Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Sign Text Culture: Studies in Slavic and Comparative Semioti)

The Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature

Sign/Text/Culture: Studies in Slavic and Comparative Semiotics A series edited by Vyacheslav V.Ivanov University of California at Los Angeles and Moscow State University Editorial Board James Bailey, University of Wisconsin, Madison [emeritus] Henryk Baran, The University at Albany/SUNY Alexander Ospovat, University of California at Los Angeles and Moscow State University Omry Ronen, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Greta Slobin, University of California, Santa Cruz Igor Smirnov, University of Constance, Germany Roman Timenchik, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Tatyana Tsivyan, Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow Volume 1 The Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature Omry Ronen Forthcoming titles Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature Olga Freidenberg Linguistics of the Narrative: The Case of Russian Elena Paducheva From“The Brothers Karamazov”to“Doctor Zhivago” Igor Smirnov The Last Charismatic Emperor:The Image of Nicholas I in Russian Culture Alexander Ospovat

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Archaic Patterns in Literary Text: The “Black Sun” Symbol Vyacheslav V.Ivanov The Russian Sphinx: Studies in Culture, History, and Poetry Edited by Henryk Baran Mikhail Bakhtin’s Philosophical Terminology Vadim Liapunov This book is part of a series. The publisher will accept continuation orders which may be cancelled at any time and which provide for automatic billing and shipping of each title in the series upon publication. Please write for details.

The Fallacy of the Silver Age in TwentiethCentury Russian Literature Omry Ronen University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

harwood academic publishers Australia • Canada • China • France • Germany • India • Japan • Luxembourg • Malaysia • The Netherlands • Russia • Singapore • Switzerland • Thailand • United Kingdom

Copyright © 1997 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Harwood Academic Publishers. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Amsteldijk 166 1st Floor 1079 LH Amsterdam The Netherlands British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ronen, Omry The fallacy of the silver age in twentieth-century Russian literature.—(Sign/text/culture: studies in Slavic and comparative semiotics; v. 1) 1. Russian literature–20th century—History and criticism I. Title 891.7’09’004 ISBN 0-203-98606-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 90-5702-550-7 (Print Edition)

Contents

Introduction to the Series Series Editor’s Foreword Acknowledgments

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1

The Notion of the Russian Silver Age Today

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2

“The Parnassus of the Silver Age” or “the Second Russian Renaissance”? Sergei MakovskiiNilolai Berdiaev

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3

The Silver of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandel’shtam, and Gumilev

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4

“The Silver Age” of Numbers

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5

Vladimir Piast’s Chronology and the Original Meaning of the Term “Silver Age of Russian Poetry”

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6

The Detractors of Postsymbolism: “Ippolit Udush’ev” and “Gleb Marev”

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7

The Adamantine Age, “the Golden Age in One’s Pocket,” and the Platinum Age

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Notes

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Literature

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Index

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Introduction to the Series

Many of the changes that have swept through Eastern Europe during the last several years have been linked to a wholesale transformation of symbolic systems. Streets, cities, regions, and countries have been renamed. Coats of arms and national hymns have been replaced. Churches and historical monuments have been restored. Previously forbidden literary, religious, and philosophical works have been published. The most radical avant-garde styles in literature, theater, and art have been revived and developed. Entire social systems and their component parts have been reshaped. As a result, the discipline of semiotics—the study of signs and texts that originated with the Greek Stoics and flowered in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the 1960s on (despite official prohibitions and pressures)— offers a privileged insight into human behavior. More than ever, to comprehend contemporary society and culture we must approach them through the realms of literary and artistic texts, symbols, traditions, and myths. The monographs and collections of articles featured in the book series Sign/Text/Culture: Studies in Slavic and Comparative Semiotics are concerned with comparative semiotic analysis of Slavic and other cultural traditions. In keeping with the broad sweep of semiotics, the subject matter of these studies ranges from individual works and authors to entire periods of Russian and European cultural history; at the same time, like Elementa, the journal with which it is linked, this series pays special attention to several distinct areas. Since major steps in developing a new cross-disciplinary methodology in the humanities were made principally in dialogue with the science of language (by the Prague Linguistic Circle, the Moscow-Tartu School, and their predecessors in the Slavic world and elsewhere), the series encourages further study of the possibilities and limitations of

