Silver Age Culture Automatic translate
“One of the most sophisticated eras in the history of Russian culture, the cultural renaissance of the beginning of the century,” called this era the philosopher N. A. Berdyaev. He was probably the first to use the concept of "silver age." Formally, the "silver age" can be indicated by the following time frames: 1890-1921.
But the “silver age” is not so much a chronological period as the time of a certain mentality, reflected in artistic images. This is the time when many philosophers wrote about the decline of Western European civilizational values, about the crisis of the Christian worldview, but at the same time they also expected a way out, a breakthrough into a new life, a new ideology expressed by new directions in art. The crisis nature in this case led to an intensive search for new ways of spiritual and social development. In the field of artistic culture, there was a desire to update poetic imagery and language, as well as conducting numerous non-cultural experiments.
The culture of the Silver Age was multipolar. It was represented by both adherents of the culture of the past and people who denied it. Along with realism, which prevailed in the worldview of artists of the second half of the 19th century, as well as being the main style in art, symbolism as a new form of romanticism is gradually becoming increasingly important.
Arose in the 80s. XIX century as the course of French literature, pan-European symbolism was enriched by the "Russian wave". The fundamental characteristics of symbolism were given in the philosophical and journalistic manifestos of this movement: “In the Light of Conscience” (1890) by N. M. Minsky and “On the Causes of Decline and the New Trends of Modern Russian Literature” (1893) by D. S. Merezhkovsky. In the years 1894-1895. three poetry collections “Russian Symbolists” are published, which presented the verses of V. Ya. Bryusov and his entourage to the public, the works of F. K. Sollogub, Z. N. Gippius, K. D. Balmont appear in print, the translation activities of Russian poets are unfolding introducing readers to new trends in European literature.
The highest flowering of Russian symbolism occurred in the 1900s, which is rightly associated with the entry into the literature of Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Innocent Annensky, Sergei Solovyov and Maximilian Voloshin. They were conditionally called young-symbolists, "symbolists of the second wave." Contrasting themselves with the “elders,” the “younger” Symbolists did not accept extreme subjectivity, pessimism, and the self-sufficient aesthetics of the decadents (“Decadents…”, as A. Bely put it figuratively, “those who felt themselves over the failure of culture without the possibility of jumping…”), they defended the idea of creativity as a service to the higher principle, believing that the previous culture had exhausted itself. However, the end of the cycle of world history is not a triumph of chaos, but a symbol of the coming transformation. In symbolism, therefore, eschatological ideas intertwined with faith in the spiritual rebirth of mankind. Symbolism in Russia was often thought of as “life creation”, as a kind of sacred action, aimed at creating a universal spiritual organism. The highest goal of Russian symbolism was the creation of the "new man."