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Symbolism rules people. Literature as the main form of art

Symbolism rules people. Literature as the main form of art

27.01.2019

Symbolist subjects

Symbolist subjects are often full of abstract fantasies, combined with biblical, ancient, medieval lines development of action. The interpretation of these stories is colorful and varied.

Typological for symbolism is peaceful-religious rural picture"Adoration of the Magi" by Maurice Denis.

Literature as main view art

Symbolism is primarily a verbal art, which, using Rimbaud’s formula, can be called the “alchemy of words.” In other words, for symbolism the main art form is literature. In literature, the forerunner of symbolism was Baudelaire, who argued: “everything for me becomes an allegory” (at the same time, no distinction was made between allegory and symbol, as, for example, in his title famous collection poems "Flowers of Evil").

But symbolism also manifested itself in the visual arts. However leading value literature for this artistic movement was also evident in this case. Thus, Böcklin believed that a symbolist painting should resemble poetry, produce an impression like a musical piece and encourage the viewer to think.

The arts are divided into spatial (for example, painting) and temporal (for example, music). Symbolists are musical. They are musical not only in music, but in poetry and even in painting. They strive to overcome the absolute spatiality of painting and introduce the time factor into it.

Russian symbolist prose is quite representatively represented by the work of Andrei Bely, combining biblical, mythological, real and fantastic motifs.

In impressionism, vision dominates hearing and other senses. In symbolism, on the contrary, hearing dominates, so musicality permeates all types of symbolist art. It reigns both in poetry and in painting. In symbolism everything is musical. In Russian literature, symbolism continued to have an influence until the post-revolutionary period, and this influence was felt, in particular, in Blok’s poems “The Twelve” and “Scythians”.

Music

Music by its very nature is a symbolic art and therefore it is no coincidence that symbolism as artistic direction was especially successfully realized in the work of composers. Researchers note the “incantatory” quality of symbolist music (Cash register. 1998. P. 394). This music is a clot of cosmic energy, the cry of things.

The music of most Symbolist composers was influenced by Richard Wagner, who is often called a “pre-Symbolist.” There is an atmosphere of mystery in his music. In his work, he carried out the synthesis of poetry and music characteristic of symbolism.

A genre of rhythmic imitation of music appears in poetry, and composers often associate their music with poems and plays by symbolist writers (Pelléas and Mélisande by Debussy, Salome by Richard Strauss). In music, German symbolism was embodied in the work of the early Richard Strauss.

Critics noted the influence of symbolism in music in Scriabin's symphonic "Poem of Fire".

Painting

In painting, the predecessors of the Symbolists were the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti, Hunt and Millais, who were oriented towards the knightly Middle Ages.

Gustave Moreau, born in 1827, is considered the leading symbolist artist. His art gained recognition in the 1870s. His painting "Island of the Dead" became famous. The artist depicted a gloomy island: dark silhouettes of cypress trees pierce the sky, with looming rocks all around. A boat approaches this mysterious island, on which rises a white figure, wrapped in a shroud. At the end of the 19th century. Reproductions from the painting “Isle of the Dead” decorated many living rooms.

In addition to Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon (France), Arnold Böcklin (Switzerland) and Edward Burne-Jones (Great Britain), who began as a Pre-Raphaelite, are widely known. The lines and colors in symbolist painting are mysteriously bizarre. The images are neither in outline nor in color similar to real objects.

Artists often illustrate books by symbolist writers (for example, Beardsley’s illustrations for Wilde’s “Salome”), and sometimes paintings are inspired by books by symbolist writers.

In Italy, the artist Carlo Kappa in 1908, in the spirit of symbolism, painted “Apocalyptic Horsemen”.

In Russian painting, the artists of the World of Art joined the Symbolists.

The subjects of paintings by symbolist artists are mythological, mystical or fantastic. V. Serov's painting "The Rape of Europa" was initially conceived as a wall panel with a large color plane and a monumental composition, but remained on canvas. This work is decorative. Art critic N. Dmitrieva believes that its rhythmic lines are vaguely reminiscent of Cretan-Mycenaean paintings, and its decorativeness is combined with a subtle intimate mood. The graceful “archaic” figure of Europe on the back of a bull shrank - she was afraid of the heavy rolling waves (see: Dmitrieva. 1993. P. 148).

Symbolism (French Symbolisme) is one of the largest movements in art (in literature, music and painting), which arose in France in the 1870-80s. and reached its greatest development at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily in France itself, Belgium and Russia. The symbolists radically changed not only various types of art, but also the very attitude towards it. Their experimental nature, desire for innovation, cosmopolitanism and wide range of influences became a model for many modern trends art.

[edit] Terminology

Jean Moreas

The term “symbolism” in art was first coined by the French poet Jean Moreas in the manifesto of the same name - “Le Symbolisme”, published on September 18, 1886 in the newspaper “Le Figaro”. In particular, the manifesto proclaimed:

Symbolic poetry is the enemy of teaching, rhetoric, false sensibility and objective description; it strives to clothe the Idea in a sensually comprehensible form, but this form is not an end in itself, it serves the expression of the Idea without leaving its power. On the other hand, symbolic art resists the idea of withdrawing into itself, rejecting the magnificent robes prepared for it in the world of phenomena. Pictures of nature, human actions, all the phenomena of our life are significant for the art of symbols not in themselves, but only as tangible reflections of the primordial Ideas, indicating their secret affinity with them... Symbolist synthesis must correspond to a special, pristinely wide-ranging style; hence the unusual word formations, periods that are either awkwardly ponderous or captivatingly flexible, meaningful repetitions, mysterious omissions, unexpected reticence - everything is bold and figurative, and the result is a beautiful French- ancient and new at the same time - juicy, rich and colorful...

By that time, there was another, already stable term, “decadence,” which was disparagingly used to describe new forms in the poetry of their critics. “Symbolism” became the first theoretical attempt of the decadents themselves, therefore no sharp distinctions, much less aesthetic confrontation, were established between decadence and symbolism. It should be noted, however, that in Russia in the 1890s, after the first Russian decadent works, these terms began to be contrasted: in symbolism they saw ideals and spirituality and, accordingly, manifested it that way, and in decadence - lack of will, immorality and passion for only the external form. Thus, Vladimir Solovyov’s epigram regarding the decadents is known:

Mandrake immanent
They rustled in the reeds,
And the rough-decadent ones
Virshi - in withering ears.

Mikhail Vrubel The Swan Princess

[edit] Origin

The basic principles of the aesthetics of symbolism first appeared in the works of the French poets Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Lautréamont.

Hugo Simberg, Wounded Angel

[edit] Aesthetics

In their works, the symbolists tried to depict the life of every soul - full of experiences, unclear, vague moods, subtle feelings, fleeting impressions. Symbolist poets were innovators of poetic verse, filling it with new, bright and expressive images, and sometimes, trying to achieve an original form, they went into what their critics considered a meaningless play on words and sounds. Roughly speaking, we can say that symbolism distinguishes two worlds: the world of things and the world of ideas. The symbol becomes a kind of conventional sign that connects these worlds in the meaning generated by it. There are two sides to any symbol - the signified and the signifier. This second side is turned towards the unreal world. Art is the key to the mystery.

The concept and image of Mystery, the mysterious, the mystical is manifested both in romanticism and in symbolism. However, romanticism, as a rule, proceeds from the fact that “knowledge of the world is knowledge of oneself, for man is greatest secret, the source of analogies for the Universe" (Novalis). The symbolists have a different understanding of the world: in their opinion, true Being, “truly existing” or Mystery, is an absolute, objective principle to which both Beauty and the world Spirit belong.

Vyacheslav Ivanov in his work “Testaments of Symbolism” succinctly and in a symbolist figurative manner expressed the artistic characteristics and aesthetic principles of the “symbolic” movement in art itself (what was said here about poetry is quite applicable to other types of art):

The special intuition and energy of the word, which is directly felt by the poet as an inscription of the ineffable, absorbs into its sound many echoes from unknown sources and, as it were, echoes of various underground springs...

