbolism. A master of the Symbolist movement, Bely uses symbols throughout the novel to stand in for objects and to make associations between them. Let’s take one of the most prominent symbols in the novel: the Bronze Horseman. The famous statue of Peter the Great that resides in the tsar’s constructed city, the Bronze Horseman becomes a symbol that haunts Nikolai Apollonovich and other residents through the streets of the city. In its first appearance in the novel, the Horseman is deconstructed by the NV into a symbol of the divorced state of Russia, its airborne front hooves standing for the desires of the new generation to escape the entrenched older one represented by the grounded back hooves. That idea is especially pertinent to Nikolai Apollonovich, the son that has promised to murder his own father in order to propel progress. As the Horseman starts to follow Nikolai Apollonovich among others around town, though, it also becomes a symbol of cosmic retribution, its frightening declaration, “I doom: irrevocably!” and its flaring nostrils reminiscent of the horsemen of the apocalypse.

But what impact can it have as just a symbol? We know that a statue is not actually following Nikolai Apollonovich around Petersburg and scaring the city’s residents; it is still rooted to the ground in the square. That interpretation changes, however, when we consider Bely’s “contorted ontology” and aforementioned finagling of the requirements for existence. The Horseman, after all, is a figment of the imagination, just like Apollon Apollonovich’s stranger. The Horseman, like the stranger, earns its existence through its presence in the minds of the characters. A horseman doesn’t actually follow these characters, but the concept of one does. And that concept, complete with its connotations of both generational ambition and cosmic retribution, is enough to drive many of their actions. Therefore, Bely imbues his novel’s symbols with an added significance by working so hard through the narrative voice to legitimate their existence. His symbols aren’t just cerebral play, but real shadows—evidence of more substantive bodies.

If we apply this ontology to the novel as a whole, we discover that Apollon Apollonovich is, like the Horseman, a symbol standing in for larger concepts—such as bureaucracy, complacency, and a lack of adaptability. Apollon Apollonovich doesn’t actually exist, but the concept of him certainly does. There were plenty of Apollon Apollonovichs in Bely’s Russia, and they were a big part of the problem in 1905. He, like the symbols in the novel then, is real according to Bely’s ontology, and this gives Petersburg a more lasting appeal and relevance. Bely argues that his novel and his creation lives; it is a Pinocchio brought to life by its unchanging presence in the minds of its readers. Because we will never ever forget it, Petersburg has life.

We’re pulling out all the stops for a two-part review of Andrei Bely’s little-known 20^th-century masterpiece, Petersburg. The first will look at how Bely uses an amorphous narrative voice to establish an ambience of instability while the second will examine how Bely then uses this narrative voice to animate and validate his fiction.

The motivation for this review: While reading Infinite Jest, Josh asked me if there were any book that, if I saw someone else reading it, I would feel a compulsion to talk to them about it. My answer, after some consideration, was Petersburg. My motivation: Petersburg is the most underrated novel of the 20^th century.

Released in two different versions in 1916 and 1922, Petersburg is an awful lot like James Joyce’s Ulysses, written around the same time (1922). There are three important differences, though: 1) Bely wrote in Russian, which means a lot of his wordplay simply doesn’t translate to English; 2) Bely wasn’t a flamboyant stylist who did as much as he could to mess with the reader the same way Joyce was; 3) Ulysses is generally considered the best novel of the 20^th century. Petersburg is not.

Now I’m not here to say that Petersburg is better than Ulysses, but I do want to make this much clear: It’s a hell of a lot closer than most people realize.*

*Before I dive in, here’s a Tim’s Notes (i.e. relatively spoiler-free) summary of Petersburg: It’s Russia in 1905, which is a pretty revolutionary place to be. And there’s this guy, Nikolai Apollonovich who promises to do whatever for a terrorist group, so they tell him to kill a high-ranking political official with a bomb. Later, they reveal that high-ranking political official to be his father, Senator Apollon Apollonovich. Moral crisis ensues. There are some other characters, too.

The beauty in Bely’s project begins in his narration. There is no real “narrator” in Petersburg; rather, it’s more of a “narrative voice” (from here on for brevity’s sake, NV) that can be omniscient and ignorant, funny and devastating, singular and plural. Bely’s great skill lies in creating such a diverse and amorphous NV that builds toward a common purpose: narrative instability.*

*Again, for basis of comparison, Joyce uses an “arranger” in place of a narrator. Joyce’s arranger, however, is not personalized nor diversified in the way Bely’s “narrative voice” is throughout the course of Petersburg.

This manipulation starts from the very first sentence of Bely’s prologue: “What is this Russian Empire of ours?” It’s a question that establishes the novel’s quest both for identity and for inclusiveness. The use of the first-person plural, which is employed at various times throughout the novel, allows the NV to collectivize individual perceptions and lend the city of Petersburg—often considered the novel’s main character—a voice of its own. The manner in which Bely animates its citizens—he refers to them as a great “myriapod” that day after day traverses the Nevsky Prospect—both adds to this collective identity and subverts it. In a span of a few paragraphs about halfway through the novel, Bely goes from describing the people of Petersburg as the individual parts of this myriapod whole to writing that there were “no people on the Nevsky” to saying that the links of the myriapod are “interchangeable” and “immutable.” In doing so, Bely illustrates the crisis of modern life in the metropolis, where individuals struggle to stand out from the human traffic on the Nevsky Prospect.

Since the city’s individuals lose their voices amid the collective din of the Prospect, Bely’s novel requires a different kind of being to tell his story. He needs something amorphous and articulate—a voice that transcends that clamor and isn’t limited to being a representative individual opinion. A singular narrator just wouldn’t suffice for Bely’s purpose. And so, he gives Petersburg a voice that historicizes the city. He speaks from his own perspective during an especially emotional moment when one of his characters contemplates suicide—as Bely himself had. While individual characters rarely get the first-person treatment, their stories are often told with specific insight. For instance, while the readers know that Dudkin is the “stranger” that follows Apollon Apollonovich for much of the novel, the NV continues to call him a “stranger,” because Apollon Apollonovich himself does not know the man’s identity. In this manner, we as readers connect and empathize more with the senator’s feeling of apprehension regarding the potentially sinister stranger.

The individualization and the interchangeability of the narrative voice, then, both broaden its scope and destabilize us as readers. In most novels, the narrator is consistent, if not faithful or reliable. In Petersburg, it is none of these things; it’s not even a “narrator.” Bely fragments the narrative and cuts back-and-forth between scenes—in a cross-cutting, Eisensteinian fashion— forcing the reader to first, acknowledge gaps in space and time, and second, fill in those gaps. This narrative fragmentation creates a sense of unease and of disorder—one where we’re not sure who’s telling the story, what he/she/it knows, or what their agenda is. In other words, it’s a lot like being in 1905 Russia.

We’ll be back with Part II next week in like six hours. If you could read Petersburg between now and then, that’d be great.

Zoshchenko comes across as an ordinary, intelligent and above all humorous documentarian of the state of Russia during trying times. His prose is a marked departure from the excess and fantastical visions of authors such as Bely and Gogol. Here one’s senses are not under the constant deluge of delirium and stimuli that adumbrates, say, Petersburg. Zoschenko eschews this approach in favor of a down to earth and sincerely sad snap shots of urban life where families occupy bathrooms and priests, who themsevles aren’t sure of their faith, listen to the confessions of others. In spite of their melancholy leitmotif when read in succession, all of Zoshchenkos stories are very humorous.

This marriage of sadness and authentic day-to-day absurdity is encapsulated well in the title tale. In Scenes From the Bathhouse, men find themselves without the materials they need to wash, no place to put their tickets and the constant threat of their clothes being stolen. The latter happens in the stories second iteration, leaving a man trembling with the humiliation that he might have to walk home with no pants on. When the manager is brought in, he is embarassed further when a woman walks in on his precarious situation. All of this is funny reading, although it is underscored by the realities of a country in a state of poverty.

