Russian symbolism

Influences The Russian symbolist movement was primarily influenced by Russian thinkers such as Fyodor Tyutchev, Vladimir Solovyov and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and to a lesser degree Western writers such as Paul Verlaine, Maurice Maeterlinck and Stéphane Mallarmé. Other minor influences included Oscar Wilde, D'Annunzio, Joris-Karl Huysmans, the operas of Richard Wagner, the dramas of Henrik Ibsen, and the broader philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Rise of symbolism: the older generation By the mid-1890s, Russian symbolism was still mainly a set of theories and had few notable practitioners. It was not until the new talent of Valery Bryusov emerged that symbolist poetry became a major movement in Russian literature. The early Russian symbolism movement included: • Aleksandr Dobrolyubov • • Nikolai Minsky (whose most important contribution was his 1884 article "The Ancient Debate") • Vladimir Solovyov (sometimes considered to be the primary Russian symbolist philosopher More recently, Robert Bird has been less critical than the Literary Gazette, "Nomenclature notwithstanding, Russian Symbolism owed far less to French Symbolism (with which, according to Ivanov, it shared 'neither a historical no ideological basis') than it did to German Romanticism and to the great poets and prose writers of nineteenth-century Russia. It was not so much an artistic movement as a comprehensive worldview, an attempt to give aesthetics a spiritual foundation. The Russian Symbolists sought to preserve the insights and achievements of past civilisations and to build upon them. They viewed human creativity as a continuum, celebrating 'Symbolist' tendencies in the art and culture of civilisations distant both temporally and spatially... According to Symbolist conviction, divisions between various fields of knowledge and artistic disciplines were artificial: poetry was intimately linked not only to painting, music, and drama, but also to philosophy, psychology, religion, and myth. The intellectual cross fertilization that took place at Ivanov's 'Tower', in short, was a social manifestation of Symbolist tenets." ==Visual arts==

's painting The Vision of the Youth Bartholomew (1890) is often considered to mark the inauguration of the Russian Symbolists.|left Probably the most important Russian symbolist painter was Mikhail Vrubel, who achieved fame with a large mosaic-like canvas, The Demon Seated (1890), and went mad while working on the dynamic and sinister The Demon Downcast (1902). Other symbolist painters associated with the World of Art magazine were Victor Borisov-Musatov and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, followers of Puvis de Chavannes; Mikhail Nesterov, who painted religious subjects from medieval Russian history; Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, with his "urbanistic phantasms"; and Nicholas Roerich, whose paintings have been described as hermetic or esoteric. The tradition of Russian symbolism in the late Soviet period was renewed by Konstantin Vasilyev, whose style was greatly influenced by the Russian neo-Romantic painter Viktor Vasnetsov, as well as Mikhail Nesterov and Nicholas Roerich. ==Music and theatre==

designed symbolist sets for Stravinsky's Petrushka in 1911. The foremost symbolist composer was Alexander Scriabin, who in his First Symphony praised art as a kind of religion. Le Divin Poème (1902–1904) sought to express "the evolution of the human spirit from pantheism to unity with the universe". Prométhée (1910), given in 1915 in New York City, was accompanied by elaborately selected colour projections on a screen. In Scriabin's synthetic performances, music, poetry, dancing, colours and scents were used so as to bring about "supreme, final ecstasy". Andrei Bely and Wassily Kandinsky articulated similar ideas on the "stage fusion of all arts". 's emblem of the symbolic Blue Rider (1911) As to more traditional theatre, Paul Schmidt, an influential translator, has written that The Cherry Orchard and some other late plays of Anton Chekhov show the influence of the Symbolist movement. Their first production by Constantin Stanislavski was as realistic as possible. Stanislavski collaborated with the English theatre practitioner Edward Gordon Craig on a significant production of Hamlet in 1911–12, which experimented with symbolist monodrama as a basis for its staging. Two years later, Stanislavski won international acclaim when he staged Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird in the Moscow Art Theatre. Nikolai Evreinov was one of a number of writers who developed a symbolist theory of theatre. Evreinov insisted that everything around us is "theatre" and that nature is full of theatrical conventions, for example, desert flowers mimicking stones, mice feigning death in order to escape cats' claws, and the complicated dances of some birds. Theatre, for Evreinov, was a universal symbol of existence. == References ==