The following lines of Konstantin Balmont are imbued with the amazing magic of symbolistic imagery, shedding light on the aesthetic principles of symbolism:

Mirror to mirror, match two mirror images, and place a candle between them. Two depths without a bottom, colored by the candle flame, will deepen themselves, mutually deepen each other, enrich the candle flame and unite with it into one. This is an image of a verse. Two lines melodiously go into uncertainty and aimlessness, unrelated to each other, but colored by one rhyme, and looking into each other, they themselves deepen, connect, and form one, radiantly melodious whole. This law of the triad, the connection of two through a third, is the fundamental law of our Universe. Looking deeply, pointing the mirror at the mirror, we will find a singing rhyme everywhere. The world is all vowel music. The whole world is a sculptured Verse. Right and left, top and bottom, height and depth, Sky above and Sea below, Sun during the day and Moon at night, stars in the sky and flowers in the meadow, thunder clouds and huge mountains, the vastness of the plain and the infinity of thought, thunderstorms in the air and storms in soul, deafening thunder and a barely audible stream, an eerie well and a deep gaze - the whole world is a correspondence, order, harmony, based on duality, now spreading into an infinity of voices and colors, now merging into one inner hymn of the soul, into the singularity of a separate harmonious contemplation , into the all-encompassing symphony of one Self, which has accepted the limitless diversity of right and left, top and bottom, height and abyss. Our day is divided into two halves, in which there is day and night. In our day there are two bright dawns, morning and evening, we know in the night the duality of twilight, thickening and discharging, and, always relying in our being on the duality of the beginning mixed with the end, from dawn to dawn we go into clarity, brightness, separateness, expanse, into a sense of multiplicity of life and diversity individual parts the universe, and from twilight to twilight, along a black velvet road strewn with silver stars, we walk and enter the great temple of silence, into the depth of contemplation, into the consciousness of a single choir, the all-united Lada. In this world, playing day and night, we merge two into one, we always transform duality into unity, connecting with our thought, with its creative touch, we connect several strings into one sounding instrument, we merge two great eternal paths of divergence into one aspiration , like two separate verses, kissing in rhyme, unite into one inseparable sonority...

Unlike other movements in art that use elements of their own characteristic symbolism, symbolism considers the expression of “unattainable”, sometimes mystical, Ideas, images of Eternity and Beauty to be the goal and content of its art, and the symbol fixed in the element artistic speech and in its image based on the polysemantic poetic word - the main, and sometimes the only possible artistic means.

The most striking change introduced by symbolism concerns the form of artistic embodiment of its poetics. In the context of symbolism, a work of any kind of art begins to play with poetic meanings; poetry becomes a form of thinking. Prose and drama begin to sound like poetry, the visual arts paint its images, and the connection between poetry and music becomes simply comprehensive. Poetic images-symbols, as if rising above reality, giving a poetic associative series, are embodied by symbolist poets in sound writing, musical form, and the sound of the poem itself is no less important, if not more important, for expressing the meaning of a particular symbol. Konstantin Balmont describes his own sensations from sounds, from which poetic words are then composed:

I, Yu, Yo, I are the pointed, thinned A, U, O, Y. I am obvious, clear, bright. I am Yar. Yu - curling like ivy and flowing into the stream. Yo - melting light honey, flax flower. And - twisting the pothole Y, an impassable pothole, because it’s impossible to pronounce Y without the firm help of a consonant sound. The softened sound words I, Yu, Yo, And always have the face of a wriggling serpent, or a broken line of a stream, or a bright lizard, or it is a child, a kitten, a falcon, or a nimble loach fish...

However, in addition to the musical and poetic (in a broad sense) principles of the embodiment of symbolist images, the very direction of art and its goals are changing. An artist who plays with symbols that carry certain secrets and poetic ambiguity, with his talent reveals in these images some eternal correspondences and interconnections of the world reflected in our consciousness, and thereby sheds light on those very secrets and “ideas” that ultimately , and lead us to Truth, to the comprehension of Beauty. Balmont’s line “a moment of beauty is bottomless in meaning” wonderfully summarizes both the Symbolists’ view of art and their artistic methods: symbols are designed to express with their meaning a certain transcendental beauty of the universe, and they also contain it in the form of their embodiment.

To summarize, we can say that the method of symbolism involves the embodiment of the main ideas of the work in the polysemantic and multifaceted associative aesthetics of symbols, i.e. such images, the meaning of which is understandable through their direct expression by a unit of artistic (poetic, musical, pictorial, dramatic) speech, as well as through its certain properties (the sound signature of a poetic word, the color scheme of a pictorial image, intervallic and rhythmic features of a musical motif, timbre colors etc.). The main content of a symbolistic work is the eternal Ideas expressed in the imagery of symbols, i.e. generalized ideas about a person and his life, the highest Meaning, comprehended only in a symbol, as well as the Beauty embodied in it.

SYMBOLISM(from the French symbolisme, from the Greek symbolon - sign, identifying mark) - an aesthetic movement that formed in France in 1880–1890 and became widespread in literature, painting, music, architecture and theater of many European countries at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries . Symbolism was of great importance in Russian art of the same period, which in art history acquired the definition of “Silver Age”.

Western European symbolism.

Symbol and artistic image. As an artistic movement, symbolism publicly declared itself in France, when a group of young poets, who rallied around S. Mallarmé in 1886, realized the unity of artistic aspirations. The group included: J. Moreas, R. Gil, Henri de Regnault, S. Merrill and others. In the 1990s, P. Valery, A. Gide, P. Claudel joined the poets of the Mallarme group. P. Verlaine contributed greatly to the development of symbolism into a literary movement, who published his symbolist poems and a series of essays in the newspapers Paris Modern and La Nouvelle Rive Gauche Damned poets, as well as J.C. Huysmans, who published the novel Vice versa. In 1886 J. Moreas placed in Le Figaro Manifesto symbolism, in which he formulated the basic principles of the direction, relying on the judgments of C. Baudelaire, S. Mallarmé, P. Verlaine, C. Henri. Two years after the publication of J. Moreas's manifesto, A. Bergson published his first book About the immediate data of consciousness, in which the philosophy of intuitionism was declared, which in its basic principles echoed the worldview of the symbolists and gave it additional justification.

IN Symbolist Manifesto J. Moreas determined the nature of the symbol, which supplanted the traditional artistic image and became the main material of symbolist poetry. “Symbolist poetry seeks a way to clothe an idea in a sensual form that would not be self-sufficient, but at the same time, serving the expression of the Idea, would retain its individuality,” wrote Moreas. Such a “sensual form” in which the Idea is clothed is a symbol.

The fundamental difference between a symbol and an artistic image is its ambiguity. The symbol cannot be deciphered by the efforts of reason: at the last depth it is dark and inaccessible to final interpretation. On Russian soil, this feature of the symbol was successfully defined by F. Sologub: “The symbol is a window to infinity.” The movement and play of semantic shades create the mystery of the symbol. If the image expresses a single phenomenon, then the symbol conceals a whole series of meanings - sometimes opposite, multidirectional (for example, “a miracle and a monster” in the image of Peter in Merezhkovsky’s novel Peter and Alexey). The poet and theorist of symbolism Vyach. Ivanov expressed the idea that a symbol signifies not one, but different entities; A. Bely defined a symbol as “the connection of heterogeneous things together.” The two-plane nature of the symbol goes back to the romantic idea of two worlds, the interpenetration of two planes of existence.

The multi-layered nature of the symbol, its open-ended polysemy was based on mythological, religious, philosophical and aesthetic ideas about super-reality, incomprehensible in its essence. The theory and practice of symbolism were closely associated with the idealistic philosophy of I. Kant, A. Schopenhauer, F. Schelling, as well as F. Nietzsche’s thoughts about the superman, being “beyond good and evil.” At its core, symbolism merged with the Platonic and Christian concepts of the world, adopting romantic traditions and new trends. Without being perceived as a continuation of any particular direction in art, symbolism carried within itself the genetic code of romanticism: the roots of symbolism are in the romantic commitment to a higher principle, the ideal world. “Pictures of nature, human actions, all the phenomena of our life are significant for the art of symbols not in themselves, but only as intangible reflections of primary ideas, indicating their secret affinity with them,” wrote J. Moreas. Hence the new tasks of art, previously assigned to science and philosophy, - to get closer to the essence of the “most real” through the creation symbolic picture world, forge the “keys of secrets”. It is the symbol, and not the exact sciences, that will allow a person to break through to the ideal essence of the world, to pass, according to Vyach.Ivanov’s definition, “from the real to the most real.” A special role in comprehending super-reality was assigned to poets as bearers of intuitive revelations and poetry as the fruit of super-rational inspirations.

