The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Merezhkovsky, a herald of the later Symbolists, had lost patience with literary strategies devised to create the “illusion of reality.” No writer of genius, he felt, could be motivated by so meager a desire. Since the 1880s, the market for poetry hadbeen growing.In fact,theabundanceofpoetic talentin thispre-WorldWar I generation encouraged later critics to apply retroactively the label “Silver Age” to these decades, invoking as benchmark the glorious “Golden Age” of Pushkin and fabricating between the two eras a direct spiritual bond. This revived passion for non-representational poetic worlds did not occur ina vacuum. Interest in spiritualism, ghosts, se´ances, exorcism, folk taboo, and the ethnography of religious cults had flourished throughout the Age of Realism as a vigorous minor line investigating “Homo Mysticus.”2 By century’s end, curiosity about metaphysical and visionary experience had become a legitimate topic of study in learned circles. The founding, in 1885, of the Moscow Psychological Society at Moscow University fed a resurgence of interest in Kant and German Romantic philosophy.3 Professors and philosophers openly identified themselves as “idealists” – but this did not imply reclusive mystics or ivory-tower intellectuals. Idealists argued passionately in the public arena against the reigning tenets of positivism (the theory, made famous by Auguste Comte [1798–1857], that valid knowledge is received solely through sense experience) and on behalf of the autonomy of philosophy, professionalization in all disciplines, and non-reductive approaches to the human being. Spiritual life had reemerged as a serious competitor among public ideologies promising to restore human dignity. Several events in particular were key for the three Modernist writers whose novels are the focus of this chapter.

168 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The fin de sie`cle: Solovyov, Nietzsche, Einstein, Pavlov’s dogs, political terrorism

Between 1877 and 1881, Russia’s first great speculative philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900) delivered a series of spellbinding lectures in St. Petersburg on what he called “Divine Humanity” or “Godmanhood.”4 The audience included both a skeptical Tolstoy and an enthusiastic Dostoevsky, who was Solovyov’s good friend. The first lecture was devoted to Russia’s need for “positive [or affirmative] religion,” understood as the striving toward an absolute or ideal principle, which was the opposite of materialist positivism. “Contemporary religion is a pitiful thing,” Solovyov declared. Reduced to a ritual, “a personal mood, a personal taste,” it was no longer able to inspire or unite humanity. Several candidates had been put forward to fill the void, but all had proven inadequate: the institution of the Church, the ideals of socialism, the French Revolution, empirical science. Christian faith provided one part of the solution, by affirming the unconditional significance of each individual in the eyes of God. But secular humanism must complement this faith and converge with it.

A second factor in this religious renaissance, and seemingly at cross purposes to it, was the profound impact on Russian culture of Friedrich Nietzsche. Debts here were varied and vast. The ideas of the “super-human,” a radical reassessment of all values, and a “will to power” that could bestow health, dignity, and autonomy on creative artists naturally appealed to the tiny trapped Russian intelligentsia. The debt was to some extent reciprocal. In 1888, Nietzsche had remarked that the Dostoevskian underground “contained the most valuable psychological material known to him” – suggesting that the German philosopher was prone to take seriously metaphysical worldviews that Dostoevsky subjected to cruel satire; the novelist’s doubts were congenial to Nietzsche, the Christian epiphanies were not. Still, turn-of-the-century Russians found much to admire in Nietzschean thought. Symbolist journals like Mir iskusstva [The World of Art] translated broad swaths of Nietzsche’s prose. Especially popular were the ideas of Zarathustra as proud artist-leader, the social misfit as above society (not superfluous to it), and an “existential renewal and vital mythic vision” that would replace utilitarian moral criticism.5

The first generation of Russian Symbolism coincided with a renaissance of interest in Classical Greece and Rome, and to this group the most vital mythic vision revealed by Nietzsche was the myth of Dionysus. In that vision, the life force is simultaneously destructive and creative, cyclical, rebellious, ecstatic, at times nihilistic, but always transformative. The end point of Russian Dionysianism was a “new man.” For some, this coveted figure coincided with

Symbolist and Modernist world-building 169