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strictly linguistic models for semiotics. Some of the volumes will explore the link of linguistics to poetics and possible alternate approaches to analysis of texts. The series will also feature further investigation into discrete units and rules of their combination, an approach that has proved fruitful in folklore and some other narratological studies, as well as probabilistic models aimed at understanding the behavior of continuous systems with a high degree of complexity. As in other fields of contemporary research, one of the most prominent parts of semiotics has been the reconstruction of the past and of primeval sources of different structures in modern society. It is often impossible to grasp the original function of symbols or other elements of a Slavic text or other modern verbal compositions without recourse to their sources in IndoEuropean mythological and poetical discourse. Thus, a principal concern of the series is the relationship between mythology and literature as it evolved across time and various cultures. In an attempt to develop a new synthetic vision of the Russian and other Slavic traditions, as well as the traditions of Central and Western Europe, the series will focus on selected chapters of literary, cultural, and social history and characteristic figures from those periods. It will explore the connections between Slavic cultures and other traditions of Eurasia, ranging from the distant past (particularly the Indo-European) to the present. It will pay special attention to the discoveries of the Slavic artistic and scholarly avantgarde in this century, and to those works that have not been accessible to readers due to the historical situation of the last decades. Vyacheslav Ivanov

Series Editor’s Foreword

I am delighted to introduce Omry Ronen’s study, the first work to appear in our new book series. In this monograph Ronen continues his outstanding research into intertextual links among different Russian authors. His previous writings in this field opened a new chapter in comprehending literature as a system that includes different works related to each other not only through some repeated and borrowed images and motifs, but also through key words and their combinations. From this point of view, the intertextual approach to literature is particularly close to investigations in structural semantics in its diachronic dimension. As suggested by Leo Spitzer in a sequence of remarkable studies composed after his emigration to America, one may base a history of ideas and important cultural semiotic concepts on the analysis of their linguistic expression (Spitzer 1948; 1963). Spitzer showed, for instance, that “our modern words ambiente, ambience, environment and Umwelt ultimately derive from the Greek concept later put to use in the Renaissance, by Newton (circumambient medium), and by Goethe, who coined the word Umwelt (translated in turn as environment by Carlyle); or that the Pythagorean concept of the music of the spheres reappeared in the Renaissance and in the Baroque period, with the result that the German word Stimmung, originally meaning ‘harmony’ ‘the worlds musical concord,’ became a rather common word signifying a state of mind, and one shorn of the emotional overtones it possessed in the baroque era” (Spitzer 1988:433–434). To take a similar example from the writings of another great philologist and linguist who was Omry Ronen’s teacher and whose lectures are quoted in the authors notes in this book, Roman Jakobson studied the history of the word circle in modern linguistics starting from the Russian kruzhok and following

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its echoes and renderings in different European languages; his approach to metalinguistic problems was mostly historical (Jakobson 1971; cf. Toman 1995). In linguistics, the necessity to understand the language of the science itself by building a specific metalinguistic theory is felt as acutely as in mathematics. Some of the greatest achievements of modern mathematics were attained in the field of metamathematics. Linguists cannot as yet boast of such fascinating results as Goedel’s theorem. But they are working on compiling dictionaries of linguistic terms and studying their origin, and exploring relative positive and negative sides of different models of grammar. Other branches of the humanities connected to semiotics have also started to slowly move in the same direction. Work on critical (synchronic), historical (diachronic), and typological (panchronic) terms has begun in literary scholarship and we hope to make it one of the aims of our series. From this point of view it may be particularly instructive to understand the innovative value of Omry Ronen’s book. It is devoted to a concrete problem in the metalinguistic study of the terminology of modern Russian literary history. The stock phrase Silver Age is described in its different (partly evaluative, i.e. axiological) uses by different Russian authors. Through this network of connections Ronen uncovers important features of literary relations. The earliest Russian poetical examples of the image in which the Golden Age and the Iron Age are opposed to each other are discussed in Ronen’s book in connection with the Greek tradition. The famous two lines by Pushkin disclose their debt to it through their hexameter rhythm and compositional scheme. Almost all the studies conducted according to the general principle proposed by Spitzer have led to the same conclusion: the bases of most key concepts of modern culture may be found in Greece, although in either their early stages1 or their later development2 the Greek fundamentals of our vocabulary of the main concepts appear to be intertwined with Oriental roots. The Greek opposition of different ages symbolically linked to metals is clearly connected to the semiotic systems of classification widely spread in ancient Oriental cultures. In such systems, metals enter into symbolic rows that connect them to colors, points of the compass, social ranks, and other semiotic units. These types of fouror six-element systems of classification can be derived from primitive

