Version classiqueVersion mobile

Reading Russia, vol. 2

 | 
Damiano Rebecchini
, 
Raffaella Vassena

Part II. The Long Nineteenth Century

O!?!?!: Reading and Readers in the Silver Age, 1890s-1900s

Jonathan Stone

Texte intégral

  • 1   B. A Sadovskoi, R. L. Shcherbakov, “Vesy (vospominaniia sotrudnika),” Minuvshee, 13 (1993), 16-17

The end of 1903 finds me in Moscow. I am in my second year of studying literature at university… The journals World of Art and New Path were my paths to a new world. I am becoming a ‘Decadent.’ I arrive for morning tea with a book and sit for a while, oblivious, as the tea grows cold. My aunt worriedly watches the clock.
“Isn’t it time for you to go to class?”
I get up, ride to the Ilinskii Gates, and from there head on foot to Mokhovaia street. Not to the University, but a little farther: to the Rumiantsev Library. I read and read without stopping - Decadents, both Russian and foreign. Over lunch, my aunt is concerned:
“You’ve become absent minded.”1

1Boris Sadovskoi’s memory of turn-of-the-century Moscow literary culture captures the newness and excitement of the moment. His discovery of emerging literary forms and his total immersion in them—to the point of obliviousness and distraction—exemplify the type of reader with whom the new aesthetic and literary modes of this period resonated most strongly. This chapter will examine the shifting nature of reading at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Sadovskoi, a reader enthralled with Decadence from morning to night, is at once commonplace and rare in a period marked by a growing stratification in the reading public.

  • 2   M. A. Travis, Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale, (...)

2The concept of the ordinary reader as a passive receptacle for the author’s social or ethical ideologies, the practice of being a neutral reader, waned in the face of modernism. Writers engaged and confronted readers in new ways as literary forms became more complex and their content frequently veered into the overtly subjective and dwelled on markedly interior states and private allusions. The reader best suited to the new trends in literature, beginning in the mid 1890s, took an active role in deciphering the text and entering into the author’s aesthetic and epistemological worldview. Molly Travis has articulated the novelty of reading in the age of modernism in terms of the framework necessary for the reader to comprehend a text, and “the difficulty of experimental works and the ascendance of academic criticism, which made solitary reading impossible, resulted in reading that was mediated at every turn.”2 Only with proper instruction and guidance can the reader be expected to make sense of a literature that builds insularity and inaccessibility into its aesthetic and formal identity. Some sections of the audience embraced this new approach to reading, while others rebuked the modernists and resisted the collaborative and mediated nature of reading their work. The start of the Silver Age with the development of Symbolism in Russia in the 1890s opened a breach in the reading public. In the decades that followed, works that partook of the new artistic trends associated with modernism and the avant-garde expanded this rift, as was reflected in the ways books were produced and consumed in turn-of-the-century Russia.

  • 3   The term was popularized (and arguably coined) by Sergei Makovskii in 1962. It has been explored (...)
  • 4   Bowlt, Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920, 11.

3Despite its many points of continuity with previous periods, the 1890s heralded a sea change in aesthetic culture. This new era of modernism would come to be called the “Silver Age” of Russian literature and the arts. This retrospective designation grouped a host of writers, poets, artists, religious thinkers, philosophers, and literary critics as emblems of the transformations underway between 1890 and 1917.3 While somewhat arbitrary in its name and amorphous in its purview, the notion of the Silver age does capture the sense of aesthetic and philosophical revitalization and renaissance that marked the period. The idea of the Silver Age serves as an imperfect umbrella notion for all of the new and more modern art produced in the span of about three decades. As John Bowlt notes, “there was something unique and unrepeatable about the Russian Silver Age. It acknowledged the new art and science of the West, but tailored them to local exigencies.”4 Starting in the 1890s with the first glimmers of movement away from the nineteenth-century tenets of realism and civic poetry, the Silver Age would arguably run until the chaos of the revolution and waves of emigration irreversibly altered the artistic landscape around 1920. Within this period, Russian literature experienced Symbolism, Decadence, neo-Realism, Acmeism, Futurism, Imagism, and the avant-garde. To a degree, it has functioned as a distinctly Russian synonym for modernism. Ronen challenges this approach by noting the expressly retrospective origins of the concept of the Silver Age. He emphasizes its abstraction as a term of nostalgia imaginatively applied to a historical period. This is the “fallacy” of the idea which, for Ronen, allows it to masquerade as a meaningful concept without shedding its arbitrariness. While the term Silver Age connotes a shifting terrain with hazy boundaries, it nevertheless reflects a productive strategy for characterizing the changes afoot at the turn of the century. The constellation of innovative forms, novel subject matter, and new venues of publication that the readers encountered at the turn of the century are all encompassed in the idea of the Silver Age.

  • 5   Pivotal statements on early Russian modernism by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Nikolai Minskii, Ivan Kon (...)

4Demands for a paradigmatic shift in all aspects of Russian cultural production became increasingly resounding in the early 1890s. Russian modernists pointed to the decline of the novel and the potential for new literary forms as an opening in the artistic landscape of the era.5 Their work was packaged and presented to the reader in the intentionally vague term “the new art.” The fairly sudden appearance of new aesthetic forms introduced a sweeping shift in the dynamics of publishing and reading. This chapter will focus on reading in the first part of the Silver Age, the opening moments of Russian modernism. While many of the traits of the Russian reading public of the 1890s-1900s remained unchanged from earlier times, I will examine the ways it began to diverge. Building on the foundation of the dramatic spread of literacy and availability of books and journals discussed by Abram Reitblat in the previous chapter, Russian modernists could engage with a growing sphere of the reading public (Reitblat, “The Reading Audience of the Second half of Nineteenth Century,” in the present volume). This offered significant opportunities while also presenting distinct challenges for establishing a modernist readership. This context aligns with Russia’s reception of the broader trends of modernism spreading throughout world literature at the time while also demonstrating how the reading practices of the Silver Age would impact the development of a Russian reading public into the twentieth century.

  • 6   Valerii Briusov’s plan to finance publishing the third issue of the modernist booklets Russian Sy (...)
  • 7   For an informed overview of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century book industry (...)

5By the end of the nineteenth century, books had become plentiful in Russia. The convergence of rapid technological developments in printing presses, paper making, and typesetting resulted in the capacity to make books quickly and inexpensively. Large publishing houses could produce vast numbers of literary and popular books a year in print runs in the tens (and even hundreds) of thousands. And for the price of a pocket watch, aspiring writers could have several hundred copies of a book printed at typographies proliferating Moscow and St. Petersburg.6 The choices that confronted a patron of the bookstalls ranged from inexpensive editions of popular novelists—Tolstoi, Gogol, Goncharov, and Saltykov-Shchedrin ranked among the most frequently published (and republished) authors of the time—to small editions of newly translated western authors (such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche) as well as their Russian emulators. The powerhouse publishing firms of Marks, Sytin, Suvorin, and Wolf coexisted with modernist journals and practically self-published collections of prose and poetry.7 The variety of books reflected an ongoing shift in readership.

6A large majority of late nineteenth-century books and readers were holdovers from the age of realism and the zenith of the thick novel. As noted by Damiano Rebecchini and Reitblat in previous chapters, many readers held fast to their expectations of social and civic engagement in literary works, typically expressed though the tenets of mimesis and psychological acuity. Readers raised on the prose traditions of the 1860s and 1870s could continue to find works that satisfied their tastes and resonated with their reading strategies in the 1890s and early 1900s. Chekhov, Bunin, Gorkii, and Andreev were the direct descendants of Turgenev, Chernyshevskii, and Dostoevskii. The significant role of thick journals and their influential literary critics well into the twentieth century also contributed to the sense of stability between the mid nineteenth century and the turn of the century. As will be discussed, the space of the thick journal, once the domain of the socially engaged critic and vehicle for the serialization of nearly every major nineteenth-century novel, also helped spread modernism. By the end of the 1890s, the modernist journal had also appeared and would co-exist with the thick journals as the primary space for reading in Russia. Proponents of the new art found a haven with the foundation of Mir iskusstva (The World of Art, 1899-1904), a journal intent on serving a limited sphere of the intelligentsia receptive to modernism’s call for an aesthetic revaluation. In the evolution of publishing modernism, the transition from Severnyi vestnik (The Northern Herald) to Mir iskusstva may appear rather smooth and natural. A linear explanation of this key moment in the history of Russian Symbolism would highlight Severnyi vestnik’s final issue as No. 10-12 of 1898 and Mir iskusstva’s opening with issue No. 1-2 of 1899. The Symbolist contributors to the literary sections of both periodicals furthers this impression of continuity. Yet such a view of Mir iskusstva as the direct successor of Severnyi vestnik devalues the uniqueness of the new journal in Russian culture. The advent of a journal expressly aimed at a reader accepting of a new artistic worldview is a significant shift in the promulgation of Symbolism. Any notion of a seamless handoff of Symbolism between Severnyi vestnik and Mir iskusstva is muddied by the practical complexities of the situation—issue 1898 No. 10-12 of Severnyi vestnik did not appear until April of 1899 while Mir iskusstva issue No. 1-2 of 1899 was available on November 10, 1898. The ensuing six months of coexistence allow for a dramatic comparison of the dying thick journal and the infant modernist journal, as if side by side on the shelves of the Petersburg bookstalls. This chapter exploits the variety and potential such a scenario offered to the Russian reader and the notable transition it represented in the history of reading in Russia as the twentieth century approached.