Aptly, there is a tale in the collection titled Poverty. One of my favorites in the bunch, Poverty recounts the introduction of electricity into an apartment building previously lit by more natural means. This great invasion of techniclogical progress only makes the characters double-take at the true desparity they had previously been living in before they had the artificial light to illuminate it. One of the tenants immediately begins to clean only to find out that the landlord has decided, to the tenant’s displeasure, to remove this great technilogical advance from her building; she cannot come to grips with how shabby her own abode looks and decides not to deal with the extra work necessary in tidying up.

Nearly all of the stories are written in a slightly spruced up version of common street language. Almost none of the characters are admirable, although Zoshchenko refrains from any true moral judgement of their character. He is, and rightly so, more concerned with the circumstance that surrounds them.

Petersburg is an astonishing composition that blends much of what many love about 19th century Russian Lit with a daunting symbolist aesthetic that practically swallows its strands of plot into a prenatal existence. Sure, there is a narrative – a bomb, politics, parricide – but the crux of Petersburg is the dazzling imagery and false signifiers that Bely relentlessly cascades from every page.

The novel is nearly as concerned with shapes as it is with humans. Cubes, pyramids and, yes, even parallelepipeds are given the same (and on occasions more) notice than the men and women who stroll about them. The result is a dizzying and at times hallucinatory painting of a city and  a world where symbolic sensation does not correspond to the stimulus.  Everything is caught in an integument of shapes and sensations with nowhere to expand. Nowhere is this captured better than in the case of Alexandr Ivanovich.

His ephemeral descent into delirium is perhaps the most perfectly realized account of madness I have read in any Russian novel (and if we’re talking madness here, Russian authors hold the throne imo). I would try to describe the end of chapter six, but my words would be impotent. I will simply sum it up with the word “enfranshish” and remark that it involves a giant bronze horse come to life and a host of other things that make for some breathtaking reading along the lines of Gogol although, and its hard for me to say, likely better.

There is plenty more to talk about here – language, narration, bodily deatchment, repetition – but I would simply like to say that this is a book worth reading. Well worth reading. It’s astonishing.

Mikhail Vrubel’s “A Seated Demon” (1890)

THE “YAWNING CHASM BETWEEN REASON AND FEELING”: THE DÆMONIACAL/DIONYSIAN SEDUCTION OF THE ABYSS IN RUSSIAN SYMBOLIST POETRY

The catalyst for the literary explosion of the Russian Silver Age can be accurately traced to Symbolism. Symbolism was imported into Russia during the fin de siècle from France, where such pioneers as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry had helped to engineer it as the first truly modern poetic style. Members of the Russian intelligentsia, an amalgamation of petty nobles from the old aristocracy (dvoriane) and the mandarins of the Russian bureaucratic class, were generally educated in the French language. They were thus aware of recent literary trends afoot in France, and were often receptive to their cultural influence.

“On the Causes of the Present Decline and New Currents in Contemporary Russian Literature,” a long critical essay by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, was published in 1892, setting in motion the Symbolist movement in Russia. In this essay he bemoaned the poverty of literary genius in Russia after the death of Dostoevskii. He felt that there should be a distinctly modern literary form to express the content of modernity — content which had been shaped by the aftermath of the epistemological crisis of Kant. Citing the example of the French Symbolism, Merezhkovskii proposed that Russian poets adopt a similar poetic program and attempt to transcend the limits of knowledge. His argument captured the literary imagination of the day, and many responded to his national call for a fresh poetic form to frame the content of modernity.

The Russian language lent itself well to Symbolist verse, and soon Konstantin Balmont, Valerii Briusov, and Fedor Sologub established themselves as the premier representatives of the new genre. Cafés, clubs, and salons began to thrive as popular purlieus for Symbolist intellectuals. The æsthetic philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde were frequent topics of discussion. Its incorporation of the religious philosophy of Vladimir Solovev, which was widely-read at the time, also helped secure Symbolism’s favorable public reception. The further assimilation of nineteenth-century Russian influences such as Gogol and Leskov, Symbolism swiftly gained acceptance amongst the intelligentsia and cultural elite. After the initial wave of Symbolism had won the general recognition of the Russian public, Aleksandr Blok, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Andrei Bely eventually surfaced as the new poetic masters in the movement. Blok’s career would be celebrated in all its stages, and he was judged by many to be the greatest national poet since Pushkin. His poem “The Stranger” became a defining piece of Russian literature. Bely, a longtime friend of Blok’s, was likewise adored in his time, publishing Petersburg in 1916, which would go on to become one of the most famous literary accounts of life in the Russian imperial capital. With the successful promotion of the Symbolist æsthetic, Russia was finally ushered into the modern European literary discourse.†

Symbolist ideals began to formally appear in the critical literature of its proponents. That is to say, the reviews and theoretical output which praised Symbolist form and content was itself expressed in quasi-Symbolist style. René Wellek succinctly described the influence of the Symbolist technique upon Russian literary culture:

For the first time, criticism became partly æsthetic, even l’art pour l’art in the French manner, exalting the ‘music’ of verse, the ‘suggestion’ of words, the personal mood of poetic themes. Another strand of criticism or rather literary theory became ‘mystical,’ claiming supernatural knowledge for poetry, ‘miracle-working,’ ‘theurgia.’[1]

Symbolist poetry washed over its audiences as if they had slipped into a phantasmal dream; its words were hazy, ephemeral, tenebrous. The distances described would stretch out, magnified, the surfaces appearing murky and opaque. A strange weight would cling to the air, suspending the listener in the moment of reflection. There would then be a pause along an empty boulevard in evening — then suddenly, the street lamps fade, and vanish into darkness.

• —————— •

Important to our present discussion is a consideration of the theoretical tenets underwriting the practice of Symbolist poetics. And while it would not produce the æsthetic manifestos that would typify its successors, from the outset Russian Symbolism displayed a highly-developed theoretical superstructure in its approach. These theories were deeply rooted in the philosophical language of nineteenth-century German Idealism, which had since Kant and Schiller produced the most thoroughly modern æsthetic philosophies. This language is known for its abstruseness, and much of the technical jargon of Prussian philosophy reappears in Russian Symbolist writings. The critical œuvre of the French Symbolists (particularly Valéry) also profoundly influenced the theoretical ideas of the Russian movement. But the national culture of Russia also had a bearing upon its brand of Symbolism, adding a homegrown idiosyncrasy to its theories. As the Symbolist theoretician Georgii Chulkov pointed out, “[t]he French tied their poetic quests to idealistic tendencies in the spirit of Kant, Hegel, and Fichte; the pioneers of Russian Symbolism sought justification for their poetry in a mystical world view.”[2]

From an historical perspective, it is important to consider the different media through which the Symbolists issued their theoretical statements. The public reception of the Symbolist movement can scarcely be imagined without reference to the art journals which published their treatises, critiques, and reviews. When the movement first began in Russia, no exclusively Symbolist publications existed. Fortuitously, however, several ambitious new journals had sprouted up toward the end of the nineteenth century which were friendly to aspiring artistic movements. Sergei Diaghilev’s Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) was founded in St. Petersburg in 1898 as a forum for the premier innovators, art critics, and theoreticians of the Russian avant-garde in all its variety (poetry, music, theater, ballet). It provided a collaborative environment in which the leading artistic minds of the day could participate in discussing the new art. Symbolist theoreticians occasionally contributed to this journal, and its wide readership helped popularize the movement. In 1904, the first properly Symbolist journal, Vesy (The Scales), was established in Moscow under the editorial supervision of Briusov. Reviews and poems appeared alongside articles on theosophy and anthroposophy, and an impressive correspondence with European authors helped it to gain international standing. The foundation of Vesy led to a flowering of Symbolist publications, and other journals soon came into existence. These were often supported by the most prominent poets in the movement. The most notable of these journals, Zolotoe runo, was created in 1906, and Blok, Briusov, Bely, Ivanov, Merezhkovsky, and Sologub were all involved in its publication. A minor schism eventually led to antagonism between the two journals, with Briusov, Bely, and Merezhkovsky writing in Vesy, while Blok, Ivanov, and Chulkov remained in Zolotoe Runo. But this internal strife was short-lived. In 1912, another major journal, Trudy i dni (Work and Days), was founded with the support of Blok, Bely, and Ivanov. This publication would last until 1916, and would represent the last great Symbolist periodical.[3]

