The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Symbolist and Modernist world-building 167

use of the poetic symbol than about art’s responsibility to socioeconomic problems. Russian literature too had experienced the split in European nineteenth-century culture between a materialist-scientific worldview and an idealist one. But Merezhkovsky then insists that the master Russian prose writers – Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Ivan Goncharov (1812–91, author of Oblomov) – are in fact idealists, although Russia’s militant radical critics refused to recognize it. With the exception of the ascetic pamphlets being produced by the aging Tolstoy – who “would take the pipe away from a bachelor, the jug of wine away from a worker, thereby further narrowing and darkening a man’s life that was already sufficiently narrow and dark” – the works of these novelists are permeated with symbols, a mystical concern for other worlds, and a quest for the beautiful in art. If (he concluded) we now sense there has been a “decline,” it is because literary spokesmen have shouted “utility,” critical realism, and sociopolitical relevance for so long that free artistic inspiration no longer seems sufficient.

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