1. Encountering the Readers of Modernism

  • 8   See A. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, 1990), 8-49; D. Albright, Putting Modernism (...)

7The first moderns are innovators and discoverers: from Darwin to Freud to de Saussure to Woolf. These drivers of modernity had something novel to offer—new perspectives, new forms. They shifted the perspective with which we viewed the world. On their face, the tenor of many of these changes is positive with an emphasis on progress, increased knowledge, and optimistic development. And yet, the artistic and literary expressions of modernism bend towards negative and pessimistic worldviews. The common root of both the hopeful and the grim sides of modernism can be found in a moment of crisis. The fearful and anxiety-inducing undertones of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century generated the fragmentation, ambivalence, and insularity of modernism. Literature of this period has to be read through the lens of a crisis of epistemology. The capacity of the arts, science, and philosophy to help humans navigate the surrounding world was being undermined. The previously reliable notions of mimesis and the absolute no longer held true for many in fin-de-siècle society. Any claim for a universal reader or objective understanding of a text was undone by the sense of instability and incomprehensibility that infiltrated the modern consciousness. This crisis impacted all levels of literary production and reception. Modernism has been presented as a sudden series of upheavals and dislocations, of social and cultural cataclysms brought about by Nietzsche’s call for a transvaluation of all values.8 For the modernists, reading was not an isolated act. It required a complex network of other readers and thrived on tautological relationships. Modernist writers’ identities were bound to the figure of the reader and their aesthetics required a blurring of the distinction between author and audience.

8For nascent Russian modernism, starting in the early 1890s writing and reading were both linked to the concept of a coterie. A connection can be established between the ways in which the dynamics of readership shifted and the growing sense of instability and crisis that marked modernity. A spate of responses to the publication of Russian Symbolists (Russkie simvolisty), one of Russia’s first forays into modernism in 1894-95, reveals the state of the Russian reading public at the dawn of the Silver Age.

9In October of 1895, Valerii Briusov received a letter from three poets.

Deeply Respected!
Valerii Iakovlevich!

Pierced by feelings of deep respect for your poetic creations and completely sharing your fascination with symbolism, we, Messrs. younger brothers ask you to find a place for the enclosed poem—the fruit of the shared labor of 2 symbolists and 1 symbolistka—in one of the forthcoming issues of Russian Symbolists.

With deep respect,

  • 9   Oct. 22, 1895 letter with poems from Valerii Briusov archive, RGB, f. 386, k. 110, ed. kh. 47, l. (...)

     Mimosa-Orchid Chrysanthemum
     Polar Orange Scorpion
     Sourly Luminous Chameleon9

10Since his literary debut the previous year, Briusov had quickly gained notoriety as a lightning rod for the public’s sentiments toward modernism. As the central poet, organizer, and publisher of these early examples of Russian modernism, Briusov embodied all of the newness of the movement. He was keenly aware of the need to cultivate a reader amenable to the new forms and new ideas entering Russian literature. He asked readers to contact him directly, even printing his home address and visiting hours on the last two issues of Russian Symbolists. In tracking several examples of that contact, we can gain a sense of the literary landscape in the 1890s and into the turn of the century. It incorporated the changes of modernism into a mode of publishing and reading that was undergoing a parallel shift from traditional to novel. The range of responses to modernist works demonstrates the various attitudes of the reading public toward modernism. But they also highlight the strategies employed by Russian readers to consume a steadily growing number of modernist publications.

11The excitement and aspirational qualities of the new art were captured in a letter Briusov received in 1894, following the first issue of Russian Symbolists. Addressed to “Vladimir Aleksandrovich Maslov” (the purported editor of the volume and one of Briusov’s numerous pseudonyms), the letter oozes with admiration.

Dear Sir, Vladimir Aleksandrovich

I have read the first issue of “Russian Symbolists” and cannot express how deeply I was touched by these poems, full of amazing mysterious meaning. I decided to present my poor work for your judgment in order also to have the privilege of being counted among the authors of the second issue. Please be so kind to inform me if my work has been accepted, although I readily admit that it is not worthy of being counted with the magisterial poems of Messrs. Briusov and Miropolskii.

Respectfully, your servant

  • 10   1894 letter from “VL” with poems for the second issue of Russian Symbolists from Valerii Briusov (...)

     VL10

12“VL” is the model of a sympathetic reader. He read the book, was influenced significantly enough to emulate its works, and established contact with its authors in the hopes of joining their enterprise. He was “touched” by the experience of reading these poems and then prompted to internalize the aesthetic by modeling it. For “VL” reading Symbolism became an initiation into modernism and caused him to self identify as a Symbolist. This is one extreme in the responses and approaches to Symbolism prompted by Briusov’s invitation to his readers.

13The personal and private nature of “VL”’s interaction with Symbolism is in clear juxtaposition to that of the literary critic. While some critics welcomed the new art, most were demonstrably hostile to it. The tenor of such responses can be felt in one of the earliest reviews of Russian Symbolists from March 1894.

Reading several of these works, I chuckled until tears, truly felt a yawn, stretched out and closed my eyes in a state of distressing hypnosis. […] The cause of these bursts of laughter was Mr. Briusov (not the calendar). Mr. Briusov (not the calendar) sings: “golden fairies […] of deceptive stars.” For those who love literary curiosities like the poetry of Zvonarev, and who don’t mind shedding a tear in healthy laughter, the works of the Moscow Symbolists […] naturally offer invaluable pleasure.

  • 11   “Malenk’ii fel’eton. Moskovskie simvolisty,” Novoe vremia, no. 6476, 10 March 1894.

     Ivan the Fool11

  • 12   A. I. Reitblat, “Simvolisty, ikh izdateli i chitateli,” in Idem, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu (Moscow, 200 (...)
  • 13 See J. Stone, “The Literal Symbolist: Solov’ev, Briusov, and the Reader of Early Russian Symbolis (...)

14“Ivan the Fool”’s blatant mockery (with the repeated reminder that the author is not the same Briusov as that of the eighteenth-century farmers’ almanac with that name) amplifies the fundamental and intentional misreading of modernism. The dominant response is confusion and laughter. These are curiosities that serve to baffle and amuse the reader, but are not meant to be taken seriously. “Ivan the Fool”’s reading strategy was to make fun of these works and question their position as art or literature. The journal editors, who shaped the Russian literary landscape of the last half of the nineteenth century, “permitted only mocking caricatures, talentless works, which they called Decadent, in order to convince the public that that is the whole of the new European art.”12 Taking these works literally, dismissing them as nothing more than incomprehensible and ridiculous, and devaluing their aesthetic worth were facets of a hostile readership that resisted modernism and held fast to the old ways and contexts for reading literature.13

15Each of these three reactions to Russian Symbolists are examples of the spectrum into which reading strategies of modernism can fall. They are responses to the changes underfoot and reveal the enthusiasm, skepticism, and derision that greeted the new art. Readers vociferously expressed their opinions about modernism. “LV” recorded his admiration for it and transformed the process of reading modernism into a strategy for joining the movement and incorporating it into his own identity. He sought to be part of its coterie. “Ivan the Fool” acknowledged little value in it and made it into the fodder of a joke. He adamantly refused to understand modernism and, by treating it no differently than the literature of the age of realism, modeled a hostile and dismissive reader. And the two Symbolists and one Symbolistka who sent their work to Briusov occupy a more indeterminate place. They both mock and applaud Symbolism; they have taken its style and form to heart, but also desire to parody that style and form. Between admiration and dismissal, their response is a blend of fascination and uncertainty. These three pseudonymous readers with their assumed and put-on identities, stand in for a much broader category of reader and a distinct approach to literature of the Silver Age. This chapter will examine all three modes of reading more closely. The modernists were aware of the stratified reading public for their work and had experienced enthusiastic support, tepid acceptance often marked with confusion, and outright hostility. This range of responses, which appeared quickly and simultaneously, could manifest itself as a muddled cacophony. The task of determining which camp the reader fell into was not always straightforward. Briusov’s only recorded reply to his Chrysanthemum, Scorpion, Chameleon admirerers as scrawled on the back of their note was a large puzzled response in red editor’s grease pencil: O!?!?!.

  • 14   R. Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York, 1990), 107.

