Silver age of Russian culture. Who coined the term "silver age" Define the term "silver age"

16.07.2019

"Silver Age"

"Silver Age"

The period in the history of Russian culture since the 1890s. at the beginning 1920s Traditionally, it was believed that the first to use the expression "silver age" was the poet and literary critic of the Russian emigration N. A. Otsup in the 1930s. But this expression gained wide popularity thanks to the memoirs of the art critic and poet S.K. Makovsky “On the Silver Age Parnassus” (1962), who attributed the creation of this concept to the philosopher N.A. Berdyaev. However, neither Otsup nor Berdyaev were the first: this expression is not found in Berdyaev, and before Otsup it was first used by the writer R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik in the middle. 1920s, and then the poet and memoirist V. A. Pyast in 1929.
Validity of naming con. 19 - beg. 20th century "Silver Age" raises certain doubts among researchers. This expression is formed by analogy with the "golden age" of Russian poetry, which the literary critic, friend A.S. Pushkin, P. A. Pletnev called the first decades of the 19th century. Literary critics, negatively related to the expression "Silver Age", pointed to the ambiguity of which works and on what basis should be attributed to the literature of the "Silver Age". In addition, the name "Silver Age" suggests that in artistic terms, the literature of this time is inferior to the literature of the Pushkin era ("golden age").
The boundaries of the "Silver Age" are conditional. Its beginning in literature coincides with the birth symbolism, its completion can be considered 1921 - the year of the death of A.A. Blok, the most famous symbolist poet, and the year of execution of N. S. Gumilyov, founder acmeism. However, references to the poetry of the "Silver Age" can be traced in the late works of A.A. Akhmatova, O. E. Mandelstam, B. L. Pasternak, in the works of poets of the group OBERIU. The literature of the "Silver Age" is symbolism and currents that arose in dialogue and struggle with symbolism: acmeism and futurism. And symbolism, and acmeism, and futurism are literary movements related to modernism. The relative unity of the literature of the "Silver Age" is given by the system of images created by the Symbolists and inherited from Symbolism.

Literature and language. Modern illustrated encyclopedia. - M.: Rosman. Under the editorship of prof. Gorkina A.P. 2006 .


See what "Silver Age" is in other dictionaries:

    SILVER AGE, the symbol of the cultural era in the history of Russia at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries. and entered into criticism and science from the late 1950s - early 1960s. Genesis The expression "Silver Age" goes back to ancient tradition (division of history ... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

    The Silver Age is a period in the history of Russian culture, chronologically associated with the beginning of the 20th century, coinciding with the era of modernism. This time also has the French name fin de siècle ("end of the century"). For more details, see Silver Age ... ... Wikipedia

    silver Age- (St. Petersburg, Russia) Hotel category: 3 star hotel Address: Vosstaniya street 13 … Hotel catalog

    silver Age- (Tarusa, Russia) Hotel category: 4 star hotel Address: Mayakovskaya Street 5, Tarusa … Hotel catalog

    silver Age- (Suzdal, Russia) Hotel category: Address: Gasteva Street 28 B, Suzdal, Russia ... Hotel catalog

    Showcase #4, October 1956. First appearance of the new version of The Flash. This comic is considered the beginning of the Silver Age of comics. Artists Carmine Infantino and Joe Kubert Silver Age of Comic Books title ... Wikipedia

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    The heyday of Russian culture at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. (1890s - 1917), the successors of Pushkin's brilliant "golden age". The term "Silver Age", according to those who introduced it into use (poet N. A. Otsup, philosopher N. A. Berdyaev, critic ... ... Art Encyclopedia

    Silver Age- a period in the history of Russian culture, chronological. associated with the beginning 20th century, coinciding with the modern era. The expression was first used in 1928 by N. Otsup, correlated with the expression Golden Age, which was often called the Pushkin era, the 1st third of the 19th century. More often … Russian humanitarian encyclopedic dictionary

    - ... Wikipedia

Books

  • Silver Age. Memoirs, "Silver Age" - a special era, covering the end of the past and the beginning of our century, the pre-revolutionary time. The proposed book is a story about outstanding writers of the beginning of the century. I. Anensky, A.… Category: Memoirs of writers and poets Publisher: Izvestia,
  • Silver Age. Memoirs, "Silver Age" - a special era, covering the end of the past and the beginning of our century, the pre-revolutionary time. The proposed book is a story about outstanding writers of the beginning of the century through the mouths of prominent ... Category:

Who first started talking about the "Silver Age", why this term was so disgusting to contemporaries and when it finally became a commonplace - Arzamas retells the key points of Omri Ronen's work "The Silver Age as Intention and Fiction"

Applied to the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, the concept of "Silver Age" is one of the fundamental ones for describing the history of Russian culture. Today, no one can doubt the positive (one might even say “noble”, like silver itself) coloring of this phrase - opposed, by the way, to such “decadent” characteristics of the same historical period in Western culture as fin de siècle (“the end century") or "the end of a beautiful era." The number of books, articles, anthologies and anthologies, where the "Silver Age" appears as an established definition, simply cannot be counted. Nevertheless, the appearance of the phrase, and the meaning that contemporaries put into it, is not even a problem, but a whole detective story.

Pushkin at the lyceum exam in Tsarskoye Selo. Painting by Ilya Repin. 1911 Wikimedia Commons

Every time has its own metal

It is worth starting from afar, namely, with two significant examples when the properties of metals are attributed to an era. And here it is worth mentioning the ancient classics (primarily Hesiod and Ovid), on the one hand, and Pushkin's friend and co-editor on Sovremennik, Pyotr Aleksandrovich Pletnev, on the other.

The first imagined the history of mankind as a succession of various human races (in Hesiod, for example, gold, silver, copper, heroic and iron; Ovid would subsequently abandon the age of heroes and prefer the classification only “according to metals”), alternately created by the gods and eventually disappearing off the face of the earth.

The critic Pyotr Alexandrovich Pletnev first called the era of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Pushkin and Baratynsky the "golden age" of Russian poetry. The definition was quickly accepted by contemporaries and by the middle of the 19th century it had become a commonplace. In this sense, calling the next great surge of poetic (and not only) culture the “silver” age is nothing but humiliation: silver is a metal much less noble than gold.

So it becomes clear why the humanities scholars, who emerged from the cultural cauldron of the turn of the century, were deeply disgusted by the phrase "silver age". These were the critic and translator Gleb Petrovich Struve (1898-1985), the linguist Roman Osipovich Yakobson (1896-1982) and the literary historian Nikolai Ivanovich Khardzhiev (1903-1996). All three spoke of the "Silver Age" with considerable irritation, directly calling such a name erroneous and incorrect. Interviews with Struve and Jacobson's lectures at Harvard inspired Omri Ronen (1937-2012) to explore the sources and reasons for the rise of the term "Silver Age" in a fascinating (almost detective) way. This note only claims to be a popular retelling of the work of the remarkable scholar-erudite "The Silver Age as intent and fiction."

Berdyaev and the memoirist's mistake

Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky (1890-1939), one of the most influential critics of the Russian diaspora and the author of one of the best "History of Russian Literature", preferred to call the cultural abundance surrounding him the "second golden age". In accordance with the hierarchy of precious metals, Mirsky called the era of Fet, Nekrasov and Alexei Tolstoy the “Silver Age”, and here he coincided with the philosophers Vladimir Solovyov and Vasily Rozanov, who allotted for the “Silver Age” a period from approximately 1841 to 1881.

Nikolai Berdyaev Wikimedia Commons

It is even more important to point out that Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948), who is traditionally credited with the authorship of the term "Silver Age" in relation to the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, actually imagined cultural development in much the same way as his colleagues in the philosophical workshop . According to the established tradition, Berdyaev called the Pushkin era the golden age, and the beginning of the 20th century, with its powerful creative upsurge, the Russian cultural (but by no means religious) renaissance. It is characteristic that the phrase "silver age" is not found in any of Berdyaev's texts. In attributing to Berdyaev the dubious fame of the discoverer of the term, several lines from the memoirs of the poet and critic Sergei Makovsky "On the Parnassus of the Silver Age", published in 1962, are to blame:

“The languor of the spirit, the desire for the “beyond” has permeated our age, the “Silver Age” (as Berdyaev called it, as opposed to Pushkin’s “Golden Age”), partly under the influence of the West.”