The formation of symbolism in France - the country in which the symbolist movement arose and flourished - is associated with the names of the largest French poets: C. Baudelaire, S. Mallarmé, P. Verlaine, A. Rimbaud. The forerunner of symbolism in France is Charles Baudelaire, who published a book in 1857 The flowers of Evil. In search of ways to the “unspeakable,” many symbolists took up Baudelaire’s idea of “correspondences” between colors, smells and sounds. The proximity of various experiences should, according to symbolists, be expressed in a symbol. Baudelaire's sonnet became the motto of symbolist quests Matches with the famous phrase: Sound, smell, shape, color echo. Baudelaire's theory was later illustrated by a sonnet by A. Rimbaud Vowels:

« A» black White« E» , « AND» red,« U» green,

« ABOUT» blue – the color of a whimsical mystery...

The search for correspondences is the basis of the symbolist principle of synthesis, the unification of arts. The motifs of the interpenetration of love and death, genius and illness, the tragic gap between appearance and essence, contained in Baudelaire’s book, became dominant in the poetry of the Symbolists.

S. Mallarmé, “the last romantic and the first decadent,” insisted on the need to “suggest images”, to convey not things, but one’s impressions of them: “To name an object means to destroy three-quarters of the pleasure of a poem, which is created for gradual guessing, to suggest it - that’s the dream.” Mallarmé's poem Luck will never abolish chance consisted of a single phrase, typed in a different font without punctuation. This text, according to the author’s plan, made it possible to reproduce the trajectory of thought and accurately recreate the “state of mind.”

P. Verlaine in a famous poem Poetic art defined commitment to musicality as the main sign of genuine poetic creativity: “Musicality comes first.” In Verlaine's view, poetry, like music, strives for a mediumistic, non-verbal reproduction of reality. So in the 1870s, Verlaine created a cycle of poems called Songs without words. Like a musician, the symbolist poet rushes towards the spontaneous flow of the beyond, the energy of sounds. If the poetry of Charles Baudelaire inspired the symbolists with a deep longing for harmony in a tragically divided world, then the poetry of Verlaine amazed with its musicality and elusive emotions. Following Verlaine, the idea of music was used by many symbolists to symbolize creative mystery.

The poetry of the brilliant young man A. Rimbaud, who first used free verse (free verse), embodied the idea adopted by the Symbolists of abandoning “eloquence” and finding a crossing point between poetry and prose. Invading any, even the most unpoetic, spheres of life, Rimbaud achieved the effect of “natural supernaturalism” in the depiction of reality.

Symbolism in France also manifested itself in painting (G. Moreau, O. Rodin, O. Redon, M. Denis, Puvis de Chavannes, L. Levy-Durmer), music (Debussy, Ravel), theater (Theater Poet, Theater Mixt, Petit Theater du Marionette), but the main element of symbolist thinking always remained lyricism. It was the French poets who formulated and embodied the main precepts of the new movement: mastery of the creative secret through music, deep correspondence of various sensations, the ultimate price of the creative act, orientation towards a new intuitive and creative way of understanding reality, and the transmission of elusive experiences. Among the forerunners of French symbolism were all the greatest lyricists from Dante and F. Villon, to E. Poe and T. Gautier.

Belgian symbolism is represented by the figure of the greatest playwright, poet, essayist M. Maeterlinck, famous for his plays Blue bird, Blind,Miracle of St. Anthony, There, inside. Already Maeterlinck's first poetry collection Greenhouses was full of unclear hints and symbols; the characters existed in a semi-fantastic setting of a glass greenhouse. According to N. Berdyaev, Maeterlinck depicted “the eternal tragic beginning of life, purified from all impurities.” Most contemporary viewers perceived Maeterlinck's plays as puzzles that needed to be solved. M. Maeterlinck defined the principles of his creativity in the articles collected in the treatise Treasure of the Humble(1896). The treatise is based on the idea that life is a mystery in which a person plays a role inaccessible to his mind, but understandable to his inner feeling. Maeterlinck considered the main task of a playwright to convey not action, but state. IN Treasure of the Humble Maeterlinck put forward the principle of “secondary” dialogues: behind the seemingly random dialogue, the meaning of words that initially seem insignificant is revealed. Movement of such hidden meanings made it possible to play with numerous paradoxes (the wonder of the everyday, the sight of the blind and the blindness of the sighted, the madness of the normal, etc.), and to plunge into the world of subtle moods.

One of the most influential figures of European symbolism was the Norwegian writer and playwright G. Ibsen. His plays Peer Gynt,Gedda Gabler,Dollhouse,Wild duck combined the concrete and the abstract. “Symbolism is a form of art that simultaneously satisfies our desire to see embodied reality and to rise above it,” defined Ibsen. – Reality has a flip side, facts have a hidden meaning: they are the material embodiment of ideas, the idea is represented through the fact. Reality is a sensory image, a symbol of the invisible world.” Ibsen distinguished between his art and the French version of symbolism: his dramas were built on the “idealization of matter, the transformation of the real,” and not on the search for the transcendental, otherworldly. Ibsen gave a specific image or fact a symbolic sound, raising it to the level of a mystical sign.

In English literature, symbolism is represented by the figure of O. Wilde. The bourgeois public’s craving for outrageousness, love of paradox and aphorism, the life-creative concept of art (“art does not reflect life, but creates it”), hedonism, the frequent use of fantastic, fairy-tale plots, and later “neo-Christianity” (the perception of Christ as an artist) allow classify O. Wilde as a writer of symbolist orientation.

Symbolism gave a powerful branch in Ireland: one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, the Irishman W.B. Yeats considered himself a symbolist. His poetry, full of rare complexity and richness, was nourished by Irish legends and myths, theosophy and mysticism. The symbol, as Yeats explains, is “the only possible expression of some invisible essence, the frosted glass of a spiritual lamp.”

The works of R. M. Rilke, S. George, E. Verhaeren, G. D. Annunzio, A. Strindberg and others are also associated with symbolism.

Prerequisites for the emergence of symbolism. The preconditions for the emergence of symbolism lie in the crisis that struck Europe in the second half of the 19th century. The reassessment of the values of the recent past was expressed in a rebellion against narrow materialism and naturalism, in greater freedom of religious and philosophical pursuits. Symbolism was one of the forms of overcoming positivism and a reaction to the “decline of faith.” “Matter has disappeared”, “God has died” - two postulates inscribed on the tablets of symbolism. The system of Christian values on which European civilization rested was shaken, but the new “God” - faith in reason, in science - turned out to be unreliable. The loss of landmarks gave rise to a feeling of lack of support, of the ground disappearing from under one’s feet. The plays of G. Ibsen, M. Maeterlinck, A. Strindberg, and the poetry of the French symbolists created an atmosphere of instability, changeability, and relativity. The Art Nouveau style in architecture and painting melted familiar forms (the works of the Spanish architect A. Gaudi), as if it dissolved the outlines of objects in the air or fog (paintings by M. Denis, V. Borisov-Musatov), and gravitated towards a wriggling, curved line.

At the end of the 19th century. Europe achieved unprecedented technological progress, science gave man power over the environment and continued to develop at a gigantic pace. However, it turned out that the scientific picture of the world does not compensate for the problems arising in public consciousness emptiness, reveals its unreliability. The limitations and superficiality of positivist ideas about the world were confirmed by a number of natural science discoveries, mainly in the field of physics and mathematics. The discovery of X-rays, radiation, the invention of wireless communication, and a little later the creation of quantum theory and the theory of relativity shook the materialist doctrine and shook the belief in the unconditionality of the laws of mechanics. The previously identified “unambiguous patterns” were subjected to significant revision: the world turned out to be not just unknown, but also unknowable. The awareness of the fallacy and incompleteness of previous knowledge led to the search for new ways to comprehend reality. One of these paths - the path of creative revelation - was proposed by symbolists, according to whom a symbol is unity and, therefore, provides a holistic view of reality. The scientific worldview was built on the sum of errors - creative knowledge can adhere to the pure source of super-intelligent insights.

The emergence of symbolism was also a reaction to the crisis of religion. “God is dead,” proclaimed F. Nietzsche, thereby expressing the general feeling of the exhaustion of traditional religious teachings in the border era. Symbolism is revealed as new type God-seeking: religious and philosophical questions, the question of the superman - i.e. about a man who challenged his limitations and stood on a par with God is at the center of the works of many symbolist writers (G. Ibsen, D. Merezhkovsky, etc.). The turn of the century became a time of searching for absolute values, the deepest religious impressionability. The symbolist movement, based on these experiences, attached paramount importance to the restoration of connections with the other world, which was expressed in the frequent appeal of symbolists to the “secrets of the tomb”, in the increasing role of the imaginary, fantastic, in a passion for mysticism, pagan cults, theosophy, occultism, and magic. Symbolist aesthetics was embodied in the most unexpected forms, delving into the imaginary, transcendental world, into areas previously unexplored - sleep and death, esoteric revelations, the world of eros and magic, altered states of consciousness and vice. Symbolists were particularly attracted to myths and stories marked by unnatural passions, disastrous charm, extreme sensuality, and madness ( Salome O. Wilde, Fire Angel V. Bryusov, the image of Ophelia in Blok’s poems), hybrid images (centaur, mermaid, snake woman), indicating the possibility of existence in two worlds.

