No single poetic heritage has ever aged and deteriorated in such a short time as Symbolism. It would even be more correct to call Russian Symbolism a pseudosymbolism, to call attention to its misuse of great themes and abstract conceptions, inadequately embodied in its language. The pseudosymbolic, that is, a large part of what the Symbolists wrote, preserves for the history of literature only a relative interest. That which has some objective value lies hidden under heaps of stage props and pseudosymbolist rubbish. What was the hardest-working and noblest generation of Russian poets paid a heavy tribute to the age in which they lived and their cultural task. Let us begin with the father of Russian Symbolism, Balmont. Strikingly little of Balmont has survived; a dozen poems perhaps. That which has survived, however, is truly superb: both in its phonetic brilliance and its deep sense of roots and sounds, it bears comparison with the best examples of metalogical poetry. It isn’t Balmont’s fault that his undemanding readers turned the development of his poetry in the worst possible direction. In his best poems—“O night, stay with me” [O noch’, pobud’ so mnoi”] and “The Old House” [“Staryi dom”]—he extracted from the medium of Russian verse new and never-to-be-repeated sounds of a foreign, almost a kind of seraphic, phonetics. For us, this is explained by the special phonetic quality of Balmont, by his exotic perception of consonant sounds. It is here rather than in his vulgar musicality that the source of his poetic power is to be found. In Briusov’s best (non-urban) poems, one feature, making him the most consistent and able of Russian Symbolists, will never fade with age. This is his capacity to approach his theme, his total authority over it, his capacity to draw from it all it can and must give, to exhaust it completely, to find for it a correct and capacious stanzaic vessel. His best poems are models of absolute mastery over the theme: “Orpheus and Eurydice,” “Theseus and Ariadne,” “The Demon of Suicide” [“Demon samoubiistva”]. Briusov taught Russian poets to respect the theme as such. There is also something to be learned from his latest books: Distances [Dali] and Last Dreams [Poslednye mechty]. Here he provides examples of the breadth of his verse and of his astonishing capacity to deploy thought-filled words of varied imagery in a space of frugal dimension. In The Urn [Urna] Andrei Biely enriched the Russian lyric with sharp prosaisms from the German metaphysical vocabulary, displaying the ironical sound of philosophic terms. In his book Ashes [Pepel] he skillfully introduces polyphony, that is, many voices, into Nekrasov’s poetry, the themes of which are subjected to an original orchestration. Biely’s musical populism is reduced to a gesture of beggarlike plasticity that accompanies the immense musical theme. Viacheslav Ivanov is more genuinely native and in the future will be more accessible than all the other Russian Symbolists. A large part of the fascination for his majestic manner stems from our philological ignorance. In no other Symbolist poet does one hear so distinctly the hum of his lexicon, the powerful clamor of popular speech surging forward and waiting its turn like a belclass="underline" “Mute night, deaf night” [“Noch’ nemaia, noch’ glukhaia”], “The Maenad” [“Menada”], etc. His apprehension of the past as the future relates him to Khlebnikov. Viacheslav Ivanov’s archaism stems not from his choice of themes, but from his incapacity to think in relative terms, that is, to compare different periods. Viacheslav Ivanov’s Hellenic poetry was not written after or at the same time as Greek poetry, but before it, because not for one moment does he forget that he is speaking in his own barbarous native tongue.
These were the founders of Russian Symbolism. None of them worked in vain. In each of them there is something to be learnt at the present moment, or at any moment you like. Let us turn to those contemporaries of theirs on whom fell the bitter lot of avoiding the historical mistakes of their kindred but at the price of exclusion from the invigorating riot of the first Symbolist feasts. Let us turn to Sologub and Annensky.
Sologub and Annensky began their work as early as the nineties, completely unnoticed. Annensky’s influence left its mark with unusual force on the Russian poetry that came after him. Our first teacher of psychological acuity in the new Russian lyric, he transmitted the art of psychological composition to Futurism. Sologub’s influence, with almost equal force, manifested itself in a purely negative way: having brought to an extreme simplicity and perfection, by way of a lofty rationalism, the devices of the old Russian literature of the period of decline—including Nadson, Apukhtin and Golenishchev-Kutuzov1—having cleansed these devices of their trashy emotional admixture and having painted them the color of original erotic myth, he rendered impossible all attempts to return to the past, and he had, it would seem, practically no imitators. Organically compassionate on behalf of banality, keening tenderly over some dead word, Sologub created a cult of ghastly and outlived poetic formulas, inspiriting them with a miraculous and terminal life. Sologub’s early poetry and his collection Ring of Fire [Plamennyi krug] are a cruel and cynical disposal of the poetic stereotype, not an enticing example, but rather a terrible warning to the brave idiot who might in the future try to write such verse.
Annensky, with the same resoluteness as Briusov, introduced the historically objective theme into poetry, and he introduced psychological constructivism into the lyric. Burning with a thirst to learn from the West, he had no teachers worthy of his vocation and was forced to pretend to be an imitator. Annensky’s psychologism is not a caprice and not the ephemeral flash of an exquisite sensibility; it is genuine, firm construction. A straight path connects Annensky’s “Steel Cicada” [“Stal’naia tsikada”] with Aseev’s “Steel Nightingale” [“Stal’noi solovei”]. Annensky taught us how to use psychological analysis as a working tool in the lyric. He was the real forerunner of psychological construction in Russian Futurism, so brilliantly represented by Pasternak. To this day, Annensky has not found his Russian reader and is known only by Akhmatova’s vulgarization of his methods. He is one of the most authentic originals in Russian poetry. One would like to transfer every poem in his books, Quiet Songs [Tikhie pesni] and The Cypress Chest [Kiparisovyi larets], into an anthology.
If Russian Symbolism had its Vergils and Ovids, it also had its Catulluses, not so much with regard to their relative stature as to the nature of their work. Here one must mention Kuzmin2 and Khodasevich. These are typical minor poets, with all the purity and charm of sound characteristic of minor poets. For Kuzmin the major line in world literature would seem in general never to have existed. He’s all bound up in a prejudice against it and in a canonization of the minor line, no higher than the level of Goldoni’s comedy and Sumarokov’s love songs. He cultivated rather successfully in his poems a conscious carelessness and baggy awkwardness of speech, sprinkled with Gallicisms and Polonisms. Enkindled by the minor poetry of the West—Musset, let us say—he writes a New Rolla and creates for the reader the illusion of the completely artificial and premature decrepitude of Russian poetic language. Kuzmin’s poetry is the prematurely senile smile of the Russian lyric. Khodasevich cultivated Baratynsky’s theme: “My gift is meager and my voice is soft” [“Moi dar ubog i golos moi negromok”] and worked every possible variation on the theme of the prematurely born child. His minor line stems from the poems of the secondary poets of the Pushkin and post-Pushkin periods, the domestic amateur poets like Countess Rostopchina, Viazemsky, and others.3 Coming from the best period of Russian poetic dilettantism, the period of the domestic album, the friendly epistle in verse, the casual epigram, Khodasevich carried the intricacy and the tender coarseness of idiomatic popular Moscow speech as it had been used in the noble literary circles of the last century right into our own. His poetry is very national, very literary, and very elegant.