16My primary approach comes through Robert Darton’s concept of a communications circuit—networks of authors, editors, publishers, booksellers, and readers.14 Reading and reception are at the heart of this circuit and the tautological relationships that fuel it. The responses elicited by the early Symbolist publications draw out the centrality of reading for such abstract topics as the conceptual history of Russian modernism to such concrete elements of literary production as the journals and books they printed. By merging the tangible and the intangible, the communications circuit offers a more holistic understanding of how modernism was created and received. It is an understanding that hinges upon multiple acts of reading and a reformulation of reading strategies. The shift in periodical culture from the widely circulating anthological approach of thick journals to the niche production of little magazines tracks these changes in audience and permeates the communications circuit. Each of these roles is repurposed with the end goal of establishing the types of coterie and elite, like-minded readership that were part of modernism. The distinction between hostile and sympathetic readers became increasingly relevant. The knee-jerk reaction of many newspaper and journal critics was to dismiss or mock modernism. These ranged from the respectable (such as Nikolai Mikhailovskii, Viktor Burenin, Vladimir Solov’ev, and Aleksandr Amfiteatrov) to the ridiculous (Ivan the Fool). Nevertheless, some critics did take a more measured approach to the new art. One such figure was Akim Volynskii, the literary critic for Severnyi vestnik. By considering more closely his reading of Symbolism in the 1890s we get a glimpse of the ways modernism could be presented and explained to a large portion of the Russian reading public.

2. Three Approaches to Reading Modernism

  • 15   R. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Princeton, 1968), 37.

17Despite a readership unequipped to understand the basic precepts and vocabulary of this new aesthetic, the venerable thick journals of the previous generation were precisely the space where the foundation was laid for the appearance of Symbolism in Russia. In the course of their engagement with literature in its broadest social and ideological contexts, the thick journal literary critics had a hand in introducing a mass audience to the language in which this literature was to be discussed and comprehended. The arena in which literary critics wrote about Symbolism was an institution particular to the Russian nineteenth century. From the 1840s until the end of the century, the thick journals were the epicenter of cultural life in both Russia’s cities and provinces. More than just noting significant historical, political, and cultural events in Russian life, the thick journals proved to be the instruments responsible for driving the country’s literary process and instructing its intellectuals. As Robert Maguire notes, they are the “oases wherein a culture developed” and “the vague rhythms of society swelled into the steady throb of great issues.” Most significantly, “the thick journals did not merely record society, but helped give it definition, direction, and flavor.”15 With all of Russia’s intellectual resources focused in such a narrow outlet, the introduction of literary novelties had to be accomplished within the forum of the thick journal. The thick journals of the 1890s are the indispensable starting points for the public’s growing awareness of new art and the sounding boards for the reception of modernism. This powerful portal was controlled by a singularly influential figure—the literary critic. The journal’s critical voice was responsible for not only articulating its stance on literature, but also imbuing the journal as a whole with a readily identifiable tone and ideological worldview. In attempting to unify the highly stratified and codified sections of the thick journal, the critic assumed the role of an intermediary who imposed a distinct and consistent stamp onto the entirety of the journal’s contents and shaped how they were read.

18In the years when early Symbolism still found a haven in Severnyi vestnik, Volynskii was seen alternately as a primary theoretician and proponent of Symbolism and its most dangerous enemy. In 1898, near the end of Severnyi vestnik’s existence, Nikolai Minskii (the journal’s one time secretary) wrote,

  • 16   A. Volynskii, “Literatura i iskusstvo,” in Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta, Dec. 31, 1898.

The course of Severnyi vestnik consisted, really, of two courses moving parallel to one another but never merging. First, Volynskii contributed to the journal’s tone with his sharply polemical articles about the [18]60s. And second, it was a shelter for the group of symbolist writers… The reading public and even the critics often confused these two courses and imagined that Volynskii was a theoretician of Russian Symbolism. That isn’t true. Using that same book of Kant with which he abused Belinskii and Chernyshevskii, Volynskii now intends to destroy Nietzsche and all his followers. Volynskii’s long articles about Leonardo Da Vinci are none other than a landmine triggered from afar which will blow contemporary Symbolism to bits.16

19The small gap between Severnyi vestnik’s aesthetics and Symbolism’s reveals much about the movement’s place, natural yet slightly forced, in the only thick journal in which it felt at home. For many early Symbolists, this journal, which simultaneously fostered and ridiculed their aspirations, was an indispensable stage in developing their public personae. It instilled in them an appreciation for a reading public who shared their artistic inclinations and helped demonstrate the difficulties of printing their work in widely circulating journals. The Symbolists’ literary and theoretical horizons, the very way they envisioned and articulated their project, were shaped by Volynskii’s approbations and attacks. Yet Severnyi vestnik itself was never other than a nineteenth-century thick journal and thus always remained inherently inhospitable to the Symbolists. While Volynskii achieves a degree of mediation between the two, he inevitably falls back on the journal’s default position of hostility and incomprehension of Symbolism.

  • 17   J. Brooks, “Readers and Reading at the End of the Tsarist Era,” in W. M. Todd (ed.), Literature a (...)

20As a space for modeling reading strategies, Severnyi vestnik could accommodate the full range of responses provoked by the new art. Its grounding in the traditions of the nineteenth-century novel invite a readership accustomed to the tenets of realism. They “delighted in Russian classical literature as a literature of high morality, eternal questions, and heightened consciousness that explored society at all levels.”17 The thick journal was designed to promote reading for content and prioritized the social and prescribed facets of reading. This called for a degree of consensus and uniformity in the reception and interpretation of a literary text. The community of readers towards which these elements of Severnyi vestnik were directed were openly hostile and mystified by modernism. Jeffrey Brooks elucidates the incompatibility of the realist and modernist readers.

  • 18   Ibid., 106.

For the modernists to win general acceptance among educated Russians, a new type of reader had to appear, a reader less concerned with morality and mimesis than with the personal aesthetic enjoyment of a literary work. The kind of reading public the new literature demanded, and eventually succeeded in getting, resembled the one that developed in all the major industrialized Western societies, a depoliticized public concerned with personal appreciation and personal questions, a public with a very different attitude toward literature and culture than that of the culturist intellectuals of nineteenth-century Russia.18

21Severnyi vestnik voiced an awareness of the shift underway on its very pages with some of its more prominent contributors serving as the vanguard. Even a journal immersed in a form and content developed around the nineteenth-century norms of publishing and marketing realism acknowledged the emergence of a new approach to literature. As Volynskii wrote in 1895,

  • 19   A. Volynskii, Bor’ba za idealizm (St. Petersburg, 1900), 410.

Art is living through an epoch of transition. It has not yet torn itself from antiquated, vulgarly realistic traditions, but already forebodes the poetic ecstasy of the future when the new ideal beauty finds for itself a perfect expression. It produces various confused, foggy, and muddled works.19

22Consequently, Severnyi vestnik did invite readers drawn to the new art. Its audience was not wholly hostile to Symbolism, but consisted of a subset of readers willing to break with the tenets of realism. It provided a venue for readers willing to accept the subjectivity and muddle of modernism. It was a vivid example of an aesthetic culture in transition and a stark juxtaposition of the varied reading strategies required to engage with twentieth-century literary innovations.

  • 20   See S. Rabinowitz, “No Room of Her Own: The Early Life and Career of Liubov Gurevich,” The Russia (...)

23The newly emerging literary forms did not fall into the traditional purview of a thick journal. Their publication and discussion on the pages of Severnyi vestnik were the result of a rather arbitrary and happenstance moment in the journal’s history. In 1891 a lawsuit between Severnyi vestnik’s shareholders was decided and the twenty-four year old Liubov Gurevich was awarded control of the journal.20 With her came Volynskii’s dominance over the journal’s literary and ideological leanings. Yet their combined force did not result in a complete overhaul of the journal’s format. The result was a typical thick journal with the mass attraction of domestic news and provincial chronicles schizophrenically intermixed with the writings of Volynskii and the Symbolists, the appeal of which was limited to a small circle. With his widely read journal and critical legitimacy, Volynskii was in an ideal position to establish himself at the head of the burgeoning Russian Symbolists. Through his association with a thick journal, Volynskii occupies a position that allows him to promote the new aesthetics while not overly associating himself with its literature. This ability to be at once a friend and foe of Symbolism, to embrace the idea of Symbolism while finding fault in its practitioners and their writings, empowers Volynskii to act as Russian Symbolism’s intermediary to the literary world without forsaking his own distinct ideological stance and view of literature’s purpose. During Russian Symbolism’s early stage, in which its poets and theorists relied on existing literary institutions to express themselves, Volynskii’s ability to force their writings into the codified and rigid framework of the thick journal proved highly useful in propagating their aesthetics and defining modernism to its Russian readers.

24Volynskii disagreed with many aspects of Symbolist poetics, but this did not prevent him from writing, for Severnyi vestnik, general theoretical pronouncements that read very much like programmatic statements declaring the need for Russian Symbolism. His November 1895 combined review of Briusov’s Chefs d’oeuvre and the third volume of Russian Symbolists opens with harsh words for Briusov and his group of Symbolists.

  • 21   A. Volynskii, Bor’ba za idealizm (St. Petersburg, 1900), 410.