Symbolism was also closely connected with the eschatological premonitions that possessed the man of the border era. The expectation of the “end of the world,” “the decline of Europe,” and the death of civilization aggravated metaphysical sentiments and forced the spirit to triumph over matter.

Russian symbolism and its predecessors. Russian symbolism, the most significant after French, was based on the same prerequisites as Western symbolism: a crisis of positive worldview and morality, heightened religious feeling.

Symbolism in Russia absorbed two streams - “senior symbolists” (I. Annensky, V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, Z. Gippius, D. Merezhkovsky, N. Minsky, F. Sologub (F. Teternikov) and “young symbolists » (A. Bely (B. Bugaev), A. Blok, Vyach. Ivanov, S. Soloviev, Ellis (L. Kobylinsky). M. Voloshin, M. Kuzmin, A. Dobrolyubov, I. Konevskoy were close to the symbolists.

By the early 1900s, Russian symbolism had reached its peak and had a powerful publishing base. The introduction of the Symbolists included: the magazine “Libra” (published since 1903 with the support of the entrepreneur S. Polyakov), the publishing house “Scorpion” , magazine " The Golden Fleece"(published from 1905 to 1910 with the support of philanthropist N. Ryabushinsky), publishing houses "Ory" (1907–1910), "Musaget" (1910–1920), « Vulture (1903–1913), Sirin (1913–1914), Rosehip (1906–1917, founded by L. Andreev), Apollo magazine (1909–1917, editor and founder S. Makovsky).

The generally recognized forerunners of Russian symbolism are F. Tyutchev, A. Fet, Vl. Soloviev. Vyacheslav Ivanov called F. Tyutchev the founder of the symbolist method in Russian poetry. V. Bryusov spoke about Tyutchev as the founder of the poetry of nuances. Famous line from Tyutchev's poem Silentium (Silence) A spoken thought is a lie became the slogan of Russian symbolists. The poet of the night knowledge of the soul, the abyss and chaos, Tyutchev turned out to be close to Russian symbolism in his aspiration to the irrational, inexpressible, unconscious. Tyutchev, who showed the path of music and nuance, symbol and dream, led Russian poetry, according to researchers, “at all directions from Pushkin.” But it was precisely this path that was close to many Russian symbolists.

Another predecessor of the Symbolists is A. Fet, who died in the year of the formation of Russian symbolism (in 1892 D. Merezhkovsky gave a lecture About the reasons decline and new trends in modern Russian literature, V. Bryusov is preparing a collection Russian Symbolists). Like F. Tyutchev, A. Fet spoke about the inexpressibility, the “ineffability” of human thoughts and feelings, Fet’s dream was “poetry without words” (A. Blok rushes to the “unspeakable” after Fet, favorite word Blok - “unspeakable”). I. Turgenev expected from Fet a poem in which the last stanzas would be conveyed by the silent movement of his lips. Fet's poetry is unaccountable; it is built on an associative, “romantic” basis. It is not surprising that Fet is one of the favorite poets of Russian modernists. Fet rejected the idea of the utilitarianism of art, limiting his poetry only to the sphere of beauty, which earned him the reputation of a “reactionary poet.” This “vacuity” formed the basis of the symbolist cult of “pure creativity.” The symbolists adopted the musicality, associative nature of Fet’s lyrics, its suggestive nature: the poet should not depict, but inspire a mood, not “convey” an image, but “open a gap into eternity” (S. Mallarmé also wrote about this). K. Balmont learned from Fet how to master the music of words, and A. Blok found subconscious revelations and mystical ecstasy in Fet’s lyrics.

The content of Russian symbolism (especially the younger generation of symbolists) was noticeably influenced by the philosophy of Vl. Solovyov. As Vyach. Ivanov put it in a letter to A. Blok: “We were mysteriously baptized by the Solovyovs.” The source of inspiration for the symbolists was the image of Hagia Sophia, glorified by Solovyov. Saint Sophia Solovyova is both Old Testament wisdom and Plato’s idea of wisdom, Eternal Femininity and the World Soul, “Virgin of the Rainbow Gate” and the Immaculate Wife - a subtle invisible spiritual principle that permeates the world. The cult of Sophia was received with great reverence by A. Blok and A. Bely. A. Blok called Sofia the Beautiful Lady, M. Voloshin saw her incarnation in the legendary Queen Taiakh. The pseudonym of A. Bely (B. Bugaev) implied dedication to Eternal Femininity. The “Young Symbolists” were in tune with Solovyov’s lack of accountability, turning to the invisible, the “unspeakable” as the true source of being. Poem by Solovyov Dear friend was perceived as the motto of the “Young Symbolists”, as a summary of their idealistic sentiments:

Dear friend, don’t you see,

That everything we see is

Only a reflection, only shadows

From the invisible with your eyes?

Dear friend, don’t you hear?

That everyday noise is crackling -

Only the response is distorted

Triumphant harmonies?

Without directly influencing the ideological and figurative world of the “senior symbolists,” Solovyov’s philosophy, nevertheless, in many of its provisions coincided with their religious and philosophical ideas. After the establishment of the Religious and Philosophical Meetings in 1901, Z. Gippius was struck by the community of thoughts in attempts to reconcile Christianity and culture. Solovyov’s work contained an alarming premonition of the “end of the world”, an unprecedented revolution in history. The Tale of the Antichrist, immediately after publication was met with incredulous ridicule. Among the Symbolists The Tale of the Antichrist evoked a sympathetic response and was understood as a revelation.

Manifestos of Symbolism in Russia. As a literary movement, Russian symbolism took shape in 1892, when D. Merezhkovsky published a collection Symbols and writes a lecture About the reasons for the decline and new trends in modern literature. In 1893, V. Bryusov and A. Mitropolsky (Lang) prepared a collection Russian Symbolists, in which V. Bryusov speaks on behalf of a movement that does not yet exist in Russia - symbolism. Such a hoax corresponded to Bryusov’s creative ambitions to become not just an outstanding poet, and the founder of an entire literary school. Bryusov saw his task as a “leader” in “creating poetry that is alien to life, embodying constructs that life cannot give.” Life is just “stuff,” a slow and sluggish process of existence, which the symbolist poet must transform into “awe without end.” Everything in life is just a means for brightly melodious poetry,” Bryusov formulated the principle of self-absorbed poetry, rising above simple earthly existence. Bryusov became a master, a teacher who led a new movement. D. Merezhkovsky took the role of the ideologist of the “senior symbolists”.

D. Merezhkovsky outlined his theory in a report, and then in a book About the reasons decline and new trends in modern Russian literature. “Wherever we go, no matter how much we hide behind the dam of scientific criticism, with our whole being we feel the closeness of mystery, the closeness of the Ocean,” wrote Merezhkovsky. Merezhkovsky supplemented the thoughts common to theorists of symbolism about the collapse of rationalism and faith - the two pillars of European civilization - with judgments about the decline of modern literature, which abandoned “ancient, eternal, never dying idealism” and gave preference to the naturalism of Zola. Literature can be revived only by a rush to the unknown, the beyond, to “shrines that do not exist.” Giving an objective assessment of the state of literary affairs in Russia and Europe, Merezhkovsky named the preconditions for the victory of new literary movements: the thematic “worn-out” of realistic literature, its deviation from the “ideal,” and its inconsistency with the foreign worldview. The symbol, in Merezhkovsky’s interpretation, pours out from the depths of the artist’s spirit. Here Merezhkovsky defined the three main elements of new art: mystical content, symbols and the expansion of artistic impressionability.

The difference between realistic and symbolic art was emphasized in the article by K. Balmont Elementary words about symbolic poetry. Realism is becoming obsolete, the consciousness of realists does not go beyond the framework of earthly life, “realists are captured, like a surf, by concrete life,” while in art the need for more refined ways of expressing feelings and thoughts is becoming more and more palpable. Symbolist poetry meets this need. Balmont's article outlined the main features of symbolic poetry: a special language, rich in intonation, the ability to arouse a complex mood in the soul. “Symbolism is a powerful force that strives to guess new combinations of thoughts, colors and sounds and often guesses them with particular conviction,” Balmont insisted. Unlike Merezhkovsky, Balmont saw in symbolic poetry not an introduction to the “depths of the spirit,” but a “declaration of the elements.” The attitude towards participation in the Eternal Chaos, “spontaneity” gave in Russian poetry the “Dionysian type” of lyrics, glorifying the “boundless” personality, self-lawful individuality, the need to live in a “theater of burning improvisations”. A similar position was recorded in the titles of Balmont’s collections In the vastness,Let's be like the sun. A. Blok also paid tribute to “Dionysianism”, singing the whirlwind of “free elements”, whirling passions ( Snow mask,Twelve).