The theoretical principles of the Symbolists serve to unveil the connections their æsthetics had with their corresponding social and political ideals, all of which reflected the deep-seated religiosity of their philosophy. The hallucinatory imagery evoked in a Symbolist poem, the rapturous feeling of its revelation — these features had their foundation in a concrete and developed literary theory. The Symbolist movement “stated emphatically that art becomes religion by the magic of the symbol, that art is a revelation of a higher reality, which it achieves with the creation of a new mythology. This new poetic myth…would transform not only society but all reality.” [4] They thus professed their faith in the transformative power of artistic expression. Such a belief is clearly utopian,† and not in just an æsthetic/poetic/prosaic sense. It is equally a theologico-political statement inasmuch as it proposes a unifying spiritual orientation by which society might actualize itself (one easily sees the potential for a Romantic interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, perhaps a Nietzschean æstheticism). This Symbolist credo was neatly compatible with some of the predominant aspects of the Russian intellectual tradition, which had since the nineteenth-century been enchanted by the romance of peasant mysticism. The actualization of this social possibility was for Symbolism implicitly revolutionary, but with a Nietzschean twist, as Chulkov revealed in his 1908 article “The Veil of Isis”:

The theme of revolution…is a cunning theme. It is not possible to include every revolutionary act in the chain of those historical phenomena that make up the living bridge from plurality to unity, from the transient to the absolute. The revolutionary struggle takes on theurgic significance only if it is Dionysian. We must listen to the rhythm of a given epoch in order to define its character in respect to the principle of Dionysianism. As Nietzsche says precisely: ‘in the music of a given nation its orgaistic [sic] experiences are perpetuated.’ The greatest musical works of modern times […] reflect in themselves religious moments of revolutionary enthusiasm.[5]

The “living bridge” of antinomical relations within history symbolizes the tremendous dialectical tensions which would give way to widespread revolution, even if we cannot (as Chulkov makes clear) have complete cognizance of their variety. Ordered knowledge of these revolutionary potentialities, itself an Apollonian ideal, is clearly not of primary importance here. Rather, Chulkov asserts that by an æsthetic intuition – if we would only “listen to the rhythm of a given epoch” – we might “define its character in respect to the principle of Dionysianism.” The musical quality of this revelation, along with the fact that it depends on sensible (in this case, audible) intuition, is also a Dionysian motif. The musical idea of counterpoint captures the essence of “the Dionysian principle,” which Ivanov declared to be “antinomial by its nature.” Chulkov makes clear that only through a Dionysian approach might the movement “from plurality to unity, from the transient to the absolute” be apprehended.[6] The “religious moments of revolutionary enthusiasm,” themselves Messianic or portentous of the Messianic, further illustrates the mystical emphasis within Symbolist philosophy.

Indeed, the theoretical ideas of Nietzsche exercised an explicit influence over Symbolist theory, particularly in his conception of the Dionysian feature of Greek æsthetics (as indicated in the passage cited above). Ivanov exclaimed this to be the greatest accomplishment of the German philosopher: “Nietzsche returned Dionysus to the world: this was his mission and his prophetic madness…The charm of Dionysus gave him an immense influence on our epoch and made him the forger of our future.”[7] This referred to the frenzied, orgiastic spirit of the historic cults of Dionysus, which rejoiced in carnal excess. The Dionysian furthermore contained a religious dimension, as these flights of intoxication were thought to channel mystical forces of inspiration. It allowed for them to partake in the dispensations of the Absolute, to become oracular vessels for its proclamations. For many Symbolist intellectuals, the pagan figure of Dionysus was not altogether at odds with their prior Christological notions. Many young poets studied the writings of Gnostic Christianity, intrigued by some of the mystical veins of thought that resulted from its heresy (if one considers it such). Moreover, the Biblical descriptions of the miracles of early Christianity (speaking in tongues, mystical visions, eschatological prophecies) seemed to align somewhat with the tales of ecstatic outbursts, wild hallucinations, and prophetic insights in the Dionysian cults. Furthermore, as Ivanov pointed out, obvious parallels can be seen between the respective mythologies of Jesus Christ and Dionysus. Both were born the son of a god, and were thereafter sacrificed and resurrected. The material symbol for each is wine. Thus, many of the leading Russian Symbolists held an interest in both Christian Messianism and Dionysianism.[8]

The Dionysian æsthetic was characterized by chaotic movement and mutability, and was epitomized by the artistic form of music. It was by its nature “musical, dissolving, and centrifugal.” The Dionysian was contrasted by Nietzsche against the Apollonian, which was usually represented by the artistic forms of sculpture or architecture. By contrast with the former, the Apollonian was “formative, cohesive, and centripetal.” [9] The Symbolists embraced Dionysian themes wholeheartedly, incorporating them into their poetry, prose, and theoretical writings. Briusov went so far as to claim that within Symbolism and without, “the very concept of beauty is not immutable,” turning his back on thousands of years of Western (Apollonian) metaphysics.[10] Ivanov was so enamored by the Dionysian mystique that he named his St. Petersburg club “The Dionysian.” And while it is true that Bely scoffed at the vogue mysticism of Dionysianism (“Apollo or Dionysus? God have mercy, what a joke! Apollo, Dionysus — these are only artistic symbols…”), Bacchanalia held a definite appeal for the artistic imaginations of the Symbolists.[11]

Balmont, among the most renowned of the early Russian Symbolists, elaborated on the musical dimension of Dionysianism dealt with their æsthetic theory. In an article he published in 1900, “An Elementary Statement about Symbolist Poetry,” he described the way in which the “special language” of Symbolist poetry strives to achieve a musical quality in its formal presentation:

…[T]hese are the basic outlines of Symbolist poetry: it speaks its own Symbolist poetry: it speaks its own special language, and this language is rich with intonations; like music and painting it arouses a complex mood in the soul — more than any other kind of poetry, it affects our aural and visual impressions, forces the reader to pass along the reverse path of creativity: a poet, creating his Symbolist work, goes from the abstract to the concrete, from idea to image.”[12]

This attention to Symbolist poetry’s effect on the soul indicates readily enough the telos of Symbolist metaphysics, which is further explained in the next section. But crucial to our present analytic is to consider the “intonational” and “musical” aspects of the Symbolist language meant to influence the audience. This clearly suggests the Dionysian emphasis on formal musicality. Also of note is the manner in which Balmont describes the movement of the Symbolist poem “along the reverse path of creativity…from the abstract to the concrete, from idea to image.” This is significant for two reasons. First, the idea of dynamic movement (as in the poem) is essentially Dionysian. Secondly, the starting points of each movement (the abstract, the idea) also hint at Dionysian themes. For the abstract and the eidetic are ideationally intangible, ambiguous, and obscure, while the concrete and imagistic are tangible, definite, and clear. The former set of qualities falls under the Dionysian æsthetic, while the latter set falls under the Apollonian.