We have already noted several manifestations from the realm of the poetry of the newest type—among those are the two collections of poetry belonging to the Russian imitators of European Symbolism. […] In the face of a scarcity of talent, these young writers, appearing before the public with vast pretensions, cannot win for themselves a single compassionate voice in the press.21

25Volynskii was clearly not an advocate of the poets calling themselves Symbolists. But he did acknowledge the need for a new perception of poetry. The fluidity with which Volynskii shifts from the language of invective and attack to that of aspiration and ambition for a new type of Russian literature is a remarkable show of the uneasy place of Symbolism in Severnyi vestnik. A compassionate voice, Volynskii served as a complement to the hostile and derisive critics. He could read the new art with a more sympathetic eye and appreciate aspects of its potential for literary innovation and progress. It was an outsider’s reading of Symbolism, but still one with a notable consideration of modernism. Volynskii shows how a space such as Severnyi vestnik could bridge the gap between readers reluctant to part with the certainty and aspirations towards universal comprehension that marked their experience with nineteenth-century Russian literature and those on the side of modernism’s lofty ephemerality and champions of its ambiguity. The third category of reading, that of the fellow traveller of the new art, intrigued by its potential yet still not part of its network of readers, is represented by Volynskii himself. In a way, he partook of the participatory nature of modernism and served as a reader and interlocutor willing to engage with its novelty and probe the paradigm it introduced. With one foot in the nineteenth century and one in the twentieth, part realist and part idealist, Volynskii modeled the reader attempting to transition between two fundamentally incompatible modes of interacting with literature.

3. The Group Dynamics of Reading Modernism

  • 22   J. X. Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge, 2004), 1-2.

26While the previous section highlighted the moments of overlap between modernism and realism and their potential for shared readers and venues, modernism nevertheless remains a radical rupture from all aspects of preceding social norms and literary traditions. This included the acts of writing and reading since “literary modernism developed in small coteries of like-minded artists and their hangers-on who were acutely conscious of their difference from everyday society.”22 The reader cultivated by the Russian Symbolists in the 1890s was not part of the broad and anonymous reading public of the thick journal culture, but a more insular and initiated co-participant in modernism, a reader who would exemplify the twentieth-century practices described by Roman Timenchik in the following chapter (Timenchik, “Early Twentieth-Century Schools of Reading Russian Poetry,” in the present volume). A particular type of perceptiveness and openness to modernism became salient features of the ideal reader of the new art. One of European modernism’s first scandals illustrates the centrality of the right type of encounter with literature. The mid nineteenth-century French reader of modernism was called on to navigate its books with particular acumen and intentionality.

  • 23   See A. Sigrídur Arnar, The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, The Artist’s Book, And The T (...)

27The sensation over the publication of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal in 1857 fixated on six poems with particularly erotic connotations. In the ensuing trial, Baudelaire defended the book in its totality and asserted that single poems must not be read outside of the context of the work as a whole. Baudelaire pinpointed the meaning of his poetry as residing in the overarching structure of the book. The mechanism for generating that meaning came through the reader’s active navigation of the contextual, associative, and material bonds that linked these poems. The term that came to describe this appreciation for the totality of the book and its capacity to elevate the aesthetic and moral import of all of its contents was “secret architecture.” This notion captures the premium placed on coherence and unity in the modernist approach to the book.23 In the modernist era, the book emerged as a vehicle for the transmission of a host of aesthetic, philosophical, and epistemological reevaluations that encompassed not only those producing such books but also those reading them. The subtlety of this perspectival shift in considering the role of the book is evident in the “secrecy” of this form, in the superimposition of its innovativeness onto extant material structures and their networks of publication. Baudelaire valued the hybridity of Les Fleurs du mal as a book that was at once familiar and yet representative of the book’s potential to convey a complete and novel worldview. When brought to trial for it, he relied on such a combination to justify it in its totality as an object imbued with artistic unity and moral worth.

28The structure of the original edition was not maintained in its subsequent publications. The glimmer of unity and intentionality that had accompanied Baudelaire’s original conception of the work was obscured. The idea was revived in 1896 when Aleksandr Urusov published a detailed account of the organization of the 1857 Les Fleurs du mal as well as a reminder of Baudelaire’s original desire for the book to be read as a unified whole. Urusov, who was close to the Symbolist poet Konstantin Bal’mont and thus had a direct connection to Briusov, reinserted the role of the book as a single entity, a coordinated construct, into the appreciation of French modernism. At this same moment, Briusov was becoming discontent with the models for making books of poetry and searched for an alternative to the available mechanisms for publishing the Russian Symbolists. The attention the Symbolists would pay to the “secret architecture” of their books reflected a growing concern with fashioning the proper readers of Symbolism and utilizing the book, as a material object, to guide and instruct them.

  • 24   Reitblat, “Simvolisty, ikh izdateli i chitateli,” 308.

29The concept of imbuing a work with a secret architecture captures a new facet of reading in the Silver Age. A fundamental stumbling block for early Russian modernists were the twin problems of visibility and identity, “their readers didn’t even recognize them as Symbolists.”24 To combat this anonymity and foster an audience that the Russian Symbolists went out of their way to invite interaction with their readership. They envisioned their art as a coterie of aesthetically likeminded readers. This is an echo of the community-building required of earlier phases in introducing new forms and new technologies to Russian readers—episodes discussed in these volumes by Bella Grigoryan (Grigoryan, “The Depiction of Readers and Publics in Russian Periodicals,” vol. 1) and Susan Smith-Peter (Smith-Peter, “The Struggle to Create a Regional Public in the Early Nineteenth Century Russian Empire,” in the present volume). They utilized new, distinctly modernist, venues of publication to solicit members for these insular circles. But that model requires a gatekeeper, an arbiter of what did and did not qualify as Symbolism. This became particularly critical with the growing tendency to mock the new art through parodic renderings of Symbolism and Decadence. The trick of distinguishing genuine from parodic was not always intuitive. There was a widespread impulse to mock or misread modernism. For those producing the new art, it became paramount to account for two distinct types of reader. The insular circles of readers who were drawn to Symbolism’s mystifications or Decadence’s pronounced carnality functioned as a sympathetic coterie for new modernist writers. These responses were less visible to the general reading public than those of the other type of reader—the hostile audiences who dismissed or challenged modernism. The growing discrepancy in edition sizes and circulation range worked to widen the gap between reader who could access and participate in modernist circles and those who experienced it from afar and typically through the mediation of newspaper and journal critics.

  • 25   L. Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City, 2006), 4-5.

30Symbolism’s operative principle of a coterie impacted how literature was both produced and consumed. As Lytle Shaw proposes, coterie writing “depends upon a small and implicitly undemocratic model of audience, a model in which particularity has hijacked the universality ‘we’ all know and want.”25 The Russian poets of the turn of the century promoted a relationship with the reader that depended on a high degree of mutual comprehension and artistic similarity. As the editors of the Symbolist almanac Northern Flowers (Severnye tsvety) announced in 1903,

  • 26   “Severnye tsvety (1903),” in Severnye cvety I-V (Munich, 1972), v.

Our third almanac differs, in certain respects, from the first two. It is more “single-voiced,” more homogenous in terms of its inner content. It includes a host of new names and some of our previous companions are absent. We’re happy to have these new ones. They possess a new youth, a new vitality, strength! And we have no time to be sorry for those left behind. There was a time when we waited for them, gave them the chance to catch up. But it’s now time for us to go again. Our gazes are again directed forward, to the future, and we can no longer see who is behind us.26

31This overt statement of editorial policy delineates the criteria for membership in the group of Russian Symbolists and goes hand in hand with the stratification of modernism’s audience. Modernists embraced the turn away from universality and trumpeted the inaccessibility inherent to such a poetics. They actively avoided universality, although not without offering an alternative means to access their art. The very markers of insularity that the hostile critics derided as part of the book’s moribund nature were meant to serve as signposts of its potential for productively establishing a forum for the new art. In order to realize this potential, those producing Symbolism had to create a distinctly Symbolist reader.

  • 27   A. Chekhov, The Seagull, in Idem, Plays, transl. P. Carson (London, 2002), 94.
  • 28   Travis, Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century, 23.
  • 29   Wolfgang Iser has developed the concepts of blank spaces and the asymmetry between reader and tex (...)

32The categories of readership that we have been examining thus far fall into two camps. The hostile, outsider, non-Symbolist readers echo the dismissive sentiments of Irina Arkadina, the heroine of Chekhov’s 1896 play The Seagull (Chaika): “As a joke I am prepared to listen to raving, but here we have claims to new forms, to a new age in art.”27 Her son’s foray into the new art provokes heckling and mockery in such an unprepared and unsympathetic audience. This frustrating and negative encounter between modernist and reader was a cautionary tale that illustrated the chasm between the two groups. This sense of distance was a persistent problem for all modernist authors who, like James Joyce in the early twentieth century, had to contend with “the gap between the reader implied by the text of Ulysses and the actual/historical reader of 1920 trained in the conventions of nineteenth-century realism.”28 As a response to the reality of the late nineteenth-century readership, the modernists sought to counteract the asymmetrical relationship between reader and text by actively forming their audience. Utilizing the potential of the blank space of the text as a space for crafting a reader, twentieth-century writers could retrain them as fellow modernists versed in a new mindset and equipped with the skills of deciphering the new art.29

  • 30   S. I. Gindin, “Programma poetiki novogo veka (o teoreticheskikh poiskakh V. Ia. Briusova v 1890-e (...)
  • 31   O. Lekmanov, “Chetyre zametki k postroeniiu “chitatel’skoi” istorii literatury,” in Samoe glavnoe (...)
  • 32   J. Culler, “Literary Competence,” in J. P. Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism, (Baltimore, (...)