For V. Bryusov, symbolism became a way to comprehend reality - the “key of secrets.” In the article Keys of Secrets(1903) he wrote: “Art is the comprehension of the world in other, non-rational ways. Art is what we in other fields call revelation.”

The manifestos of the “senior symbolists” formulated the main aspects of the new movement: the priority of spiritual idealistic values (D. Merezhkovsky), the mediumistic, “spontaneous” nature of creativity (K. Balmont), art as the most reliable form of knowledge (V. Bryusov). In accordance with these provisions, the creativity of representatives of the older generation of symbolists in Russia developed.

"Senior Symbolists". The symbolism of D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius was of a distinctly religious nature and developed in line with the neoclassical tradition. Merezhkovsky's best poems included in collections Symbols,Eternal companions, were built on the “homogenization” with other people’s ideas, were dedicated to the culture of bygone eras, and gave a subjective revaluation of world classics. In Merezhkovsky's prose, based on large-scale cultural and historical material (history of antiquity, the Renaissance, national history, religious thought of antiquity), there is a search for the spiritual foundations of existence, the ideas that move history. In the camp of Russian Symbolists, Merezhkovsky represented the idea of neo-Christianity, looking for a new Christ (not so much for the people as for the intelligentsia) - “Jesus the Unknown.”

In the “electric”, according to I. Bunin, poems of Z. Gippius, in her prose there is a gravitation towards philosophical and religious issues, the search for God. Strictness of form, precision, movement towards classicism of expression, combined with religious and metaphysical emphasis, distinguished Gippius and Merezhkovsky among the “senior symbolists”. Their work also contains many formal achievements of symbolism: music of moods, freedom of conversational intonations, the use of new poetic meters (for example, dolnik).

If D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius thought of symbolism as the construction of artistic and religious culture, then V. Bryusov, the founder of the symbolic movement in Russia, dreamed of creating a comprehensive artistic system, a “synthesis” of all directions. Hence the historicism and rationalism of Bryusov’s poetry, the dream of the “Pantheon, the temple of all gods.” A symbol, in Bryusov’s view, is a universal category that allows one to generalize all truths and ideas about the world that have ever existed. V. Brusov gave a concise program of symbolism, the “testaments” of the movement in a poem To the young poet:

A pale young man with a burning gaze,

Now I give you three covenants:

First accept: don’t live in the present,

Only the future is the domain of the poet.

Remember the second: do not sympathize with anyone,

Love yourself infinitely.

Keep the third: worship art,

Only for him, undividedly, aimlessly.

Affirmation of creativity as the goal of life, glorification of the creative personality, aspiration from the gray everyday life of the present into the bright world of the imaginary future, dreams and fantasies - these are the postulates of symbolism in Bryusov’s interpretation. Another, scandalous poem by Bryusov Creation expressed the idea of intuition, unaccountability of creative impulses.

The neo-romanticism of K. Balmont differed significantly from the work of D. Merezhkovsky, Z. Gippius, V. Bryusov. In the lyrics of K. Balmont , singer of vastness - the romantic pathos of elevation above everyday life, a view of poetry as life-creativity. The main thing for Balmont the symbolist was the celebration of the limitless possibilities of creative individuality, a frantic search for means of its self-expression. Admiring the transformed, titanic personality affected the intensity of life sensations, the expansion of emotional imagery, and an impressive geographical and temporal scope.

F. Sologub continued the line of research begun in Russian literature by F. Dostoevsky on the “mysterious connection” of the human soul with the disastrous beginning, and developed a general symbolist approach to understanding human nature as an irrational nature. One of the main symbols in Sologub’s poetry and prose was the “unsteady swing” of human conditions, the “heavy sleep” of consciousness, and unpredictable “transformations.” Sologub’s interest in the unconscious, his deepening into the secrets of mental life gave rise to the mythological imagery of his prose: so the heroine of the novel Little devil Varvara is a “centaur” with a nymph’s body covered in flea bites and an ugly face, the three Rutilov sisters in the same novel are three moiras, three graces, three harites, three Chekhov sisters. Comprehension of the dark principles of mental life, neo-mythologism are the main signs of Sologub’s symbolist style.

Huge influence on Russian poetry of the twentieth century. influenced the psychological symbolism of I. Annensky, whose collections Quiet songs And Cypress casket appeared at a time of crisis, the decline of the symbolist movement. In Annensky's poetry there is a colossal impulse to renew not only the poetry of symbolism, but also all Russian lyric poetry - from A. Akhmatova to G. Adamovich. Annensky's symbolism was built on the “effects of revelations”, on complex and, at the same time, very objective, material associations, which makes it possible to see in Annensky the forerunner of Acmeism. “A symbolist poet,” wrote the editor of the Apollo magazine, poet and critic S. Makovsky, about I. Annensky , - takes as a starting point something physically and psychologically specific and, without defining it, often without even naming it, depicts a series of associations. Such a poet loves to amaze with an unexpected, sometimes mysterious combination of images and concepts, striving for the impressionistic effect of revelations. An object exposed in this way seems new to a person and, as it were, experienced for the first time.” For Annensky, a symbol is not a springboard for a leap to metaphysical heights, but a means of displaying and explaining reality. In Annensky’s mournful-erotic poetry, the decadent idea of “prison”, the melancholy of earthly existence, and unquenched eros developed.

In the theory and artistic practice of the “senior symbolists”, the latest trends were combined with the inheritance of the achievements and discoveries of Russian classics. It was within the framework of the symbolist tradition that the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Lermontov (D. Merezhkovsky L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, M.Yu. Lermontov. Poet of Superhumanity), Pushkin (article by Vl. Solovyov The fate of Pushkin; Bronze Horseman V. Bryusov), Turgenev and Goncharov ( Books of Reflections I. Annensky), N. Nekrasov ( Nekrasov as a poet of the city V. Bryusova). Among the “Young Symbolists”, A. Bely became a brilliant researcher of Russian classics (book Gogol's poetics, numerous literary reminiscences in the novel Petersburg).

"Young Symbolists". The inspirer of the Young Symbolist wing of the movement was Muscovite A. Bely, who organized the poetic community of the “Argonauts”. In 1903 A. Bely published an article About religious experiences, in which, following D. Merezhkovsky, he insisted on the need to combine art and religion, but put forward other, more subjective and abstract tasks - “to get closer to the World Soul,” “to convey Her voice in lyrical changes.” In Bely’s article, the guidelines of the younger generation of symbolists were clearly visible - “the two bars of their cross” - the cult of the madman prophet Nietzsche and the ideas of Vl. Solovyov. A. Bely’s mystical and religious sentiments were combined with reflections on the fate of Russia: the position of the “Young Symbolists” was distinguished by a moral connection with the homeland (A. Bely’s novels Petersburg, Moscow, article Green meadow, cycle on Field Kulikovo A. Blok). A. Bely, A. Blok, Vyach. The individualistic confessions of the older symbolists, their declared titanism, supra-worldliness, and break with the “earth” turned out to be alien to Ivanov. It is no coincidence that A. Blok called one of his early cycles “ Earth Bubbles", borrowing this image from Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth: contact with the earthly elements is dramatic, but inevitable, the creations of the earth, its “bubbles” are disgusting, but the task of the poet, his sacrificial purpose is to come into contact with these creations, to descend to the dark and destructive principles of life.

From among the “Young Symbolists” came the greatest Russian poet A. Blok, who, according to A. Akhmatova’s definition, became the “tragic tenor of the era.” A. Blok considered his work as a “trilogy of humanization” - a movement from the music of the beyond (in Poems about a Beautiful Lady), through the underworld of the material world and the whirlwind of the elements (in Bubbles of the earth,City,Snow mask, scary world) to the “elementary simplicity” of human experiences ( Nightingale Garden,Motherland,Retribution). In 1912, Blok, drawing a line under his symbolism, wrote: “No more symbolism.” According to researchers, “the strength and value of Blok’s separation from symbolism is directly proportional to the forces that connected him in his youth with the “new art.” The eternal symbols captured in Blok’s lyrics (the Beautiful Lady, the Stranger, the nightingale’s garden, the Snow Mask, the union of the Rose and the Cross, etc.) received a special, piercing sound thanks to the poet’s sacrificial humanity.