This dual aspect, with its move from the Dionysian into the Apollonian (“from the abstract to the concrete”), is the very essence of music. As Ivanov wrote in a 1912 treatise, “[m]usic is embodied in a visual manifestation: the Apollonian vision emerges above the gloom of the Dionysian frenzy: indivisible and yet not combined is the Pythian dyad, the soul. But the soul, as the beholder (epopt) of the mysteries, is not abandoned without some instructive vision clarifying that which is perceived by consciousness.”[13] According to Andrei Bely’s 1903 theoretical essay, “Symbolism as a World View,” it is this internal movement from one æsthetic to the other (Dionysian to Apollonian) so described by Balmont and Ivanov which reveals the essential truth of Symbolist poetry to our consciousness. This revelation is the first “Nietzschean moment” within Symbolist poetry, the tragic moment. It is a window into the chthonic recesses of the Absolute, a negative moment inspiring a sense of awe mixed with terror:

The blending of essence (the spirit of Dionysus) with the visible world (the spirit of Apollo) is our tragedy, that movement of the hand to the eyes as a blinding light takes away our sight and circles before our eyes become monsters, which we take for the real representation of essence. A time will certainly come when we can remove our hand from our eyes, when we will renew our faith in the external. But t will never be possible to forget what we have seen. One may turn away. Turning away is a form of terror for us, whereas turning toward the depths is a form of terror for those around us. Both forms of terror guard us in our position on the border between pessimism and tragedy, criticism and symbolism.

The negativity of these “depths” should be obvious to the reader. Our metaphysical apprehension (apperceptive and categorical) of the world limits us to only see objects as though “through a glass, darkly,” as the Apostle Paul recorded. Those shadows on the wall which we take for reality (Plato), that illumined finger pointing to the moon which we take for the moon itself (Augustine) — these merely constitute the phenomenal realm. It is the brilliance of the ideal that casts those shadows, the radiance of the moon which illuminates the finger — these are the images which symbolize the noumenal realm. For Bely, the intimation of the noumenal divine demands that we remove ourselves from the world of appearances, pulling back the veil that cloaks the divine light. But this is a terrifying perception, because the noumenal world appears as the absolute negation of the phenomenal world with which we are familiar. Where one is finite, the other is infinite; where one is particular, the other is universal. Qua antinomical, it is the absolute non-identity of the phenomenal, essentially abysmal. “A great chasm opens up at our feet,” writes Bely, “the moment we tear the mask off phenomena. We are terrified by the abyss separating us from the sleepers on the other side.”[14] This abyss is what Merezhkovskii had called the “limitless and dark ocean that lies beyond the limits of our own cognition,” the noumenal realm first posited by Kant — unfathomable and ineffable, but at the same time irresistible.[15] This irresistibility was expressed by Ivanov as he declared the goal of Symbolist theater as being “to throw a torch into the black chasm yawning beneath everyone’s feet in order to illuminate with its fleeting ray the bottomless immensity. But this is an almost Dionysian tremor and ‘rapture on the edge of a gloomy abyss.’”[16]

This conception of the numinous Absolute as including dæmonic (that is, negative) energies is not peculiar to Symbolist philosophy. It is a theme common to many forms of mysticism. It is not altogether incompatible with certain strains of mystical Christianity (though this negativity is a positive attribution of God’s character, and thus does not constitute an apophatic theology). For these energies comprise what the prominent German Protestant religious philosopher Rudolf Otto dubs the tremenda majestas, or “aweful majesty,” of the numinous. Indeed, the “Dionysian tremor” described by Ivanov corresponds closely to the “numinous tremor” of the “orgé” of “the Wrath of Yahweh” detailed by Otto.[17] The Judeo-Christian God certainly possesses the capacity for negation, commonly referred to as His “wrath.” As far as the subjective experience of the numinous is concerned, however, the mystical Absolute is shown to be the complete negation of the world of phenomena. But this negativity is abstract, and its absolute Nothingness can be equally seen as absolute Being, just as a void and a plenum would equally appear to be perfectly static and intractable (therefore identical, as Hegel realized). Before the infinite positivity of the absolute Being in the numinous, our own phenomenal being would seem to be its negative. Or, as Otto explained it in his 1920 book, The Idea of the Holy:

We come upon ideas, first, of the annihilation of self, and then, as its complement, of the transcendent as the sole and entire reality. These are the characteristic notes of mysticism in all its forms, however otherwise various in content. For one of the chiefest and most general features of mysticism is just this self-depreciation (so plainly parallel to the case of Abraham), the estimation of the self, of the personal ‘I,’ as something not perfectly or essentially real, or even as a mere nullity, a self-depreciation which comes to demand its own fulfillment in practice in rejecting the delusion of selfhood, and so makes for the annihilation of the self.[18]

The feeling of terror in the face of this great beyond is therefore quite understandable. One’s very selfhood is eradicated in the moment of universality, absolutely annulled. For as Balmont pointed out, even the greatest voyager into this mystical Absolute was swallowed up by its negativity. “The philosopher of decadence [i.e., Symbolism],” Balmont wrote, “is Friedrich Nietzsche, an Icarus who perished, who was able to make wings for himself, but who couldn’t give his wings the strength to withstand the burning fire of the all-seeing sun.”[19] Ivanov, by contrast, asserted that Nietzsche avoided being consumed by the chaos of the Dionysian, but only by fleeing from it. He wrote: “Nietzsche saw Dionysus — and reeled away from Dionysus, as Faust recoils from the luminous orb in order to admire in order to admire its reflections in the rainbows of the waterfalls.” To Ivanov, this betrayal constituted the philosopher’s greatest error. “Nietzsche’s tragic guilt,” he wrote, “lies in his not having believed in the god whom he himself revealed to the world.”[20] Bely offered the third and most accurate opinion, which acknowledged that Symbolism’s philosophical (and programmatic) debt to Nietzsche could hardly be overstated, whether or not he had fled from the abyss:

Nietzsche was…a meteor. He brought depths to us from immortal distances. And even though the friendly battle over the traveler to Eternity has not subsided, we are all somehow more serious in his wake than we were before. We no longer have the same short-sighted naïveté…For even if that explosive charge of eternal fire has streamed by so close to us today, nothing can preserve us from the eternal perils. A certain indelible new mark has been left on us all in the wake of the wise Nietzsche.[21]

Despite the apparent decision of Nietzsche to retreat from the Dionysian (suggested by Ivanov), the Symbolists felt it their duty to venture further into the Absolute which it revealed. Ivanov felt that the Symbolist had little choice in pursuing this goal; “the spellbinding insistence and powerful voice of the abyss,” as Ivanov called it, always beckons the poet of modernity, whispering into his ear, echoing in his nightmares. It speaks with the voice of Mephistopheles, seducing him with promises of dæmonic insight. He sees visions of other worlds — they rise up out of the vapors of his subconscious and slowly dissipate, but are not forgotten. Blok explained: “[t]he worlds that appear in the light of the radiant sword become more and more appealing; melancholic musical sounds, appeals, whispers, almost words, already float from their depths.”[22] For the Symbolist, the Absolute cries out to him with a singular command, articulated by Ivanov: “Follow the powers that are cast down and seethe in the bottomless depths, into the chasm yawning with the murky eyes of madness!”[23] True, this path was frightening, but to many young poets its charms proved irresistible.