33Symbolist poets wrote for Symbolist readers—sympathetic, likeminded members of their coterie. These were readers who could navigate the secret architecture of the new art were imbued with an innate understanding of a Symbolist worldview. Sergei Gindin describes the lay of the land in the age of early modernism, “As soon as the language of poetry was obligated to reflect a new reality, its semantic and expressive power, the very principles of the representation of reality, had to to change.”30 This is accomplished through “readerly co-creation” (chitatel’skoe sotvorchestvo), a facet of modernism that can also be seen in its dialogic nature–a key component of Oleg Lekmanov’s approach to twentieth-century Russian literature.31 In modernism, the reader no longer occupies a passive position and must attentively and creatively participate in its production. This shift is a necessary component of modernism’s novelty since, “if a difficult work later becomes intelligible it is because new ways of reading have been developed in order to meet what is the fundamental demand of the system: the demand for sense.”32 Modernist works were ineffective in respect to the hostile and uninitiated audiences since they failed to make sense. Only those willing to understand these new works, Culler’s “competent” reader, had access to them and that only as a result of the “new ways of reading” in which they were engaged—readerly co-creation.

  • 33   T. Avery, P. Brantlinger, “Reading and Modernism: ‘Mind Hungers’ Common and Uncommon,” in D. Brad (...)
  • 34   A. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, 1986), 75.

34Readerly co-creation is another expression of the insular and tautological qualities of modernist reading culture. It is founded on the belief that likemindedness is an essential quality in modernist readers. The reader should have a predisposition towards Symbolism in order to read Symbolism. The modernist poet and the modernist reader should share an aesthetic and epistemological outlook. The type of reader who responded to Briusov’s invitation to contribute and participate in the Symbolist project was precisely that who embraced the concept of readerly co-creation. This category could make an easy transition from reading Symbolism to writing Symbolism and shows how intertwined those two identities could become. These qualities also demonstrate the essence of early modernism’s elitism and inaccessibility. As the new art, Symbolism called for a change in the very act of reading. “In pursuing the ‘new,’ especially through experimentation with narrative and poetic forms and conventions, modernist writers inevitably defamiliarized the common reader. Many of them therefore wrote first for themselves and then, at most, for small coteries of kindred spirits.”33 The ideal Symbolist comprehends and emulates the coded language and secret forms of the new art. They are the addressees of Briusov’s 1904 manifesto on Symbolism, which served as the opening article of the first issue of the Russian Symbolist journal Vesy (Libra): “Keys to the Mysteries.” Only a fellow Symbolist could make use of these keys which were meant to facilitate both reading and writing Symbolism. The identity of the movement itself was contingent on a shared epistemology and aesthetics. Symbolism is an orchestrated set of interactions motivated by the reciprocal nature of the symbol. As Anne Carson notes, “The English word “symbol” is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. In the words of Aristophanes (in Plato’s Symposium): ‘Each one of us is but the symbolon of a human being and each pursues a never ending search for the symbolon of himself.’”34

  • 35   P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York, 1993), 115
  • 36   “One of the hallmarks of literary modernism was its preoccupation with teaching readers.” Travis, (...)

35Consequently, the ideal Symbolist reader collapsed the distinction between artistic producer and artistic consumer. The Symbolists’ place in the late nineteenth century aligned them with a moment of rejection and reevaluation in terms of both the market/audience for their works as well as the underpinning aesthetic tendencies of their art. As a “symbolic good,” Symbolism turned away from the “field of large-scale cultural production” and took root in the alternate “field of restricted production.” The former is broadly directed at the whole of the reading public (including the “non-producers of cultural goods”) while the latter is meant exclusively for “a public of producers of cultural goods” who function as both “clients and competitors.”35 By so intentionally isolating their literary production from the mass market, the modernists could fairly blatantly disregard the majority of the reading public. The interactions they cultivated with readers took on an instructional quality. A crucial function of being a Symbolist and writing Symbolism was to educate and guide the reader.36 The cooperative and interactive nature of reading these new works created a palpable divide in categories of readership.

36Readers with an inherent connection to modernism, with an inclination to self identify as modernists and simultaneously produce and consume it, were set apart from the passive and unengaged readers. The constellation of terms used to describe this distinction—coterie, insularity, likemindedness, tautological relationships, readerly co-creation, secrets and mysteries—all point towards a degree of blurring between the roles of author and reader. In its essence, the practice of reading the new art of the 1890s was built on a degree of contact and familiarity between the two that emphasized collective modes of artistic production over individual reading experiences. By picking up a Symbolist book, readers entered into a network of interactions that caused dynamic shifts in their identities. They adopted the role of Symbolists as readers, interlocutors, and creators of Symbolism. The epithet equally and simultaneously encompassed all of those roles and served to cultivate a collective identity for the Symbolists. Reading modernism pulled one into a group dynamic and was a primary entry point for becoming a modernist.

37These fundamental shifts in the way literature was read at the turn of the century bring the issue of accessibility to the forefront. Understood both literally as the availability of modernist writing and figuratively as the comprehensibility of modernism, accessibility significantly shaped its readership. The early modernist reader was able to obtain the relatively few books and journals that printed modernism, despite their small print runs, concentration in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and confinement to expressly modernist publishing houses. The relative obscurity and physical unavailability of these publications made them less accessible to a broad readership. Compounding this barrier to establishing a wide and diffuse reading public was the issue of modernism’s perceived nonsensicality. Its prioritization of hints and nuances over concrete images alienated many who expected descriptive precision and clarity in literature. Thus doubly inaccessible, Symbolism was not the reading material of choice for much of Russia’s literate public.

4. Un-Modernist Readers

  • 37   N. K. Mikhailovskii, “Optimisticheskii i pessimisticheskii ton. Maks Nordau o vyrozhdenii. Dekade (...)

38The literary critic Nikolai Mikhailovskii indicated the centrality of the salon and offered a somewhat disgruntled view of the position in which it placed the reader: “Mallarmé presents himself as the center of a certain circle (kruzhok) and primarily concerns himself with interlocutors and not readers.”37 This lack of concern with readers in favor of the immediacy and ephemerality of interlocutors is a potentially alienating and even confrontational gesture. This chapter has argued that reframing the notion of the interlocutor and building a notion of readership around the limited and insular groupings of the coterie were a defining feature in the development of modernism. Consequently, a large portion of readers were not included in these circles. Russians who read Symbolism from such an outside perspective were prone to feel mystified and hostile toward this novel and intentionally inaccessible experience. However, only those aware of the existence of modernism, chiefly the educated intellectuals, experienced this alienation. As with all of the types of Silver Age reader on which I have focused, the category of hostile reader presupposes an engagement with the new art. A fourth, and vast, section of the Russian reading public were those wholly uninterested in, or even unaware of, modernism. Thus while a sea change in literary production and reception was well underway by the turn of the century, the reading habits and strategies employed by the fastest growing segments of the Russian public had more akin with the eighteenth century than the twentieth.

  • 38   J. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read : Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton, N (...)
  • 39   Reitblat, “Chitatel’skaia auditoriia v nachale XX veka,” 279.
  • 40   Brooks gives a thorough discussion of the popular formats of the turn of the century in Brooks, W (...)
  • 41   See Ch. A. Ruud, Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow (Montreal, 1990); E. A. Din (...)
  • 42   For a discussion of the Symbolists’ efforts to reframe the notion of artistic value, see J. Stone (...)

39Both Abram Reitblat and Jeffrey Brooks have extensively charted the growth in literacy and book production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.38 A significant element of that increase was the tremendous boom in reading among workers and peasants. While the circulation numbers of journals and edition sizes of books directed towards educated readers remained relatively flat during this period, the amount of reading material available for the “lower” and “middle” strata saw a notable increase.39 The presence of the mass reader on the literary landscape impacted the types of works produced, the popularity of certain authors, and the dominant literary forms of the time. Inexpensive newspapers (such as “The Kopeck Daily”), illustrated journals, and free literary inserts ruled the day and the most widely read writers of the early 1900s were mainly the nineteenth-century stalwarts reprinted in these formats.40 These are trends that exploded in the 1890s and early 1900s, with the dramatic increase in overall literacy in Russia, but do not note a major shift in what or how Russians read. It is in fact the culmination of reforms and developments that had begun in the 1860s and ushered in new social, political, and economic possibilities that became increasingly realizable during the second half of the nineteenth century and would continue well into the twentieth century in the form of Soviet campaigns for literacy and their reframing of the nineteenth-century canon. At the height of Russia’s brief period of capitalism in the final decades of the 1800s, catering to the mass reader was a profitable occupation. Publishers such as Ivan Sytin, Aleksei Suvorin, and Adolf Marks were influential businessmen and accomplished entrepreneurs.41 They equated popularity and profitability with literary significance, and the size of an edition (which is to say the number of readers to whom a work appealed) was the primary marker of a book’s value. The modernists, who relied on patrons and not publisher- entrepreneurs to support their works, had a radically different means of evaluating their work and judging the success and popularity of their art, a system that diverged from questions of profit and edition size.42 For the mass reader, the eccentricities of modernism were far less appealing (or noticeable) than the bandits and detectives that filled the pages of popular fiction.