In his poetry, A. Blok created a comprehensive system of symbols. Colors, objects, sounds, actions - everything is symbolic in Blok’s poetry. So “yellow windows”, “yellow lanterns”, “yellow dawn” symbolize the vulgarity of everyday life, blue, purple tones (“blue cloak”, “blue, blue, blue gaze”) - the collapse of the ideal, betrayal, Stranger - unknown, unfamiliar to people an entity that appeared in the guise of a woman, a pharmacy is the last refuge of suicides (in the last century, first aid for drowned victims was provided in pharmacies - ambulances appeared later). The origins of Blok's symbolism are rooted in the mysticism of the Middle Ages. So yellow in the cultural language of the Middle Ages it denoted an enemy, blue – betrayal. But, unlike medieval symbols, the symbols of Blok’s poetry are polysemantic and paradoxical. Stranger can be interpreted both as the appearance of the Muse to the poet, and as the fall of the Beautiful Lady, her transformation into “Beatrice at the tavern counter”, and as a hallucination, dream, “tavern frenzy” - all these meanings echo each other, “flicker like the eyes of a beauty behind the veil."

However, ordinary readers perceived such “ambiguities” with great caution and rejection. The popular newspaper Birzhevye Vedomosti published a letter from Prof. P.I. Dyakov, who offered one hundred rubles to anyone who would “translate” Blok’s poem into the generally understandable Russian language You are so bright….

The symbols capture the torment of the human soul in the poetry of A. Bely (collections Urn,Ash). The rupture of modern consciousness is depicted in symbolic forms in Bely’s novel Petersburg– the first Russian “stream of consciousness” novel. The bomb that the main character of the novel, Nick, is preparing. Ableukhov, broken dialogues, disintegrated kinship within the “random family” of the Ableukhovs, scraps of well-known plots, the sudden birth among the swamps of an “impromptu city”, an “explosion city” in symbolic language expressed the key idea of the novel - the idea of disintegration, separation, undermining all ties. Bely’s symbolism is a special ecstatic form of experiencing reality, “every second departures into infinity” from every word and image.

As for Blok, for Bely the most important note of creativity is love for Russia. “Our pride is that we are not Europe or that only we are true Europe,” Bely wrote after a trip abroad.

Vyach.Ivanov most fully embodied in his work the symbolist dream of a synthesis of cultures, trying to combine Solovyovism, renewed Christianity and the Hellenic worldview.

The artistic quest of the “Young Symbolists” was marked by enlightened mysticism, the desire to go to the “outcast villages”, to follow the sacrificial path of the prophet, without turning away from the harsh earthly reality.

Symbolism in the theater. The theoretical basis of symbolism was the philosophical works of F. Nietzsche, A. Bergson, A. Schopenhauer, E. Mach, and neo-Kantians. The semantic center of symbolism becomes mysticism, the allegorical background of phenomena and objects; Irrational intuition is recognized as the fundamental basis of creativity. The main theme is fate, a mysterious and inexorable rock that plays with the destinies of people and controls events. The emergence of such views during this period is quite natural: psychologists argue that the change of centuries is always accompanied by an increase in eschatological and mystical sentiments in society.

In symbolism, the rational principle is reduced; a word, an image, a color – any specifics – in art lose their informational content; but the background increases many times over, transforming them into a mysterious allegory, accessible only to irrational perception. The “ideal” type of symbolic art can be called music, which by definition is devoid of any specifics and appeals to the listener’s subconscious. It is clear that in literature symbolism had to originate in poetry - in a genre where the rhythm of speech and its phonetics initially have no less importance than the meaning, and even can prevail over the meaning.

The founders of symbolism were the French poets Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé. However, theater, as the most socially sensitive art form, could not remain aloof from modern views. And the third founder of this trend was the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. Actually, Mallarmé in his theoretical works, dedicated to symbolism, turns to the theater of the future, interpreting it as a replacement for worship, a ritual where elements of drama, poetry, music, and dance will merge in extraordinary unity.

Maeterlinck began his literary career as a poet, publishing a collection of poems in 1887 Greenhouses. However, already in 1889 his first play appeared, Princess Malene, enthusiastically received by modernist critics. It was in this field of drama that he achieved his greatest success - in 1911 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Maeterlinck's plays such as Blind (1890),Pelias and Melisande(1892),Death of Tentagille(1894),Sister Beatrice(1900),Miracle of Saint Anthony (1903), Blue bird(1908) and others became not only the “bible” of symbolism, but also entered the golden fund of world drama.

In the theatrical concept of symbolism, special attention was paid to the actor. The theme of destructive fate, which controls people like dolls, was refracted in stage art into the denial of the actor’s personality, the depersonalization of the performer and his transformation into a puppet. It was precisely this concept that was adhered to by both the theorists of symbolism (in particular, Mallarmé) and its practitioners-directors: A. Appiah (Switzerland), G. Fuchs and M. Reinhardt (Germany), and especially Gordon Craig (England), in in his productions he consistently implemented the principle of an actor-super-puppet, a mask devoid of human emotions. (It is very symbolic that Craig published the magazine “Mask”). The symbolists categorically preferred unambiguous poeticized images-signs to the multifaceted, psychologically voluminous stage character.

In its general concept, the theater of symbolism had much in common with the medieval theater and its genres - mystery, miracle, morality, and naturally tried to reconstruct these genres.

At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. in Paris, studio theaters appeared, basing their repertoire exclusively on works of symbolism: “Theatre d'ar”, “Evre”, “Théâtre des arts”. Here, in addition to Maeterlinck’s plays, works by G. Ibsen, B. Bjornson, A. Strindberg were staged , P. Quillard, C. Mendes; poetic works by C. Baudelaire, A. Rimbaud, P. Verlaine, S. Mallarmé were performed.

In Russia, the development of symbolism receives very fertile ground: general eschatological sentiments are aggravated by the severe public reaction to the failed revolutions of 1905–1907. Pessimism, themes of tragic loneliness and the fatality of existence find a warm response in Russian literature and theater. Brilliant writers, poets and directors Silver Age are happy to plunge into the theory and practice of symbolism. Vyach. Ivanov (1909) and Vs. Meyerhold (1913) write about symbolist theatrical aesthetics. Maeterlinck’s dramatic ideas are developed and creatively developed by V. Bryusov ( Earth, 1904); A. Blok (trilogy Showcase,King in the square,Stranger, 1906; Song of fate, 1907); F. Sologub ( Victory of Death, 1907, etc.); L. Andreev ( Human Life, 1906; King Hunger, 1908; Anathema, 1909, etc.).

The period 1905–1917 dates back to a number of brilliant symbolist dramatic and opera performances staged by Meyerhold on a variety of stages: the famous Showcase Blok, Death of Tentagille And Pelleas and Melisande M. Maeterlinck, Eternal fairy tale S. Przybyshevsky, Tristan and Isolde R. Wagner, Orpheus and Eurydice H.V. Gluck, Don Juan J.B.Moliere, Masquerade M. Lermontova and others.

The main stronghold of Russian stage realism, Moskovsky, also turns to symbolism. Art Theater. In the first decade of the 20th century. One-act plays by Maeterlinck were staged at the Moscow Art Theater Blind, Uninvited And There, inside; Drama of life K.Gamsun, Rosmersholm G. Ibsen, Human Life And Anathema L. Andreeva. And in 1911, for a joint production with K.S. Stanislavsky and L.A. Sulerzhitsky Hamlet G. Craig was invited (in the title role - V.I. Kachalov). However, the extremely conventional aesthetics of symbolism was alien to the theater, which initially relied on the realistic sound of performances; and Kachalov’s powerful psychologism turned out to be unclaimed in Craig’s setup for an actor-super-puppet. All these and subsequent symbolist performances ( Miserere S. Yushkevich, There will be joy D. Merezhkovsky, Ekaterina Ivanovna L. Andreev) at best remained only within the framework of the experiment and did not enjoy the recognition of the Moscow Art Theater audience, who were delighted with the productions of Chekhov, Gorky, Turgenev, Moliere. The happy exception was the performance Blue bird M. Maeterlinck (production by Stanislavsky, directors Sulerzhitsky and I.M. Moskvin, 1908). Having received the right of the first production from the author, the Moscow Art Theater transformed the heavy, semantically oversaturated symbolist drama into a subtle and naive poetic fairy tale. It is very significant that the age orientation of the audience changed in the performance: it was addressed to children. The performance remained in the repertoire of the Art Theater for more than fifty years (the two thousandth performance took place in 1958), and became the first viewing experience for many generations of young Muscovites.