From the outset of the movement, Merezhkovskii announced the exploration of the Absolute as the explicit (if unavoidable) task of Russian Symbolism. The Kantian wall which separates mankind from the Unconditioned realm of the noumenal had to be torn down. Merezhkovskii set this down as the great commission of the modern age, writing in his 1892 manifesto:

No matter where we go, no matter how we try to hide behind the dam of scientific criticism, we feel with our whole essence the proximity of the secret, the proximity of the ocean. There are no boundaries! We are free and alone! …It is not possible to compare any subjugated mysticism of past ages with this horror. Never before have people felt with their hearts the necessity of believing and understood with their reason the impossibility of believing. The most characteristic feature of [nineteenth] century mystical aspiration is contained in this ailing, insoluble dissonance, this tragic contradiction, in the unheard-of intellectual freedom, in the audacity of negating.[24]

Merezhkovskii’s wife, Zinaida Gippius, expressed this same sentiment in poetic form, even more eloquently than her husband. Many of the same symbols (the ocean, an abyss) and themes (the impossibility of faith) recur. In her 1893 poem “Helplessness,” for instance, she wrote:

I’m looking to the sea with greedy eyes,

Chained to the earth above the coastal foam…

I stand on an abyss – above the skies,

Yet cannot fly toward the azure dome.

Should I rebel – or give up all the way?

I lack courage either to live or die…

My God is near me, but I cannot pray.

I want love – and cannot love.

Stretch my arms toward the sun, toward the sun…

A curtain of pale clouds is draped about.

It seems I can know truth, but I am one

Who cannot find the words to speak it out.[25]

The condition of modernity is fraught with anxiety. One wants desperately to believe, but finds himself incapable of faith. The Enlightenment quest to vanquish myth in all its forms, to achieve perfect rational consciousness, contains within it the seed of its own undoing. There is the feeling that one is standing at the cusp of some fathomless oblivion (“I stand on an abyss”), lost in the black infinity of an ocean at twilight. There islands of memory drift by, fragments of a shattered history, but even these are devoured by the voracious tide. Whether the conscious mind could still be called sane in the face of such incomprehensibility is difficult to determine. But it would seem likely that the rational mind, designed only for phenomenal apprehension, would be driven mad by the limitless horizons of the noumenal. The finitude of consciousness is overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of this oceanic unconscious. One finds himself on the brink of his own annihilation, searching desperately, as Ivanov did, for answers to the most cosmic of questions: “[W]hence has the Soul of the World come? from the bluing crystal of untold differences? from the light blue nimbus of unuttered proximity?”[26]

But for the Symbolists, in the madness that would result from an encounter with the Absolute, there is Truth. Or as Briusov put it in his review of Balmont, “[t]he limits of consciousness will expand and be submerged by that immensity which we now call the unconscious. But in that barely conceivable future these mysterious powers will attain their full flowering and make man in all aspects of life more discerning, more sensitive, more commanding.”[27] According to Symbolist æsthetic theory, art is thus a means for “ecstasy, of supersensible intuition.” The Absolute which is merely posited as a possibility by rational philosophic inquiry is intuited as an actuality by irrational æsthetic sensitivity. This is the second Nietzschean moment within Symbolism. Once the terror of the Absolute recedes, one attains the “heaven of truth” — the culmination of the Absolute Spirit coming to know itself. However, this would this would not be achieved by ratiocination, as Enlightenment philosophers proposed, reflection (and subsequent Notion), as Hegel had supposed, or by the denial of volition, as Schopenhauer had thought; rather, by intuition mankind would be delivered into the Messianic kingdom of the Absolute Spirit. Schopenhauer came close to this, but was bogged down by the prejudices he inherited from Kantian metaphysics. In a piece from 1904, Briusov stated it thus:

The only answer that can hope to answer these [metaphysical] questions is intuition, inspired guessing — the method that philosophers and thinkers, who have sought the solution to the mystery of existence, have used in all ages. And I will point to one solution to the enigma of art that belongs precisely to a philosopher, which — it seems to me — gives an explanation to all those contradictions. This is the answer of Schopenhauer. The philosopher’s own æsthetics are too closely tied to his metaphysics. But, tearing his guessing loose from the restricting chains of his thought, freeing his teachings about art from his accidentally entangled teachings about ‘ideas,’ the intermediaries between the worlds of noumena and phenomena — we arrive at a simple and clear truth: art is the comprehension of the world by other, non-rational ways. Art is what in other areas we call revelation. Works of art are doors half-opened to Eternity.[28]

Against the theoretical protocols of vulgar Realism, the greatest rival force in Russian literature at the time, the Symbolists “protest[ed] against the idea that the task of literature is to photograph the way people live” (to invoke Bely’s polemical quip).[29] The revolutionary mentality of the Symbolists was for the most part confined to a revolution in æsthetics, to a revolutionary form of art. By contrast, Realist literature overflowed with theories of political revolution, to a revolutionary content for art. Having restricted their goal to depicting the world of the profane, the Realists had no hope of ever reaching the sacred world of the Absolute. In one of the early formulations of Symbolist artistic theory, Balmont directed the negativity of criticism against the profanity of literary Realism, simultaneously positing the sacredness of the Symbolist enterprise:

While the realist poets regard the world naïvely, as simple observers, subservient to its material basis, Symbolist poets, re-creating materiality with their complex sensitivity, rule the world and penetrate its mysteries. The realist poets’ consciousness goes no further than the limits of earthly life, defined with the exactness and with the deadly boredom of mileposts. Symbolist poets never lose Ariadne’s mysterious thread that connects them with the worldwide labyrinth of Chaos. They are always fanned by whiffs that come from a place beyond the limits, so that, as if against their will, the dull roar of still other voices, not theirs, seems to be heard beyond the words they pronounce. One senses the speech of the elements, fragments from choirs, resounding in the Holy of Holies, of the Universe we imagine […] We feel the proximity of something new and unknown for us, and looking for the talisman, we go, we depart for someplace further along, further and further.[30]

While he is here clearly preoccupied with questions of æsthetics, and not of politics, the critical tone of Balmont’s language reflected the polemical style of political critiques from this period. He employs condescending terms in arguing that the Realists’ approach is superficial, calling their methods essentially “naïve,” “simple,” and “subservient.” And while Balmont immediately transitions from this caustic negativity into an eloquently positive account of Symbolist poetics, the original hostility should not be ignored. It prefigures what will be detailed in the next section as the “politics of æsthetics” which dominated Russian literary discourse during the Silver Age.

• —————— •

Stylistically, the Russian Symbolists had much in common with their French counterparts. Their techniques each suggested a sort of spiritual intimacy with language, an almost magical immediacy, and a meticulous attention to the sound and order of their verses. With Symbolist poetry, Bely wrote in 1909, “the musical force of sound is resurrected in the word, as we are once again captivated, not by the meaning, but by the sound of words.”[31] In the world of contemporary Russian literature, however, this marked a major departure from the formal Realism that had formerly held preponderance. Whereas the realists before them considered the straightforwardly constative function of language to be basically equivalent to its performative function (to use J.L. Austin’s terminology), the Symbolists celebrated ambiguity and obscurity. Metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, and irony were all used heavily. The poetic word was not to be simply descriptive, “informative,” or “referential”; in Symbolist poetry it was instead intended to awaken noumenal energies that hibernate in the human soul. To the Symbolists, “the poetic word [was] seen as a mystical Logos, reverberating with occult meanings.”[32] Thus, it would appear that the direct meaning a word conveyed often was a secondary consideration to the sound, shape, and feeling it conjured in its listeners.