  • 43   Brooks places the lubok and its derivates in a primary place in the development of popular litera (...)
  • 44   See B. Dralyuk, Western Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze, 1907-1934 (Leiden, 2012); (...)
  • 45   Dralyuk, Western Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze, 1907-1934 , 49-62.

40The ubiquitous, inexpensive, plot driven works that demanded the mass reader’s attention were a close relative of the prints and chapbooks derived from the woodcut prints (lubki) that could be found in most peasant and merchant homes.43 As these works wended their way into fiction, they contributed to the “craze” for popular genres such as the detective novel and bandit tale.44 With their roots in the visual and folk forms of the broadside, these publications were directed towards a very different sort of reader than the modernist journal and book. The intended audience for modernism diverged significantly from that of the Russian Pinkerton. The didactic and interactive components of reading modernism were absent from the strategies and skills of engaging with the detective novel. Popular fiction’s artistic and economic drive to reach as wide of an audience as possible distinguished it from the ways Symbolism cultivated its readership. Yet the Russian modernists were not immune from the appeal of attracting a larger segment of the reading public. By the time modernism entered its second decade in Russia, around 1905, it had begun to assimilate some of the thematic and stylistic elements of the detective novel and gravitate towards more widely circulating venues.45 While not refuting the need for readerly co-creation or disavowing the core of their identity as a coterie, the modernists did account for a growing audience for their works and a more centralized position in the field of cultural production.

5. Channeling the Modernist Riot

  • 46   Frolova, Kniga v Rossii, 1895-1917, 256-265.

41While Russian modernism’s initial years were devoted to creating a reader suited to comprehending the new art, its second decade saw the divergent pull of efforts to increase its isolation from the mass readership and more fully integrate it into print culture of the early twentieth century. The years 1900-1910 saw an explosion in modernist publications and visibility. The two most prominent modernist publishing houses—Skorpion (1899-1916) and Grif (1904-1915)—would produce nearly 200 books by the 1917 revolution.46 Three high profile journals—Mir iskusstva (1899-1904), Vesy (Libra) (1904-1909), and Zolotoe runo (The Golden Fleece) (1905-1909)—would supply the reading public with a mixture of poetry, prose, criticism, reviews, and visual arts. The sources of modernism were increasingly plentiful and varied in the first decade of the twentieth century. The wealth of material examples of the new art allowed for a more concerted effort to guide and instruct the reader’s attempts to comprehend it. The critic A. V. Amfiteatrov made the following observation about Vesy in a letter of July 9, 1909 to Briusov.

  • 47   Quoted in A. V. Lavrov, D. E. Maksimov, “Vesy,” in B. A. Bialik, V. A. Keldysh, V. R. Shcherbina (...)

The role of editor of such a journal seems to me devilishly hard, for you can’t survive with just an uprising of literary eccentricities; the time for this has passed, and to support an uprising as a logical system and form an academy out of it, as you were able to do, requires, in addition to talent, an extremely well-rounded education, both general and specialized.47

42The notion of a Symbolist academy shows the growing prerogative for structure and accessibility. The varied aesthetic and material culture appended to modernism in this period—book catalogs, advertisements, critical explications of Symbolism, and book reviews—helped to combat the insularity and incomprehensibility that was part of modernism’s initial Russian appearance. Moving from the coterie to the academy allowed readers a more passive and anonymous encounter with modernism. With multiple points of entry into the new art and overt explanations and guidance to its meaning, the public could learn to read Symbolism without becoming Symbolists themselves. The writers’ steadily growing interest in this new didactic and relatively welcoming and democratic quality could be seen in the emergence of manifesto-like publications throughout the 1900s. Andrei Bely’s 1902 “Forms of Art” (Formy iskusstva), Briusov’s 1904 “Keys to the Mysteries,” Viacheslav Ivanov’s 1908 “Two Currents in Contemporary Symbolism” (Dve stikhii v sovremennom simvolizme), and Aleksandr Blok’s 1910 “On the Current State of Russian Symbolism” (O sovremennom sostoianii russkogo simvolizma) all supply a framework and commentary to help readers situate themselves into modernism’s literary landscape.

  • 48   Stone, The Institutions of Russian Modernism: Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism (...)
  • 49   M. S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1 (...)

43I have argued elsewhere for a dramatic shift in the interaction between modernists and their Russian readers that occurred around 1910. This concept, best described as biographical Symbolism, placed the new art in a more open and accessible framework that invited a wider audience.48 This more expansive approach to presenting Symbolism to its readers aligns with the general trajectory of modernism to become more fully integrated into the public sphere and mass culture. Mark Morrisson posits one of modernism’s fundamental traits as its “appropriating some of the institutions of the newly emerging mass publishing world to create counterpublicity, counterpublic spheres whose ultimate aim was to influence the dominant public sphere.”49 In Russia, this act of appropriation required new partnerships. The Russian Symbolists pursued alliances with other authors and different publishers that helped them to retain their identity as modernists while reaching new readers. They could still inhabit the insular confines of a journal crafted in the model of modernism and they could still distinguish the public sphere they inhabited and readership they attracted from the general reader, but they would do so in a context that was accessible to those outside of their coterie.

  • 50   See Iu. Romaikina, Literaturno-khudozhestvennyi al’manakh izdatel’stva ‘Shipovnik’ (1907-1917): t (...)

44The most prominent early example of this co-mingling of Russian modernism and the broader reading public of the beginning of the twentieth century was the literary almanac Shipovnik. Founded in 1907, Shipovnik boasted a roster of contributors that included both major Symbolists (Blok, Bely, Briusov, Bal’mont, and Sologub) and the neo-realists continuing and developing the prose traditions of the nineteenth century (including Bunin, Andreev, and Prishvin).50 With print runs exceeding 30,000 copies, Shipovnik relied on broad appeal and commercial viability. It was able to accommodate all three types of reader discussed above. The devoted Symbolist-reader could continue to be immersed in the intricate networks of modernism, the skeptical reader could partake of small doses of the new art in the mixed company of contemporary realists, and the hostile reader could experience the immediate juxtaposition of modernist and non-modernist works. All of these reading practices occurred in a space of publication that was designed for the mass audience of the general public rather than the restricted readership cultivated by the Symbolists. Modernism’s position in the broader literary landscape of the early 1900s and its placement in front of a large and undifferentiated spectrum of readers was a significant facet of its evolution and also a harbinger of the crisis that would come to severely undermine its aesthetic identity.

6. A Crisis of Symbolism, a Crisis of Readership

  • 51   M. Kuzmin, “O prekrasnoi iasnosti,” Apollon, 4 (1910), 6,10.

45The crisis of Symbolism arrived on several fronts, but one of the first salvos was directed at the very language that made modernism difficult for the uninitiated reader. Mikhail Kuzmin was well aware of the extent of modernism’s networks of publication. He contributed to many of its ventures from the almanacs Northern Flowers to the journal Vesy to publishing books of both prose and poetry under sign of Skorpion. The notion of interlinkages and a well-wrought and organized volume of poetry is conspicuously incorporated into Kuzmin’s first book of verse, Nets (Seti), which appeared in 1908 with Skorpion. It was therefore from within that Kuzmin launched his assault on Symbolist insularity. His article “On Beautiful Clarity” (“O prekrasnoi iasnosti”) from the January 1910 issue of Apollon, takes aim squarely at the secret architecture and carefully fashioned reader that had been the driving forces of Symbolism. The intersection of its material and aesthetic culture, embodied in the notion of the distinctly Symbolist reader, was at odds with Kuzmin’s proposed movement—“Clearism” (klarizm). His rallying cry was for a simplification of contemporary Russian literature with an eye on universality and comprehensibility. “I beg of you, be logical (forgive me this heartfelt exclamation!), logical in thought, in construction, and in syntax.” His plea for infusing logic into the culture of Russian modernism placed its creators in the role of “artful architects.” Kuzmin made these pronouncements from within the ranks of Symbolism, whispering into the ear of his “dear friend” that he should make his chaos “transparent and orderly.”51 The critiques he offered of Symbolism unquestionably resonated with the more hostile responses of its unsympathetic readers that had accompanied Symbolism since its inception. However Kuzmin speaks as an insider, a Symbolist poet who has proven to be a capable Symbolist reader of modernism’s output in the first decade of the twentieth century. His concerns are thus not a regurgitation of the complaints of the non-Symbolist reader, but rather the articulation of a more deeply rooted call for Symbolism to engage with that very same non-Symbolist reader.

  • 52   On the crisis of Symbolism, see Irene Masing-Delic, “The Symbolist Crisis Revisited: Blok’s View, (...)