The mysterious Gleb Marev and the emergence of the term

The very first writer who worked at the turn of the century and declared his own era the "Silver Age" was the mysterious Gleb Marev (almost nothing is known about him, so it is possible that the name was a pseudonym). In 1913, under his name, the pamphlet “Vsedury. Gauntlet with Modernity”, which included the manifesto of the “End Age of Poesi”. It is there that the formulation of the metallurgical metamorphoses of Russian literature is contained: “Pushkin is gold; symbolism - silver; modernity is a dull-coppered all-fool.”

R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik with children: son Leo and daughter Irina. 1910s Russian National Library

If we take into account the quite probable parodic nature of Marev's work, it becomes clear the context in which the phrase "Silver Age" was originally used to describe the modern era for writers. It was in a polemical vein that the philosopher and publicist Razumnik Vasilyevich Ivanov-Razumnik (1878-1946) spoke, in the article of 1925 "Look and Something" poisonously mocking (under Griboedov's pseudonym Ippolit Udushyev) over Zamyatin, "Serapion Brothers" "Serapion Brothers" - an association of young prose writers, poets and critics, which arose in Petrograd on February 1, 1921. The members of the association were Lev Lunts, Ilya Gruzdev, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Veniamin Kaverin, Nikolai Nikitin, Mikhail Slonimsky, Elizaveta Polonskaya, Konstantin Fedin, Nikolai Tikhonov, Vsevolod Ivanov., acmeists and even formalists. The second period of Russian modernism, which flourished in the 1920s, Ivanov-Razumnik contemptuously dubbed the “Silver Age”, predicting the further decline of Russian culture:

Four years later, in 1929, the poet and critic Vladimir Pyast (Vladimir Alekseevich Pestovsky, 1886-1940), in the preface to his memoirs "Meetings", spoke seriously about the "silver age" of contemporary poetry (it is possible that he did this in the order of the dispute with Ivanov-Razumnik) - although very inconsistently and prudently:

“We are far from claiming to compare our peers, “eighties” by birth, with representatives of some kind of “Silver Age” of Russian, say, “modernism”. However, in the mid-eighties, a rather significant number of people were born who were called to "serve the muses."

Piast also found the "golden" and "silver" ages in classical Russian literature - he tried to project the same two-stage scheme onto contemporary culture, speaking of different generations of writers.

The Silver Age is getting bigger

Magazine "Numbers" imwerden.de

The expansion of the scope of the concept of "Silver Age" belongs to the critics of the Russian emigration. The first to spread the term, applying it to the description of the entire pre-revolutionary era of modernism in Russia, was Nikolai Avdeevich Otsup (1894-1958). Initially, he only repeated Piast's well-known thoughts in a 1933 article entitled "The Silver Age of Russian Poetry" and published in the popular Parisian émigré magazine Chisla. Otsup, without mentioning Piast in any way, actually borrowed from the latter the idea of ​​two centuries of Russian modernism, but threw out the “golden age” from the 20th century. Here is a typical example of Otsup's reasoning:

“Belated in its development, Russia, due to a number of historical reasons, was forced to carry out in a short time what had been done in Europe for several centuries. The inimitable rise of the "golden age" is partly explained by this. But what we have called the “Silver Age”, in terms of strength and energy, as well as the abundance of amazing creatures, has almost no analogy in the West: these are, as it were, phenomena squeezed into three decades, which occupied, for example, in France throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."

It was this compilation article that introduced the expression "silver age" into the lexicon of the Russian literary emigration.

One of the first to pick up this phrase was the well-known Parisian critic Vladimir Vasilievich Veidle (1895-1979), who wrote in his article “Three Russias” published in 1937:

“The most striking thing in the recent history of Russia is that that silver age of Russian culture, which preceded its revolutionary collapse, turned out to be possible.”

Members of the Sounding Shell Studio. Photo by Moses Nappelbaum. 1921 On the left - Frederica and Ida Nappelbaum, in the center - Nikolai Gumilyov, on the right - Vera Lurie and Konstantin Vaginov, below - Georgy Ivanov and Irina Odoevtseva. Literary Crimea / vk.com

Here the new term for the era is just beginning to be used as something obvious, although this does not mean that it was from 1937 that the idea of ​​the “Silver Age” has already become public domain: the morbidly jealous Otsup in a revised version of his article, which was published after the death of the critic , specially added the words that it was he who first owned the name "to characterize modernist Russian literature." And here a reasonable question arises: what did the "figures" of the "Silver Age" era think about themselves? How did the poets themselves define themselves, representing this era? For example, Osip Mandelstam applied the well-known term “Sturm und Drang” (“Storm and Drang”) to the era of Russian modernism.