The ultimate linguistic, poetic, and eidetic object for the Symbolists was the symbol. In the first theoretical statement of Russian Symbolism, Merezhkovskii invoked Goethe’s dictum that “a poetic work should be symbolic.” With that literary authority behind him, Merezhkovskii asked the essential question (i.e., its “whatness”): “What is a symbol?” The articulation of an answer to this question would constitute a good deal of the early theoretical writings of Russian Symbolism. For Merezhkovskii, it was the seduction of the noumenal energies flowing beneath the phenomenal appearance of things. It was a consummately idealistic (and therefore spiritualistic) affair: “You sense it [the allure of the symbol] in a breath of ideal human culture, a symbol of the free Hellenic spirit.” But this is merely an empirical account, a subjective treatment of the feeling the symbol inspires. As to its objective constitution, Merezhkovskii had this to say: “An artistic symbol is hidden under a realistic detail.” This preternatural concealment of the symbol is what necessitates its revelation by spiritual means. But these cannot be mined from reality though a conscious effort. They must manifest themselves by their own ideal spontaneity, which the sensitive consciousness might apprehend through intuition. Or, in Merezhkovskii’s words, “[s]ymbols should naturally and unintentionally pour from the depths of reality.”[33]

However, this did not exhaust the manifold of meaning claimed by the Symbolists for the symbol, and many of the other leading theorists of Russian Symbolism helped lend definition to the concept. Chulkov stressed the religious significance of the symbol, citing the archaic meaning of its root: “The worshippers of Demeter understood symbalon as a holy sign that stood for the secret of divinity. Let’s decide to have a symbol signify that incarnation of æsthetic experience which opens up a number of mystical potentials that lead to the absolute.”[34] Its purpose was not simply logical (as Logos), but rather to be mythological and poetic (as Mythopoesis). Or, as Ivanov explained it, “[t]he holy word, heiròs lógos, turns into the word as mythos.”[35] Hence the “mystical potentials” of the symbol are unlocked by its invocation. The mythopoetical word allowed for the religious experience of symbolic language. “Mythopoesis,” wrote Ivanov, “allows us to reach the desired end of achieving the most symbolic revelation of reality.”[36]

The Symbolists took the human spirit as their metaphysical telos, objectifying their own subjectivity in search of that unconditioned Absolute which grounds all consciousness (spirit, mind, Geist). Intimations of this Absolute, as described earlier, granted the only transcendent possibility for the human spirit. The poetic symbol was a means to unlock the gates to this great beyond, the sacred shibboleth that would grant entry into the Absolute. Since its concern was to reach the ideal realm of the Absolute, the æsthetic philosophy of Symbolism can be said to have been idealist. This idealism was essentially egocentric — in other words, it studied the “multiplicity [of thoughts] within the unity” of consciousness, to use Leibniz’s terminology. Recognition of the unity of the ego could only be accomplished by reference to some outside (though ideal) object which was not the subject (not-I), which would be implied by the variety of thought contained within the ego’s cognition. Sologub explained it as follows: “The aspiration toward unity, toward Me, can originate only in that which is My polar opposite — the many, the not-I. But all streams must flow together into one sea and not be lost in the quicksand of the divided multitude.”[37] All objects were thus contained within the consciousness of the subject. However, some theorists (Ivanov in particular, contra Sologub) were careful to qualify Symbolist idealism as fundamentally objective and realistic, and not purely subjective and idealistic (as in Berkeley’s idealism). The ideal worlds that fell under the gaze of the Symbolist were universal. Realistic symbolism rests on the discovery of what Blok called “the objectivity and reality of ‘those worlds,’” where “it is positively confirmed that all the worlds we visit and all the events that take place in them are not at all ‘our notions,’ i.e., that the ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ have more than a personal meaning.”[38]

This requires some explication. Crudely wrought in the terms of German Idealism (the terms in which they were all thinking anyway), the Symbolists can thus be said to have come to generally Fichtean, Schellingean, Hegelian, or Shopenhauerian conclusions with regard to the Absolute and its relationship to the individual subject. That is to say, they felt either that the true “in-itself” source that inspired their knowledge was entirely numinous, indescribable, inaccessible (Kant), or could be approximated “for-the-self” through mystical, reverential acts of self-abnegation (Schelling). The result was that subjectivity (the human spirit in-itself, or Substance) would perpetually attempt to think itself by objectifying its spiritual contents, only ever arriving at the gravesite of their former consciousness. The individual subject who would ever at the same time be able to identically take himself (i.e., his spirit) as the universal object of his contemplation would have achieved the Absolute (what is referred to in Hegelian terms as the identical subject-object). That is to say, a human consciousness would realize that its subjective mind is the psychic theater upon which all objective relations exist (and subsist), and would at the same time be perfectly aware of the tiniest convolutions of its thought. For Symbolism, it is “sufficient [that] the thought [occur] that the whole world is in me to penetrate deeply into consciousness.”[39] Thus, the spiritual truths which Symbolism aspired to were objectively real, and not just subjectively ideal. Or, as Ivanov explained it, “the principle of Idealistic Symbolism [is] psychological and subjective, [while] the principle of Realistic Symbolism [is] objective and mystical.”[40]

A prose selection from Bely’s Petersburg illustrates the idealist phenomenology inherent to the æsthetic psychology of Symbolism. In perceiving a mustachioed stranger, the individual mind

…[is] like Zeus: out of his head [flow] goddesses and genii. One of these genii (the stranger with the small black mustache) arising as an image, ha[s] already begun to live and breathe in the yellowish spaced. And he maintain[s] that he had come from there, not from the [individual’s] head. This stranger turn[s] out to have idle thoughts too. And they also possessed the same qualities.

They [the thoughts] would escape and take on substance.[41]

Later in that same chapter, Bely reaffirms the reality of the ideal objects (in this case, the stranger) of the mind: “Once [one’s] brain has playfully engendered the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists, really exists. He will not vanish from the Petersburg prospects as long as the [consciousness] with such thoughts exists, because thought exists too.”[42]

The objectification of the self and the subjectivization of the world are simultaneous processes for the Symbolist. Symbolic art furthermore leads to the transcendental æstheticization of all phenomena, the intersection of art and life. “[M]y own magical world,” Blok wrote, “has become the arena of my actions my ‘anatomical theater,’ or puppet show, where I myself play a role alongside my amazing dolls (ecce homo!)…The ocean† is my heart, in it everything is equally magical: I don’t differentiate between life, dreams, or death, this world or other worlds…”[43] These “amazing dolls” adamantly insist upon their autonomous existence, even if (ideally) their objective presence is predicated upon the self’s subjectivity. Of their own accord they “escape and take on substance.” Even physical representations begin to correlate to the metaphysics of thought, especially in our cognition of thought as objective. The coarse matter which we identify with our ideal processes becomes spiritually symbolic for us. For, as Bely writes, the individual’s “cranium [becomes] the womb of thought-images, which at once bec[o]me incarnate in this spectral world [of the mind].”[44]

The corporeal universality of the incorporeal ego (the instantaneous objectivity of subjective thought) arises, and reifies and relives itself, through the magical power of words. For the Symbolists, words were the glue which monistically bound objects beheld with the subjective beholder. Bely elucidated this in his 1909 theoretical essay, “The Magic of Words”:

Supra-individual consciousness and supra-individual nature first meet and become joined in the process of naming. Thus consciousness, nature and the world emerge for the cognizing subject only when he is able to create a designation. Outside of speech there is neither nature, world, nor cognizing subject…The word connects the speechless, invisible world swarming in the subconscious depths of my indivisible world swarming in the subconscious depths of my individual consciousness with the speechless, senseless world swarming outside my individual ego. The word creates a new, third world: a world of sound symbols by means of which both the secrets of a world located outside me and those imprisoned in a world inside me come to light. The outside world spills over into my soul. The inside world spills out of me into the break of day and the setting sun, into the rustling of trees. In the word and only in the word do I recreate for myself what surrounds me from within and from without, for I am the word and only the word.[45]