However, the time of symbolism as an aesthetic movement was coming to an end. This, undoubtedly, was facilitated by the social upheavals that befell Russia: the war with Germany, the October Revolution, which marked a sharp breakdown of the country’s entire way of life, civil war, devastation and famine. In addition, after the revolution of 1917, public optimism and the pathos of creation became the official ideology in Russia, which fundamentally contradicted the entire orientation of symbolism.

Perhaps the last Russian apologist and theorist of symbolism remained Vyach. Ivanov. In 1923 he wrote a “programmatic” theater article Dionysus and pre-Dionysianism, which deepens and re-emphasizes Nietzsche’s theatrical concept. Vyach is in it. Ivanov tries to reconcile conflicting aesthetic and ideological concepts, proclaiming a new, “genuine symbolism” as a means of “restoring unity” in a “permissive moment of enthusiastic pathos.” However, Ivanov’s call for theatrical performances of mysteries and myth-making mass actions, similar in perception to the liturgy, remained unclaimed. In 1924 Vyach. Ivanov emigrated to Italy.

Tatiana Shabalina

The meaning of symbolism. The heyday of Russian symbolism occurred in the nine hundred years, after which the movement began to decline: significant works no longer appeared within the school, new directions emerged - Acmeism and Futurism, the symbolist worldview ceased to correspond to the dramatic realities of the “real, non-calendar twentieth century.” Anna Akhmatova described the situation at the beginning of the 1910s: “In 1910, a crisis of symbolism clearly emerged, and aspiring poets no longer joined this movement. Some went to futurism, others to acmeism. Undoubtedly, symbolism was a phenomenon of the 19th century. Our rebellion against symbolism is completely legitimate, because we felt like people of the twentieth century and did not want to live in the previous one.”

On Russian soil, such features of symbolism appeared as: the multifaceted nature of artistic thinking, the perception of art as a way of cognition, the sharpening of religious and philosophical issues, neo-romantic and neoclassical tendencies, the intensity of the worldview, neo-mythologism, the dream of a synthesis of arts, rethinking the heritage of Russian and Western European culture, the focus on the maximum price of the creative act and life creativity, deepening into the sphere of the unconscious, etc.

There are numerous connections between the literature of Russian symbolism and painting and music. The poetic dreams of the Symbolists find correspondence in the “gallant” painting of K. Somov, the retrospective dreams of A. Benois, the “legends in the making” of M. Vrubel, in the “motives without words” of V. Borisov-Musatov, in the exquisite beauty and classical detachment of the paintings of Z. Serebryakova , “poems” by A. Scriabin.

Symbolism laid the foundation for modernist movements in the culture of the 20th century and became a renewing ferment that gave a new quality to literature and new forms of artistry. In the works of the greatest writers of the 20th century, both Russian and foreign (A. Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva, A. Platonov, B. Pasternak, V. Nabokov, F. Kafka, D. Joyce, E. Pound, M. Proust , W. Faulkner, etc.) – the strongest influence of the modernist tradition inherited from symbolism.

Tatiana Skryabina

LITERATURE

Craig G.E. Memoirs, articles, letters. M, 1988
Ermilova E. Theory and figurative world of Russian symbolism. M., 1989
Dzhivilegov A., Boyadzhiev G. History of Western European theater. M., 1991
Khodasevich V. The end of Renata/ V.Bryusov. Fire Angel. M., 1993
Encyclopedia of symbolism: Painting, graphics and sculpture.LITERATURE. Music/ Comp. J.Cassou. M, 1998
Poetic movements in Russian literature of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Literary manifestos and artistic practice: Reader/ Comp. A. Sokolov. M., 1998
Payman A. History of Russian Symbolism. M., 1998
Basinsky P. Fedyakin S. Russian literature of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. M., 1998
Kolobaeva L. Russian symbolism. M., 2000
French Symbolism: Drama and Theater. St. Petersburg, 2000

Symbolism

Direction in European and Russian art of the 1870-1910s; focused primarily on artistic expression through the symbol of intuitively comprehended entities and ideas, vague, often sophisticated feelings and visions. The philosophical and aesthetic principles of symbolism go back to the works of A. Schopenhauer, E. Hartmann, F. Nietzsche, and the work of R. Wagner. Trying to penetrate into the secrets of being and consciousness, to see through visible reality the supra-temporal ideal essence of the world (“from the real to the most real”) and its “imperishable” or transcendental Beauty, the symbolists expressed rejection of bourgeoisism and positivism, longing for spiritual freedom, a tragic premonition of world socio-historical changes. In Russia, symbolism was often thought of as “life-creativity” - a sacred act that goes beyond the boundaries of art. The main representatives of symbolism in literature are P. Verlaine, P. Valery, A. Rimbaud, S. Mallarmé, M. Maeterlinck, A. A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. I. Ivanov, F. K. Sologub; in fine arts: E. Munch, G. Moreau, M. K. Ciurlionis, M. A. Vrubel, V. E. Borisov-Musatov; The work of P. Gauguin and the masters of the “Nabi” group, the graphic artist O. Beardsley, and the work of many Art Nouveau masters are close to symbolism.

Symbolism

"Armenia" - M.S. Saryan

By the end of the 19th century, an opinion had formed among artists that realism, with its critical-natural reflection of reality, could not recreate thoughts and states of mind, that painting should not only record objects of the visible world, but also convey sensations of the supernatural and otherworldly. This is how symbolism appeared.

Many paintings related to symbolism convey subjects with religious and mythological overtones or address themes of death and sin. The poets Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine are considered the founders of symbolism in France. In Russia, this movement was represented by: in poetry - Alexander Blok, in painting - Mikhail Vrubel, in music - Alexander Scriabin.

Symbolism acquired new imagery in German art - primarily in the painting of A. Beklin. He portrayed naiads, fauns and centaurs extremely realistically, outside of classical plots. More straightforward and naturalistically frightening was the art of painting by F. von Stuck.

"Snow on Rue Carcelle" - Paul Gauguin

Symbolists have made their presence felt in Russian painting since 1904, when an exhibition called “Scarlet Rose” took place in Saratov. It was attended by V.E. Borisov-Musatov, P.V. Kuznetsov, M.A. Vrubel, N.N. Sapunov and many others. Borisov-Musatov gravitated towards the musicality of transparent and completely indefinite impressionistic chords. In his paintings “Tapestry” and “Pond”, poses and gestures are devoid of any specific meaning. The East turns into a bright sunny fairy tale in the paintings of M.S. Saryan. The emotional tension of contrasting tones brings him closer to expressinism ("Heat", "Running Dog"). At the same time, the decorative nature of his works brings his creative style closer to Fauvism. The meaningfulness of the decoration is combined with grace and color in N. Sapunov’s paintings. The unexpected effect of sadness, which is hidden in the funny, rough figures of S.Yu., is symbolic. Sudeikina: a lady with a lute ends up on a tree, a dog dances next to a ballerina. N.P. also uses similar effects. Krymov: funny miniature houses and toy trees are filled with scary power.

In Vrubel’s painting one can feel the creative direction of symbolism, the eternal presence of a higher spiritual principle, incomprehensible to reason. Its symbolism in its exquisite sad beauty goes into modernity.

Other artists who were touched by symbolism are the Frenchman Paul Gauguin, the Englishman Burne Jones, and the Austrian Klimt. Symbolism began to fade away at the beginning of the 20th century, when it was replaced by surrealism.

Which appeared in the middle of the century before last in France. This one quickly gained the widest popularity and continued its active development until the twentieth century.

Symbolism is one of the most important elements of world art. Although it appeared only in the nineteenth century, its elements can be clearly seen from ancient times. For example, Gothic is imbued with the symbolism of Christianity. medieval painting and frescoes. In the mystical, ghostly paintings that artists painted during the Romantic era, one can see numerous elements of symbolism.

However, this direction in art received its greatest development already in the nineteenth century as a counterweight to realism and impressionism. In this direction, a negative attitude towards the developing bourgeoisie was openly expressed. Symbolism is an expression of longing for spiritual freedom, a subtle premonition of historical and social changes throughout the world and humanity.

The term “symbolism” itself was first published in “Le Figaro” - a fairly popular printed periodical- in 1886, September eighteenth. The main ideas of this movement were described in literature by the famous Charles Baudelaire. He believed that only symbols can fully express the subtle state of mind poet or artist.