46Kuzmin’s article is not an assault on modernism from one who has turned away from its particular worldview. It is the manifestation of a sentiment that had been welling up from within Symbolist circles over the previous years. The notion of competency was a driving element of my evaluation of modernism’s conceptual development, and one that was central to the modernists’ own approach to their art. A competent reader had to be taught and informed how to make sense of and interpret a modernist book—a project that had engaged the modernists since the reading public first encountered their Russian Symbolists in 1894. In this earlier period, competency was equated with the exclusive notions of “likeminded” and “Symbolist” readers. These were real categories of readership that distinguished those capable of actively co-creating a Symbolist work from the general reading public. This distinction waned by 1910 and anyone could become a competent reader of modernism. This change in the criteria for being a proper reader of modernism coincided with the crisis of its earliest group manifestation in Russia—Russian Symbolism was being fractured both from without and within.52 A distrust of Symbolism as an aesthetic capable of supplying an sensible description of the modern world increasingly pervaded Russian literary culture around 1910. This included a renewed interest in making art more comprehensible to all readers.

  • 53   Bowlt, Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920, 299-300.
  • 54   O. Lekmanov, “Shustovskii spotykach, Miunkhenskoe pivo i D. S. Merezhkovskii,” Novoe literaturnoe (...)

47The wave of Russian modernists who gained prominence as Symbolism declined were dubbed Acmeists. They sought refuge under the sign of Apollo, the emblem of clarity and order. Their art promoted “a renewed Classical, Alexandrine culture which countered the radical trends of the ‘new barbarians’ in Moscow and St. Petersburg.” The Acmeists did not have to train their readers since their writing “favor[ed] lucidity of meaning and constancy of structure.”53 This renewed interest in a universal reader signaled a shift in Russian modernism’s understanding of its place in the public sphere. Modernist writers could no longer presume the close bonds of the coterie and insider knowledge of an insular circle of author-readers. The reading public was still stratified by class and education, but the divisions among those reading modernism were less glaring than at its outset. The new art had come to accommodate the mass reader and accept a broader and less differentiated audience. Even the earliest Symbolists were implicated in this shift, as a 1912 advertisement for cognac featuring a poem in the style of Merezhkovskii (pod Merezhkovskogo) attests.54

  • 55   Viktor Zhirmunskii’s 1916 discussion of post-Symbolist poets was titled “Those Whose Have Overcom (...)
  • 56   A. Zhdanov, Essays on Literature, Philosophy, and Music (New York, 1950), 12.

48After 1910, towards the final decade of the Silver Age, popular culture had expanded to incorporate the authors and themes associated with modernism. In order for it to do so, the initial incomprehensibility and inaccessibility of Symbolism had to be “overcome.”55 This called for a reader who was neither automatically sympathetic nor hostile, but instead attentive. Zhirmunskii notes that the intimate scenes of Akhmatova’s poetry are constructed through finely wrought details rather than the assumption of a close circle of familiar readers. This return to a more anonymous and passive audience, one akin to the nineteenth century, is in part a reflection of the growing sphere of readers interested in modernism. Yet despite this call for clarity (and the Soviet mandate for all literary production to demonstrate “truthfulness and historical concreteness” later in the century56), the impact of modernism on the Russian reader must not be discounted. The encounter with modernism was transformative. As the French Symbolist Rachilde wrote in her 1900 novel The Juggler,

  • 57   Rachilde, The Juggler, trans. M. Hawthorne (New Brunswick, 1990), 95.

I remember that one of my friends, a great lover of new poetry, used to say to me: ‘Between ourselves, I’ll admit I don’t understand a thing of what those poets write… only, after the symbolists, I can no longer read the others, it seems to me they are the ones who make grammar mistakes!’57

49The indelible mark left by reading modernism reflected the fundamental changes in how perception was understood in the early years of the twentieth century. In a decade where the likes of Einstein, Freud, and de Saussure smashed notions of objectivity and the absolute in the realms of science, psychology, and linguistics, art and literature also demanded a new perspective. The readers of Symbolism, the viewers of Cubism, the audience of Stravinskii all employed new strategies for understanding an aesthetic that did not readily give way to comprehension. Silver Age Russian readers stepped into a literary landscape that shaped and articulated their identities while allying them with the riotous forces of modernism.

Bibliographie

Albright D., Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting 1872-1927 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 2015.

Avery T., Brantlinger P., “Reading and Modernism: ‘Mind Hungers’ Common and Uncommon,” in D. Bradshaw (ed.), A Concise Companion to Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).

Bornstein G., Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Bourdieu P., The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

Bowlt J. E., Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920: Art, Life & Culture of the Russian Silver Age (New York: Vendome Press, 2008).

Brooks J., “Readers and Reading at the End of the Tsarist Era,” in W. M. Todd (ed.), Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1978).

Brooks J., When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

Cooper J. X., Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Culler J., “Literary Competence,” in J. P. Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

Darnton R., The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990).

Diepeveen L. (ed.), Mock Modernism: An Anthology of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds, 1910-1935 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).

Dinershtein E. A., A.S. Suvorin : chelovek, sdelavshii kareru (Moscow, Rosspen, 1998).

Dinershtein E. A., Siniaia ptitsa Zinoviia Grzhebina (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2014).

Dralyuk B., Western Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze, 1907-1934 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

Frolova I. I., Kniga v Rossii, 1895-1917 (St. Petersburg: Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, 2008).

Gindin S. I., “Programma poetiki novogo veka (o teoreticheskikh poiskakh V.Ia. Briusova v 1890-e gody),” in Serebrianyi vek v Rossii (Moscow: Radiks, 1993).

Iser W., The Act of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

Lavrov A.V., Maksimov D.E., “Vesy,” in B. A. Bialik, V. A. Keldysh, V. R. Shcherbina (eds.), Literaturnyi protsess i russkaia zhurnalistika kontsa XIX-nachala XX veka. 1890-1904. Burzhuazno-liberal’nye i modernistskie izdaniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1982).

Leenhardt J., “Toward a Sociology of Reading,” in S. R. Suleiman, I. Crosman, The Reader in the Text (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Lekmanov O., “Chetyre zametki k postroeniiu “chitatel’skoi” istorii literatury,” in Samoe glavnoe: O russkoi literature XX veka (Moscow: Rosebud, 2017).

Morrisson M. S., The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).

Rabinowitz S., “No Room of Her Own: The Early Life and Career of Liubov Gurevich,” in The Russian Review, 57, no. 2 (1998).

Rabinowitz S., “Northern Herald: from traditional thick journal to forerunner of the avant-garde,” in D. Martinsen (ed.), Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Reitblat A. I., “Chitatel’skaia auditoriia v nachale XX veka,” in Idem, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2009).

Reitblat A. I., “Detektivnaia literatura i russkii chitatel’,” in Idem, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu (Moscow, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2009).

Reitblat A. I., Ot Boby k Bal’montu (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2009).

Reitblat A. I., “Simvolisty, ikh izdateli i chitateli,” in Idem, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2009).

Romaikina Iu., Literaturno-khudozhestvennyi al’manakh izdatel’stva “Shipovnik” (1907-1917): tip izdaniia, intregiruiushchii kontekst (Saratov: Saratov State University, 2016).

Ronen O., The Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (The Netherlands, Harwood, 1997).

Ronen O., Serebrianyi vek kak umysel i vymysel (Moscow, OGI, 2000).

Ruud Ch. A., Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990).

Shaw L., Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006).

Southworth H. (ed.), Leonard & Virginia Woolf: The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Stone J., The Institutions of Russian Modernism: Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017).

Stone J., “The Literal Symbolist: Solov’ev, Briusov, and the Reader of Early Russian Symbolism,” The Russian Review, 67, no. 3 (2008), 373-86.

Travis M. A., Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998).

Volzhenina E. V., Zhiznetvorchestvo grubykh gunnov ili Modernizm – massam (Moscow: AIRO-XXI, 2018).

Notes

1   B. A Sadovskoi, R. L. Shcherbakov, “Vesy (vospominaniia sotrudnika),” Minuvshee, 13 (1993), 16-17.

2   M. A. Travis, Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale, 1998), 19.

3   The term was popularized (and arguably coined) by Sergei Makovskii in 1962. It has been explored and problematized by Omri Ronen. See O. Ronen, The Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Amsterdam, 1997) and Serebrianyi vek kak umysel i vymysel (Moscow, 2000); S. Makovskii, Na parnase serebrianogo veka (Munich, 1962); J. E. Bowlt, Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920: Art, Life & Culture of the Russian Silver Age (New York, 2008).

4   Bowlt, Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920, 11.

5   Pivotal statements on early Russian modernism by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Nikolai Minskii, Ivan Konevskoi, Valerii Briusov, and Sergei Diagilev can be found in: Iu. K. Gerasimov, E. I. Goncharova (eds.), Literaturnye manifesty i deklaratsii russkogo modernizma (St. Petersburg, 2017); N. A. Bogomolov, (ed.), Kritika russkogo simvolizma (Moscow, 2002); with English translations in The Russian Symbolists: An Anthology of Critical and Theoretical Writings, edited and translated by R. Peterson (Ann Arbor, 1986).

