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Among the topics in Slavic literary scholarship that have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, the study of Russian modernism, also known as the Silver Age, has been one of the indisputable leaders. The groundwork for the canonization of the Silver Age was laid in the postwar Soviet Union, where young poets like Andrei Voznesenskii and Joseph Brodsky made pilgrimages to Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova. The allure of the Silver Age was increasingly felt in official Soviet culture as well. Just as Vladimir Maiakovskii's canonical status had earlier sanctioned the limited study of other futurists, the official recognition of Aleksandr Blok and Valerii Briusov as the bards of the October revolution provided the cover for scholars in the 1970s and 1980s to undertake a massive excavation of symbolist culture. After the beginning of perestroika, survivors from the Silver Age, from philosopher Aleksei Losev to émigré poet Irina Odoevtseva, came to be revered as emissaries from a lost, better world.
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- On the Borders of the Silver Age
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008
References
I would like to thank Robert Bird, Ilya Kliger, and Mark Steinberg for their comments on earlier drafts of this Introduction.
1. The results of this research were presented in such encyclopedic works as the Blok and Briusov volumes of Literaturnoe nasledstvo. See Briusov, Valerii, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 85, ed. Scherbina, V. R. (Moscow, 1976)Google Scholar; Valerii Briusov i ego korrespondenly, 2 vols. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 98 (Moscow, 1991-94); Aleksandr Blok: Novye materialy i issledovaniia, 5 vols. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 92 (Moscow, 1980-1993).
2. See, for example, a monograph by Ronen, Omry, The Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Amsterdam, 1997)Google Scholar. Ronen argues that Silver Age is largely a misnomer, since Russian modernism was anything but a second-rate decadent culture. Other scholars, such as, for example, Galina Ryl'kova, became convinced that the Silver Age was largely a cultural myth and sought to debunk it. Ryl'kova's essay, entided “Na sklone Serebrianogo veka,” was published in a special cluster dedicated to the Silver Age in the Russian journal Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. While Ryl'kova argues against what she perceives as the cult of the Silver Age in twentieth-century culture and scholarship, her respondents, V. V Nikolaenko and Lea Pil'd, maintain that regardless of its appellation, modernism constitutes a crucial period in Russian culture whose prestige ought to be preserved. See Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 46 (2000): 231-49.
3. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Untimely Meditations, trans. Hollingdale, R. J., introduction by Stern, J. P. (Cambridge, Eng., 1983), 57–124 Google Scholar.
4. Ibid., 61-63.
5. Ibid., 64.
6. Lotman, Iu. M., “O semiosfere,” hbrannye stat'i: V trekh tomakh (Tallinn, 1992), 11–24 Google Scholar.
7. For a detailed discussion of the role of poetic texts as memory loci in Russian acmeism, see Lachmann, Renate, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism, trans. Sellars, Roy and Wall, Anthony (Minneapolis, 1997)Google Scholar.