The philosophical and aesthetic foundations of symbolism began to develop almost simultaneously in many Western countries. European countries. The main representatives of symbolism are S. Mallarmé, P. Verdun, A. Rimbaud, P. Valery in France; M. Maeterlinck, E. Verhaeren in Belgium; G. Gaupmann in Germany; R. Rilke in Austria; Oscar Wilde in Great Britain; G. Ibsen and K. Hamsun in Norway. One could even say that the symbolism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was completely dependent on literature.

Symbolism is to some extent an echo of romanticism. The aesthetics of both of these movements are very similar and related. A symbol is an object of insight generated by the poet. He expressed secret meaning things, revealed the secrets of existence, painted otherworldly, mystical, esoteric meaning phenomena hidden from ordinary people. The symbols drawn by the artist were considered truly prophetic, and the artist himself was a creator, a seer who was able to see certain hidden signs of fate in events and phenomena.

Symbolism refers to interaction inner world a person, his personality and individuality, with the external world. According to the concept of symbolism, the real world exists beyond our visible world, and it can only be partially reflected in it. It is art that acts as a kind of mediator between these worlds and is a means of transformation and interpretation of the spiritual side of life.

Symbolism has firmly entered into the literature, painting and architecture of many countries, significantly influencing world art. The Symbolists laid the foundation for surrealism with their desire for innovation, cosmopolitanism and numerous experiments.

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Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944, Norwegian)Madonna

Aesthetics of symbolism

The ideas of symbolism were first proclaimed in literature by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who believed that visual arts in painting (paints, lines, etc.) are symbols that reflect the world of the artist’s soul. The first theorists of symbolism were the decadents. (Note: in European countries these are not two opposite terms. In Europe, the term “decadence” was used to disparage new forms in the poetry of their critics. In Russia, after the first Russian decadent works, the terms began to be contrasted: in symbolism they saw ideals and spirituality, and in decadence - lack of will, immorality and passion only for external form.) Until the 1890s. symbolism in the visual arts remained completely dependent on literature, and not only on the literature of symbolism. The foundations of the aesthetics of symbolism were laid by A. Rimbaud, S. Mallarmé, P. Verlaine, K. Hamsun, M. Maeterlinck, E. Verhaerne, O. Wilde, G. Ibsen, R. Rilke and others. Aesthetic principles symbolism largely went back to the ideas of romanticism, as well as to some doctrines of the idealistic philosophy of A. Schopenhauer, E. Hartmann, partly F. Nietzsche, to creativity and theorizing German composer R. Wagner. Symbolism contrasted living reality with the world of visions and dreams. A symbol generated by poetic insight and expressing the otherworldly meaning of phenomena hidden from everyday consciousness was considered a universal tool for comprehending the secrets of existence and individual consciousness. The creative artist was seen as a mediator between the real and the supersensible, everywhere finding “signs” of world harmony, prophetically guessing signs of the future, both in modern phenomena and in events of the past. Symbolism refers to the realm of the spirit. The symbolist concept is based on the postulate that behind the world of visible things there is a true, real world, which our world of phenomena only dimly reflects. Art is seen as a means of spiritual knowledge and transformation of the world. The moment of insight that occurs during the creative act is the only thing that can lift the veil over illusory world everyday things

Fernand Khnopff.

Features of symbolism

The symbolists radically changed not only various types of art, but also the very attitude towards it. Although representatives of symbolism belonged to a variety of stylistic movements, they were united by the search for new ways to convey those mysterious forces that, as they believed, rule the world, vague ideals and elusive shades of meaning. Symbolist artists they denied realism and believed that painting should recreate the life of every soul, full of experiences, unclear, vague moods, subtle feelings, fleeting impressions, should convey thoughts, ideas and feelings, and not just record objects of the visible world. However, we emphasize that they did not write abstract subjects, but real events, real people, real world phenomena, but in a metaphorical and thought-provoking manner. The expression of the language of the soul and thoughts was based on an image-symbol, which contains the meaning work of art. Among the subjects, scenes from the Gospel history, semi-mythical and semi-historical events of the Middle Ages, ancient mythology. In general, everything connected with religious or mythological overtones. Therefore, the works of artists of this movement are imbued with mysticism; all works of symbolists convey a feeling of the supernatural and otherworldly. Among the Symbolists, an unwritten “code of creativity” developed, combining religious, philosophical and artistic thinking, which encouraged artists to address eternal, transtemporal problems. Therefore, the frequent themes of their paintings were the themes of life and death, sin, love and suffering, waiting, chaos and space, good and evil, beautiful and ugly...
Characteristic features: polysemy of the image, play of metaphors and associations.

Style trends of symbolism

In general, symbolism was a very heterogeneous and contradictory phenomenon. Without having its own distinct style, it was rather an “ideological” movement that attracted artists of a variety of styles. The diversity of ideological and socio-cultural tendencies that existed within symbolism, which led to the rapid disintegration of its groups and the polarization of ideological orientation. Thus, symbolism was divided into directions using different approaches.

Late Romanticism
The most important source of ideas and images for symbolists is pictorial romanticism with its unusual subjects. A significant influence on the formation of this direction was German romanticism, which attracted symbolist artists with its mysterious fairy-tale motifs, and the mystical art of the Nazarenes.

Stylistic approach - modern
In the 1890s. both in France (the “Nabi” group led by P. Sérusier and M. Denis), and in other countries, symbolism acquired a fairly broad stylistic justification in “modernism”, becoming an inextricable, and often the defining element of its artistic programs, figurative and meaningful building, poetics. The “modern” masters, trying to fill the form with active, spiritual and emotional content, to overcome the disturbing instability of the world, sought to establish a kind of emblem of style, find the “unchangeable” symbolism of each color, and identify a unifying musical principle in the rhythm of drawing and composition. This path was also affected by the decadent tendencies inherent in symbolism, with its extreme individualism and self-sufficient aestheticism; affectation, exaggerated sensuality, irrationalism of images (F. von Stuck. M. Klinger in Germany, G. Klimt in Austria), mystical visionaryism, which sometimes takes on a hopelessly pessimistic character (F. Knopf, the Latham school led by J. Minne in Belgium ), sometimes imbued with painfully refined eroticism (O. Beardsley in Great Britain), sometimes turning into religious exaltation (J. Torop in Holland).

Aubrey Beardsley. Death of Arthur

Aubrey Beardsley

Gustav Klimt.Girls (1912—1913)

Fernand Khnopff.

Musical approach - modern
A special place in symbolist painting is occupied by the fairy-tale-folklore work of M. K. Ciurlionis in Lithuania, which is close to “modern” and based on direct analogies with music.

world creation.

Going beyond the Art Nouveau style, some masters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. attached symbolic images even greater expression, trying in a pointed, often cartoonish, deliberately illogical form to expose the ugliness of the surrounding life (J. Ensor in Belgium, E. Munch in Norway, A. Kubin in Austria) or trying to more fully express the heroic-epic sound of the symbol (F. Hodler in Austria).

E. MunchScream

Literary approach - academicism
Borrowed literary subjects and “eternal” motifs were embodied by formal means of almost all the main trends of the 19th century. - classicism, romanticism, naturalism, impressionism, or in an eclectic mixture of their techniques, in a paradoxical combination of salon banality with sophisticated fantasy - sometimes mannered, refined, painfully fragile (G. Moreau in France), sometimes convincingly reliable, as if tangible (A Böcklin in Switzerland, partly X. Thoma in Germany), sometimes intriguingly vague and frighteningly illogical (O. Redon in France) or filled with outright eroticism (F. Rops in Belgium).

Gustave Moreau.Apollo and the Nine Muses- 1856

Odilon Redon Cyclops 1914

Formal approach - post-impressionism
At the end of the 1880s. in France P. Gauguin and a group of his followers, calling to follow the “mysterious depths of thought,” became close to symbolism. Based on the pictorial system of so-called synthetism, generalizing and simplifying shapes and lines, rhythmically arranging large color planes, resorting to a clear contour line, they tried to embody the desired symbols in the very nature of the plastic form.

On the meaning of symbolism

Entered art many countries, symbolism had a great influence on world art and prepared the basis for the emergence of surrealism painting. The experimental nature of the Symbolists, their desire for innovation, cosmopolitanism and a wide range of influences have become a model for most modern art movements.

Symbolism rules people. Literature as the main form of art

Symbolist subjects

Literature as main view art

Music

Painting

Symbolism

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