The phrase "silver age" as applied to the beginning of the 20th century is found only in two major poets (or rather, poetesses). In Marina Tsvetaeva's article "The Devil", published in 1935 in the leading Parisian émigré magazine "Modern Notes", the following lines were removed during publication (they were later restored by researchers): we, the children of the silver age, need about thirty pieces of silver.”

From this passage it follows that Tsvetaeva, firstly, was familiar with the name "Silver Age"; secondly, she perceived it with a sufficient degree of irony (it is possible that these words were a reaction to the above reasoning of Otsup in 1933). Finally, perhaps the most famous are the lines from Anna Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero:

On Galernaya arch darkened,
In Summer, the weather vane sang subtly,
And the silver moon is bright
Frozen over the Silver Age.

Understanding these lines is impossible without referring to the broader context of the poet's work, but there is no doubt that Akhmatova's "Silver Age" is not a definition of an era, but a common quotation that has its own function in a literary text. For the author of “A Poem Without a Hero”, dedicated to summing up the results, the name “Silver Age” is not a characteristic of the era, but one of its names (obviously not indisputable) given by literary critics and other cultural figures.

Nevertheless, the phrase under discussion quickly lost its original meaning and began to be used as a classification term. Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov wrote in the preface to the poetic anthology of the turn of the century: “The poetics of the Silver Age in question is, first of all, the poetics of Russian modernism. This is how it is customary to call three poetic trends that announced their existence between 1890 and 1917 ... ”So the definition quickly took hold and was accepted on faith by both readers and researchers (it is possible that for lack of a better one) and spread to painting, sculpture, architecture and other areas of culture.

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"Silver Age"… The atmosphere of this period was created not only directly by creative artists. But also organizers of artistic life, famous patrons. According to the legend, he called this golden page of Russian culture the “Silver Age” philosopher Nikolay Berdyaev. The poetry of the Silver Age was marked by a spiritual outburst unparalleled in the history of culture. We know only a small part of the cultural wealth accumulated by mankind. Poets and philosophers of the "Silver Age" sought to master all layers of world culture.

It is customary to define the boundaries of the "Silver Age" in just a quarter of a century: 1890-1913. However, these boundaries are highly contested on both sides. In scientific works, the beginning is usually taken as the middle of 1890 - Merezhkovsky and the early Bryusov. Anthologies - starting from the time of the famous anthologies of Yezhov and Shamurin - usually begin with Vl. Solovyov, whose poetics was formed back in the 1870s. The collection "Sonnet of the Silver Age" opens with Pleshcheev. At the beginning of the century, Gogol, Tupgenev, Dostoevsky were attributed to the predecessors of modernism. The Symbolists placed at the origins of their school either Sluchevsky and Fofanov, or Aeschylus - and almost the poetry of Atlantis.

To the question: “When did the Silver Age end? a normal average intelligent person will answer: "October 25, 1917." Many will name 1921 - marked by the death of Blok and Gumilyov. But the poets of the "Silver Age" include Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, who created their poems after 1920 and after 1930.

The work of some poets of the post-revolutionary era does not fit into the framework of socialist realism. Therefore, the poet's reference to the "Silver Age" would be more correctly determined not by dates, but by poetics.

The poets of the "Silver Age" are interested in the poetic possibilities of the word, the subtle shades of meanings in poems. Epic genres are rare in this era: A. Blok's poem "The Twelve", M. Kuzmin's "Trout breaks the ice", but these works lack a coherent plot.

The form in the "Silver Age" plays a major role, poets experiment with the word, rhyme. Each author is brightly individual: you can immediately determine who owns those or other lines. But everyone strives to make the verse more tangible so that everyone can feel every line.

Another feature of the poetry of the "Silver Age" is the use of mystical meanings, symbols. Mysticism painted with itself eternal themes: love, creativity, nature, homeland. Even small details in the verses were given a mystical meaning...

The poetry of the "Silver Age" is tragic, imbued with a sense of universal catastrophe, motives for death, destruction, withering - hence the term "decadence". But the end is always the beginning, and in the minds of the poets of the "Silver Age" there is a premonition of the beginning of a new life, grandiose, glorious.

The complexity and ambiguity of the Silver Age worldviews gave rise to many poetic trends: symbolism, acmeism, futurism.

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