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binary oppositions. One of the oldest literary examples of such structures might be seen already in the Sumerian poetical dispute between Silver and Copper (Vanstiphout 1990).3 Such poetical and mythopoetical contests might have been based on the ritualistic differences among the corresponding social groups. Thus, in one of the archaic Old Hittite kilam rituals the smiths connected to the four metals appear in the order gold-iron-silver-copper explained by the particular axiological role of iron at that period (Ivanov 1988: 16–17, 24, with further references). Similarly, the order of metals found in Hesiod’s description of different ages can be connected to the social and technological changes of the following time (Vernant 1960, 1966; Fontenrose 1974; Pucci 1971). For Russian poets of the symbolist period discussed in Omry Ronen’s book the image of the ages of metal seems to be connected not so much to Hesiod as to Ovid. Both Viacheslav I. Ivanov and Innokentii Annenskii have in mind Ovid’s terminology. This is not a chance occurrence. Although both of them translated Greek poets, still for them—as for later Russian poets, up to Joseph Brodsky—the Roman tradition was the main living classical one. This tendency is particularly clear in the case of Mandel’shtam, who managed to produce a synthetic combination of the two different expressions when he rendered the Latin aureus “golden” (golden measure, golden age) in his one line: “Meroi veka zolotoi” (“With the golden measure of the age”). Omry Ronen’s intertextual method of finding clues to the literary work proves to be absolutely indispensable in the case of Anna Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero. The poetess was fond of asking friends and visitors to comment on its enigmatic parts. Several times when I visited her I was drawn into this sort of play with the reader. Of my comments, Akhmatova particularly liked the one in which I suggested that the poem had been written to give her view of that short period preceding World War I. Neither she nor I used the term analyzed in Ronen’s book. Neither one of us would have liked it, and I completely agree with Ronen’s arguments concerning its fallacy (though I am not sure it is possible to change the standard use of this term, however incorrect). But we had in mind just this misnamed time interval. Akhmatova’s work invites the reader to participate in attempts to solve its riddles. The clues may well vary with different readers and their degree of the intertextual inventiveness. Ronen rightly pays attention to the epigraph from Byron’s Don Juan in connection with

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the name of the poet appearing at the point where Akhmatova discusses her own style. It seems to me that the sentence “I want a hero” in Byron’s text may be one of the literary clues to the title of Akhmatova’s poem; another one might be Pasternak’s line “la b za geroia ne dal nichego” (“I would give nothing to get a hero”) from Spektorskii (Akhmatova’s interest in this work is confirmed by her transformation of some images borrowed from it in her own poem). Thus, for the title of a single poem at least three different intertextual sources may be responsible: the one suggested by Omry Ronen and the other two discussed here. One cannot be sure about the concrete process of how a certain combination of words is formed: it may well be a fusion of several sources. At the same time, such hypothetical constructions may in some cases say more about a reader or researcher than about an author. The degree of certainty depends on many different conditions. Particularly intriguing for me is Ronen’s main conclusion (anticipated already in Aleksandr Lavrov’s article from 1981, which he cites at length) that the first to use the opposition of the Golden and the Silver Age in relation to modern Russian literature was Ivanov-Razumnik (the pseudonym of Razumnik Vasil’evich Ivanov, 1878–1946). The role of this extraordinarily gifted and influential writer, political journalist and politician has not been evaluated sufficiently, although several substantial studies by Lavrov (see bibliography in Ronen’s monograph) have recently opened this important field of research, to which Ronen also has contributed in his book. Ivanov-Razumnik’s life was a difficult one—filled with arrests, periods of internal exile, months or years in prison or camp,4 whatever the political regime in power. He was arrested twice while a university student in pre-Revolution Russia; subsequently, between 1919 and 1937, he was arrested a number of times by the Soviet secret police, mainly because of his connections to publications of the Left Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party; finally, during World War 11, he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. It would be hard to exaggerate Ivanov-Razumnik’s influence on many of the most important Russian authors of his time. During 1916–1918 he was the central figure of the group Skify (Scythians): a name occasionally employed by Ivanov-Razumnik as a pseudonym since 1912 was used as the title of two collections of essays and other literary works edited by him in 1917–1918, and also as a designation of a whole group of authors whose writings were published in these

