Русский символизм: искусство и идеи конца XIX – начала XX века.

Activities and events of the Symbolist movement in 19th century Russia

Russian symbolism was an intellectual, literary and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It arose separately from West European symbolism, and emphasized defamiliarization and the mysticism of Sophiology.

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

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