6   Valerii Briusov’s plan to finance publishing the third issue of the modernist booklets Russian Symbolists in 1895 was to pawn his gold pocket watch. Rossiiskaia Gosudarstvennaia Biblioteka (RGB), f. 386, k. 1, ed. khr. 13, l. 11.

7   For an informed overview of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century book industry in Russia, see I. I. Frolova, Kniga v Rossii, 1895-1917 (St. Petersburg, 2008).

8   See A. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, 1990), 8-49; D. Albright, Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting 1872-1927 (Baltimore, 2015), 1-6; M. Bradbury, J. McFarlane (eds.), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930 (London, 1976).

9   Oct. 22, 1895 letter with poems from Valerii Briusov archive, RGB, f. 386, k. 110, ed. kh. 47, l. 1

10   1894 letter from “VL” with poems for the second issue of Russian Symbolists from Valerii Briusov archive, RGB, f. 386, k. 110, ed. kh. 53.

11   “Malenk’ii fel’eton. Moskovskie simvolisty,” Novoe vremia, no. 6476, 10 March 1894.

12   A. I. Reitblat, “Simvolisty, ikh izdateli i chitateli,” in Idem, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu (Moscow, 2009), 309 (quoting Maksimilan Voloshin from 1901). As Leonard Diepeveen notes, “a blunt understanding of mimesis was central to public understandings of art, and works that seemed to contest its place led people to wonder if in fact these works still could be art.” L. Diepeveen (ed.), Mock Modernism: An Anthology of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds, 1910-1935 (Toronto, 2014), 5.

13 See J. Stone, “The Literal Symbolist: Solov’ev, Briusov, and the Reader of Early Russian Symbolism,” The Russian Review, 67, 3 (2008), 373-386.

14   R. Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York, 1990), 107.

15   R. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Princeton, 1968), 37.

16   A. Volynskii, “Literatura i iskusstvo,” in Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta, Dec. 31, 1898.

17   J. Brooks, “Readers and Reading at the End of the Tsarist Era,” in W. M. Todd (ed.), Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800-1914 (Stanford, 1978), 106.

18   Ibid., 106.

19   A. Volynskii, Bor’ba za idealizm (St. Petersburg, 1900), 410.

20   See S. Rabinowitz, “No Room of Her Own: The Early Life and Career of Liubov Gurevich,” The Russian Review, 57, 2 (1998); S. Rabinowitz, “Northern Herald: from traditional thick journal to forerunner of the avant-garde,” in D. Martinsen (ed.), Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (Cambridge, 1987).

21   A. Volynskii, Bor’ba za idealizm (St. Petersburg, 1900), 410.

22   J. X. Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge, 2004), 1-2.

23   See A. Sigrídur Arnar, The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, The Artist’s Book, And The Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago, 2011); J. Lawler, Poetry and Moral Dialectic: Baudelaire’s “Secret Architecture” (Madison, New Jersey, 1997)

24   Reitblat, “Simvolisty, ikh izdateli i chitateli,” 308.

25   L. Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City, 2006), 4-5.

26   “Severnye tsvety (1903),” in Severnye cvety I-V (Munich, 1972), v.

27   A. Chekhov, The Seagull, in Idem, Plays, transl. P. Carson (London, 2002), 94.

28   Travis, Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century, 23.

29   Wolfgang Iser has developed the concepts of blank spaces and the asymmetry between reader and text in the context of his work on implied readership. W. Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore, 1978), 163-179. Jaques Leenhardt also uses the language of disjuncture in singling out modernism’s “gap between productive and receptive codes” that has resulted in the “formation of a new reading public.” J. Leenhardt, “Toward a Sociology of Reading,” in S. R. Suleiman, I. Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text (Princeton, 1980), 207.

30   S. I. Gindin, “Programma poetiki novogo veka (o teoreticheskikh poiskakh V. Ia. Briusova v 1890-e gody),” in Serebrianyi vek v Rossii (Moscow, 1993), 90-91.

31   O. Lekmanov, “Chetyre zametki k postroeniiu “chitatel’skoi” istorii literatury,” in Samoe glavnoe: O russkoi literature XX veka (Moscow, 2017).

32   J. Culler, “Literary Competence,” in J. P. Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism, (Baltimore, 1980), 111.

33   T. Avery, P. Brantlinger, “Reading and Modernism: ‘Mind Hungers’ Common and Uncommon,” in D. Bradshaw (ed.), A Concise Companion to Modernism (Oxford, 2003), 249.

34   A. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, 1986), 75.

35   P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York, 1993), 115.

36   “One of the hallmarks of literary modernism was its preoccupation with teaching readers.” Travis, Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century, 19.

37   N. K. Mikhailovskii, “Optimisticheskii i pessimisticheskii ton. Maks Nordau o vyrozhdenii. Dekadenty, simvolisty, magi i proch. (1893),” in Idem, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1909), 501.

38   J. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read : Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton, N.J., 1985) and A. I. Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu (Moscow, 2009).

39   Reitblat, “Chitatel’skaia auditoriia v nachale XX veka,” 279.

40   Brooks gives a thorough discussion of the popular formats of the turn of the century in Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read : Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 , 109-165. Using library data, Reitblat has compiled a table of the relative popularity of various writers at key moments in the late nineteenth century. Topping his list for 1900-01 are Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, and Turgenev, all of whom had been dead for at least two decades (except Tolstoi who rejected his identity as a novelist in the 1880s). Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu , 82.

41   See Ch. A. Ruud, Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow (Montreal, 1990); E. A. Dinershtein, A. S. Suvorin: chelovek, sdelavshii kareru (Moscow, 1998).

42   For a discussion of the Symbolists’ efforts to reframe the notion of artistic value, see J. Stone, The Institutions of Russian Modernism: Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism (Evanston, 2017), 17-18.

43   Brooks places the lubok and its derivates in a primary place in the development of popular literature well into the twentieth century. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 , 59-108.

44   See B. Dralyuk, Western Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze, 1907-1934 (Leiden, 2012); Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read : Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917, 109-213; A. I. Reitblat, “Detektivnaia literatura i russkii chitatel’,” in Idem, Ot Bovy k Bal’montu (Moscow, 2009), 294-306.

45   Dralyuk, Western Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze, 1907-1934 , 49-62.

46   Frolova, Kniga v Rossii, 1895-1917, 256-265.

47   Quoted in A. V. Lavrov, D. E. Maksimov, “Vesy,” in B. A. Bialik, V. A. Keldysh, V. R. Shcherbina (eds.) Literaturnyi protsess i russkaia zhurnalistika kontsa XIX-nachala XX veka. 1890-1904. Burzhuazno-liberal’nye i modernistskie izdaniia (Moscow, 1982), 131.

48   Stone, The Institutions of Russian Modernism: Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism , 203-240.

49   M. S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920 (Madison, 2001), 11. Ekaterina Volzhenina also notes the simultaneity of an industrialized mass market and the development of Russian modernism and seeks to link the two. E. V. Volzhenina, Zhiznetvorchestvo grubykh gunnov ili Modernizm – massam (Moscow, 2018).

50   See Iu. Romaikina, Literaturno-khudozhestvennyi al’manakh izdatel’stva ‘Shipovnik’ (1907-1917): tip izdaniia, intregiruiushchii kontekst (Saratov, 2016); E. A. Dinershtein, Siniaia ptitsa Zinoviia Grzhebina, (Moscow, 2014); Frolova, Kniga v Rossii, 1895-1917, 164-172.

51   M. Kuzmin, “O prekrasnoi iasnosti,” Apollon, 4 (1910), 6,10.

52   On the crisis of Symbolism, see Irene Masing-Delic, “The Symbolist Crisis Revisited: Blok’s View,” in J. Douglas Clayton (ed.), Issues in Russian Literature Before 1917 (Columbus, Ohio, 1989).

53   Bowlt, Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920, 299-300.

54   O. Lekmanov, “Shustovskii spotykach, Miunkhenskoe pivo i D. S. Merezhkovskii,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 30, 2 (1998).

55   Viktor Zhirmunskii’s 1916 discussion of post-Symbolist poets was titled “Those Whose Have Overcome Symbolism.” V. M. Zhirmunskii, “Preodolevshie simvolizm (1916),” in Idem, Teoriia literatury. Poetika. Stilistika (Leningrad, 1977).

56   A. Zhdanov, Essays on Literature, Philosophy, and Music (New York, 1950), 12.

57   Rachilde, The Juggler, trans. M. Hawthorne (New Brunswick, 1990), 95.

Auteur

Jonathan Stone is Associate Professor of Russian and Russian Studies and Chair of Comparative Literary Studies at Franklin & Marshall College (USA). He studies early Russian modernism and the print and material culture of the fin de siècle. He is the author of The Historical Dictionary of Russian Literature and has published articles on Russian Symbolism, Decadence, the history of the book, and Mikhail Bakhtin. His book The Institutions of Russian Modernism: Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism was published in 2017 by Northwestern University Press.

CC-BY-SA-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Acheter

Volume papier

amazon.fr
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search