Russian Symbolism

Russian symbolism was an intellectual and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It represented the Russian branch of the symbolist movement in European art, and was mostly known for its contributions to Russian poetry.

Primary influences on the movement were the irrationalistic and mystical poetry and philosophy of Fyodor Tyutchev and Vladimir Solovyov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novels, the operas of Richard Wagner, the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, French symbolist and decadent poets (such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire), and the dramas of Henrik Ibsen.

The movement was inaugurated by Nikolai Minsky's article "The Ancient Debate" (1884) and Dmitry Merezhkovsky's book On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature (1892). Both writers promoted extreme individualism and deified the act of creation. Merezhkovsky was known for his poetry as well as a series of novels on god-men, among whom he counted Jesus, Joan of Arc, Dante Alighieri, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon and (later) Hitler. His wife, Zinaida Gippius, also a major poet in the early days of the symbolist movement, opened a salon in Saint Petersburg, which came to be known as the "headquarters of Russian decadence".

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