For the most part, Symbolist philosophy was not solipsistic. Briusov and Sologub were notable exceptions to this to this rule. But the general feeling was that symbolic words help to overcome the cognitive impasse of isolated individualism. The mythopoetic word of Ivanov’s conception imbues our conscious perception with concrete reality. Chulkov arose to its defense against the “decadence” of extreme individualism in “The Veil of Isis.” Ivanov’s “theme of mytho-creation†…as a religious and æsthetic theme” revealed the “religious social process” of human experience. Chulkov wrote: “The essence of a religious society is an individual finding a personality for himself, i.e., beyond the transient psychological experiences, finding his I for himself, as a principle that unites him with the internal side of humanity and the world.”[46] The task of Russian Symbolism was, therefore, as Annenskii even more succinctly described in 1909, “to join the ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ through a sieve of symbols.”[47]

Words were not only constitutive of our world, but especially symbolic words additionally possessed a transcendental power that enabled to transport the listener beyond the vulgarity of everyday life. Following the philosophical aphorisms of the great German poet Novalis, the Symbolists rejected the philistinism of the mundane. The routine of the everyday was an experience most often marked by boredom (or “ennui,” as they loved to express it). Often they would take quotidian locales as settings for their poems, using symbolic language to peel back the phenomenal veneer to glimpse the noumenal energies flowing beneath. The human spirit could only realize itself through contact with the numinous Absolute, which requires for one to abandon “the language of daytime consciousness and external experience,” in order to achieve the “noumenal openness…of a somnambulist, marching through the world of essences under the cover of night.” Contrasted against the spiritual emptiness of daily routine, Ivanov magnificently described the fulfillment of absolution:

In order to preserve his individuality a man limits his craving for fusion with ‘infinity,’ his aspiration for ‘self-oblivion,’ ‘destruction,’ ‘merging with the slumbering world,’ and the artist turns to the brightest forms of daytime existence, to the patterns of the ‘cover woven from gold,’ that was thrown over the ‘world of secret spirits, the nameless abyss,’ by the gods — i.e., the abyss that cannot find its name in the language of daytime consciousness and external experience…And still the most valuable moment in our experience and the most prophetic in creativity is delving into that contemplative ecstasy, where ‘there is no barrier’ between us and the ‘uncovered abyss’ […][48]

As individuals who have peered out into this abyss, followers of the Symbolist movement had insight into a reality that was immeasurably more profound than the everyday world, which was beset by its countless frivolities. The numinous journey of the soul into the expanses of the Absolute therefore appears to have been for it a sort of mystical Aufhebung (its synchronous annihilation and preservation). The initial tragedy of that first terrifying movement into the Absolute culminates and finally yields the second moment — theurgy. This is where the “contemplative ecstasy” of absolution results in the actions “most prophetic in creativity.”

Whereas the tragic moment was destructive, the theurgic moment is essentially creative. Crediting Soloviev with its discovery, Bely defined theurgy as “the union of the summits of symbolism in art with mysticism.” Nietzsche’s romance with the Dionysian was seen by Bely as a striving toward the climactic moment of theurgism.[49] Likewise, Ivanov defined as theurgic any “act marked with the seal of the divine Name.” Ivanov considered the theurgic moment too sacred to be casually applied to the poet’s activities; theurgy is a truly metasymbolic ideal that guides spiritual creativity. It represents an æsthetic ideal from the standpoint of Redemption, “unattainable,” a holy quest that must remain forever unfulfilled.[50] But Blok was yet more ambitious in his application of theurgy. “A Symbolist,” he wrote, “from the very beginning is a theurgist, that is, a possessor of secret knowledge, behind which secret action stands.” But even he was wise enough to refrain from declaring victory in the Symbolist’s approximation of the divine Name. For in it one must remember that “the Name has [only] almost been guessed”; it is only this humility which saves us from claiming “the dead point of triumph.”[51] The Symbolist poet, as a theurgist, is someone bound to the holiest of missions, himself an embodied reflection of God’s creative genius.

• —————— •

The subjects of Symbolist poetry often verged on the depraved, characterized by violent fits of passion and drunken ravings, and it was therefore considered by many in the public to be a “decadent” form of art. The swaying verse of Aleksandr Blok’s “The Stranger”† simulates a state of acute inebriation, following the poet’s inchoate ideations and obsessive ramblings (“Bewitched by this strangeness so near at hand/ I look through her dark veil and see/ Appear a most enchanted shoreline and/ Enchanted distances for me”). The poem steadily abstracts from its more concrete beginnings, which had been relatively lucid by comparison. The reader gets the sense that Blok intends for the poem to symbolically (in terms of content) convey the states of mind one experiences as he becomes progressively drunker. The poem culminates in Blok’s description of his fixation upon the appearance of a beautiful woman — someone he has never exchanged words with — whose aura contains the most perfect eroticism and mystery. Rapt by the presence of the mysterious stranger, and affected by the “tart wine” which “has pierced into each bend and convolution of [his] soul,” Blok’s drunken vision staggers forth in exquisite detail:

And those black drooping ostrich feathers rise

And fall in my brain evermore…

Together with two blue fathomless eyes

That bloom upon the distant shore.

The ecstasy of this drunken epiphany finally leads Blok to conclude: “In vino veritas.”† Referring back to some of the theoretical ideas which underscored Blok’s practical poetics, wine transports the poet’s soul into the realm of the Absolute. There its sacred truths are revealed to the poet. The notion that drunkenness opened portals into the Holy of Holies can clearly be seen to have caused some moral outrage, despite its romantic appeal.[52]

Even more shocking to the Russian public were Fedor Sologub’s poems, which often contained overtly satanic themes. His sympathetic (even reverential) portrayal of the Devil recalls Baudelaire’s poetic blasphemies — and is informed by Sologub’s familiarity with the long dæmonological tradition of mystical Christianity. In one of his many untitled poems, he describes his prayerful supplication to the Devil in the hour of his peril, identifying Satan as his father:

My ship began to sink beneath me,

As I sailed on the stormy sea.

I called out thus: My devil, Father,

I’m drowning, have mercy, save me!

Don’t let my soul that’s grown embittered

Perish before its precise hour,

And I’ll give my dark days remaining

Unto your blackest evil’s power.[53]

What is this “stormy sea” upon which the poet sails? Setting Sologub’s symbolism into the greater context of Russian Symbolist theory, the reader can easily infer that the poet is here referring to the “limitless and dark ocean” of the Absolute. But he is unprepared to brave this journey alone; he succumbs to the tragic moment of terror in tarrying with the noumenal. Shipwrecked, Sologub cries out for a dæmonic guide to save him from the waters, to grant him some reprieve. He loses himself in satanic prayer, desperate to live.

There is, of course, an occult sophistication to intellectual Satanism which is absent in its more popular conceptions. This must be dealt with before continuing our exegesis of Sologub’s poem. Sologub did not invoke the satanic naïvely. The idea of the dæmon as the revealer of divine mysteries is a common theme in Kabbalistic and Gnostic esoterica. If one takes into account the historical setting in which Sologub was writing, one also notices that renaissance that dæmonological mysticism enjoyed in intellectual circles around the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, a striking parallelism emerges from the consideration of concurrent trends in German philosophy from the same period. The similarities are so extraordinary that one must wonder if some of the German philosophers were not reading Sologub’s poetry, or vice versa.† An excerpt from Leo Löwenthal’s 1920 essay “The Dæmonic” is fairly representative, and helps to capture the essence of Sologub’s meaning in the poem quoted above. Löwenthal’s study from the outset “places itself into the yawning abyss”; the resemblance should already be obvious. In detailing the “ascent” into the Absolute, the philosopher disembarks from the profane into the sacred, and notes the appearance of the dæmonic:

…the ascent remains simple and plainly unambiguous. Only in the more differentiated sphere of the psychical does the dangerous inferno release the entire brew of its forms and grotesque faces. But the man of myth, still caught up in his dream and barely weaned from paradise, begins his confrontation with the most naïve object: with nature, with the exterior. For the total unfolding of all possibilities may only be accomplished by the ego that confronts the subject as object…[E]verything that passes beyond the merely animalistic functions, and yet claims meaningfulness in its immediate reality…becomes the mysterious bearer (rather: the intermediary bearer) of the ultimate forces. Here the dæmonic finds its first abode. It becomes the final explanation in order to interpret what, to the anxious soul, appears to require interpretation. The necessity of finding one’s way in the uncanny and enigmatic character of living and dying thus engender the ‘daimon’ as the true ‘dispenser,’ according to the Greek meaning of the word.[54]

The Symbolist themes thusfar discussed figure prominently into Löwenthal’s account of the Absolute. The scene of action is clearly “the “differentiated sphere of the psychical” (i.e., cognitive, spiritual). For the “man of myth,” the trigger for “the total unfolding of all possibilities” (in attaining the Absolute, where all possibility is actuality — Spinoza, Schelling) is released only by “the ego that confronts the subject as object,” exactly as Ivanov, Bely, and Blok had ascertained. The “uncanny” in experience is anything that transcends our basest vital needs; it quickly multiplies and rips open the phenomenal fabric of our cognition. These spiritual objects “[become] the mysterious bearer…of ultimate forces.” The “daimon” finally appears as a guide to “the anxious soul” (of Bely’s tragic moment), aiding in “[t]he necessity of finding one’s way.” Löwenthal is correct here. The original Greek meaning of “daimon” was “dispenser” or “revealer,” and still appears in this sense in English words such as “demonstrate.”

This is Sologub’s exact meaning in the poem quoted from earlier. The Devil possesses a salvific power in the psychical realm of the Absolute. The satanic not only saves, but also guides the spirit through the rest of its journey in the ocean of the noumenal. Sologub describes this:

The Devil lifted me and threw me

Into a half-rotting boat where

I found a pair of oars before me

And a gray sail, and a bench there.

[…] And I’ve been true, my Father, Devil;

To that pledge I’ve not been remiss –

When I sailed on that stormy ocean

And you saved me from the abyss.

And I will glorify you, Father,

And blame the wicked Day’s abuse.

My curse will stand over the world…

And my seducing will seduce.

The symbolism of the “stormy ocean” and “the abyss” from which the poet was saved obviously allude to the Absolute, as stated earlier. The saving power of the satanic confirms what was asserted just previously. The necessity of the dæmonic revelation of the noumenal seems to validate the conclusions reached in our discussion of Löwenthal. Blok, echoing Sologub’s notion of the dæmonic, held that the theurgic power of the Symbolist rested upon such Mephistophelean guidance. He wrote: “What is created in such a [dæmonic] manner — by the conjuring will of the artist and with the help of many petty dæmons [an allusion to Sologub’s most famous work, The Petty Dæmon], which every artist has at his disposal — has neither beginning nor end [i.e., is Absolute].”[55]

Melancholy or angry reflections upon the world, human nature, and the self mark other poems by the Symbolists, and are often reminiscent of the paroxysms of Dostoevskii’s Notes from Underground. Some of the most embittered sentiments expressed by the Russian Symbolists came from the pen of Zinaida Gippius, who tirelessly debated theory with her peers and launched insults at her enemies. But in her 1905 poetic appraisal of “She” (her own subjectivity as object), Gippius is perhaps at her most critical:

She is gray as dust, as earthly ashes,

In her shameless, despicable vileness.

And I am perishing from just this nearness,

From this inseparable bond which joins us.

The opening stanza clearly indicates that this “other” (“She”) whom the poet is contemplating is actually herself. The “nearness” and “inseparable bond which joins us” reveals this truth. Thus, Gippius’ disdain for this woman (which is her own spirit) “[i]n her shameless, despicable vileness,” is shown to be self-loathing. She continues:

And she is scabrous, yes, and she is prickly,

And she is cold. She is a serpent, too.

And her repulsive, searing, overlapping

Snake scales have wounded me as few things do.

If only I could feel a sharp sting twinging!

But she is flaccid, still, with dull veneer.

She is so like a lump, so very sluggish.

One cannot get to her; she cannot hear.

Coiling around me, stubborn, insinuating,

She hugs and strangles me, crushing me whole.

And this thing that’s so dead, so black, so frightful –

This wretched, loathsome thing is called my soul.[56]

The reader encounters Gippius in her darkest moment — she despises who she is; she longs to be rid of herself. Her disgusted descriptions of herself (too abundant to quote) are above all tragic, since she is of course condemned to her identity. The tone of desperation and defeat seems to suggest that Gippius does not feel that she can do anything to change her sense of self. Such dour content scandalized some segments of the Russian readership. Others, however, embraced these controversial sentiments as embodying the modern age, and celebrated their honesty.

Nevertheless, the Symbolists also displayed an astonishing metaphysical sensitivity in their presentation of more widely accessible topics in their poems. Though the content of their poetry was often introverted and self-referential, they occasionally branched out to deal with broader social themes. Several currents of thought within the movement (beginning with Gippius, Chulkov, and Bely) had sought to shed the “decadent” individualism that characterized early Russian Symbolism. Bely’s 1908 poem “Despair” explores a theme common to Russian poetry in general, but relatively uncommon to Russian Symbolist poetry. In it he lamented over the plight of the Russian people, bemoaning the injustices that had plagued them for centuries. Seeing no viable solution to the exigent problems they faced, Bely called for the Russian people to vanish from the face of the earth, so as to avoid another day of pain:

“Enough: do not wait, do not hope!

Disperse, my poor people, my race!

O torturous years without hope,

Break up, disappear into space.

Long centuries of serfdom and need.

O Motherland, allow me then

Tears for your expanses. I grieve

For your dark empty spaces again: –”[57]

Bely empathizes profoundly with his native culture, yet sees no possibility for redemption. His appeals to familiar scenes from Russian life (as the poem goes on) help indicate the depth of his grief. Bely’s resignation to the fate of his nation also had its roots in a long Russian tradition. Fatalism had been a theme in Russian literature since at least Lermontov, and it is fair to say that the Russian people were receptive to it, however pessimistic its conclusions.

NOTES

Acabei de adquirir, no Brasil, Petersburgo, de Andrei Bely, numa tradução publicada, em 1992, pela Ars Poetica.

Andrei Bely (1880-1934), pseudónimo de Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, é considerado um dos maiores teóricos do Simbolismo russo. A propósito da obra, Vladimir Nabokov considerou-a uma das quatro obras-primas do século XX.

Petersburg is an astonishing composition that blends much of what many love about 19th century Russian Lit with a daunting symbolist aesthetic that practically swallows its strands of plot into a prenatal existence. Sure, there is a narrative – a bomb, politics, parricide – but the crux of Petersburg is the dazzling imagery and false signifiers that Bely relentlessly cascades from every page.

The novel is nearly as concerned with shapes as it is with humans. Cubes, pyramids and, yes, even parallelepipeds are given the same (and on occasions more) notice than the men and women who stroll about them. The result is a dizzying and at times hallucinatory painting of a city and  a world where symbolic sensation does not correspond to the stimulus.  Everything is caught in an integument of shapes and sensations with nowhere to expand. Nowhere is this captured better than in the case of Alexandr Ivanovich.

His ephemeral descent into delirium is perhaps the most perfectly realized account of madness I have read in any Russian novel (and if we’re talking madness here, Russian authors hold the throne imo). I would try to describe the end of chapter six, but my words would be impotent. I will simply sum it up with the word “enfranshish” and remark that it involves a giant bronze horse come to life and a host of other things that make for some breathtaking reading along the lines of Gogol although, and its hard for me to say, likely better.

There is plenty more to talk about here – language, narration, bodily deatchment, repetition – but I would simply like to say that this is a book worth reading. Well worth reading. It’s astonishing.