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volumes. But “The Scythians” was also the title and theme of Alexander Blok’s famous 1918 poem, in which we find many ideas common also to the writings of Ivanov-Razumnik, who by then was particularly close to its creator. For intertextual studies it might be particularly interesting that Blok’s poem, and especially the line “O, staryi mir! Poka ty ne pogib…” [“Oh, Old World! While you have not yet perished…”]), bears the trace of a sentence in Herzen’s memoirs (My Past and Thoughts, chapter 41) in which he, as “an old Scythian,” speaks of his joy at seeing the coming ruin of the old world. This very sentence was chosen by Ivanov-Razumnik as a motto to his 1920 article on Herzen as a “Scythian of the forties” of the previous century. In a long and well-documented introduction to his publication of Ivanov-Razumnik’s and Blok’s correspondence, Lavrov is very cautious in assessing the role of the Left SR Party for both of them. But it goes without saying that in the first months following October 1917 these two authors were enthusiastically in favor of the new Revolution and were positively disposed towards the recent events. During this period, a whole group of writers was connected with Left SR publications; not only Blok with his The Twelve and “The Scythians,” but also Andrei Belyi, Kliuev, Esenin, and Pasternak published their works in volumes that were partly edited by IvanovRazumnik or by his close companions. These publications ceased after the major political change of July 1918, when the Left SRs, previously represented in Lenin’s first government, became the enemy of the Bolsheviks. From this time forward the original two-party government that proclaimed a broad international orientation gives way to a totalitarian dictatorship with a growing national Russian tendency. Neither the connections between the authors named above and Left SR publications nor the change in their mood after July 1918 have been investigated in Soviet works on the history of Russian literature. In this, as in many other respects, Western European and American publications imitated the deficiency of their Soviet counterparts. This gap in describing the connections between Russian literature and the political atmosphere in Russia of 1917– 1918 may be partially compensated for by the study of the works of Ivanov-Razumnik as initiated by Lavrov and followed by Ronen. To grasp the difference between the creative Golden Age of the early twentieth century and the following decay of the Silver Age introduced in the Ivanov-Razumnik article that Ronen studies, one

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has to take into account the Russian author’s previous writings. To see the relation between his literary views, on the one hand, and political evaluations and predictions, on the other, one has to read his collection of articles The Year of the Revolution (published at the start of 1918).5 The first part of this volume represents his political diary of 1917; in the second part, entitled “Literature and Revolution” (a heading subsequently borrowed by Trotsky), he gathers together some of his literary-critical and general ideological works from this period. For Ivanov-Razumnik, the fate of Russian literature was completely determined by that of the Revolution. At the time when the newspaper articles included in the book were written, it seemed to him that both the Revolution and literature were at their summit. When we reread the collection today we are struck by the similarity between his political language and rhetorical devices and those of Bolshevik politicians. Ivanov-Razumnik was not an accidental fellowtraveler: he shared with the Bolsheviks common roots in the Russian tradition of Belinskii, Chernyshevskii, and Nekrasov, all of whom he continued to write about in a highly elevated style even during those terrifying days. The Russian social cataclysm of 1917 was partly prepared by such traditional negation of all the standard Western European values connected to respect for property (of the state and church, as well as private). That anarchistic tendency of nonacquisitiveness (nestiazhatel’stvo) was a prerequisite for building a new utopian society. I believe that negation of all values also meant an anarchistic approach to poetical form. One can understand, therefore, why Ivanov-Razumnik was fond of Khlebnikov (cf. Ronen’s book for the quotation concerning Khlebnikov and Elena Guro as true futurists) rather than Mandel’shtam. Likewise, the noted critics opposition to the acmeists was rooted in the difference between his views and theirs: he was completely hostile to the acmeists’ conception of world culture as the foundation for their work. It also appears that Blok’s views on poetry and culture in the final years of his life diverge sharply from those of IvanovRazumnik. Although the latter subsequently published an article by Blok that sharply attacked Gumilev, still, at the time this article was written (1921), they were no longer as close as when Blok had written “The Scythians.” The differences between them are manifested in their response to Mandel’shtam’s poetry. As may be seen from Blok’s diary, he recognized the particular poetical substance of

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Mandel’shtams visions. For Ivanov-Razumnik, however, even the later Mandel’shtam remained an epigone of the second rank (see the full text of the quotation in Ronen’s book). Although Blok gave Ivanov-Razumnik some Classical books as a present, he distanced himself from the man with whom the ecstatic images of the beginning of 1918 had been connected. After the catastrophe of July 1918, when Blok was arrested and spent a few terrible days in a Bolshevik jail, he never regained the optimistic view that he had shared with Ivanov-Razumnik. For his part, the politically engaged author opposed Blok’s views on the crisis of humanism. As far as ideology was concerned, they became strangers to each other. As for Blok’s intellectual environment, it is noteworthy that another author in whose writings Ronen identifies an anticipation of the modern deeper understanding of the notion of the Silver Age was also a friend of the great poet. This was Vladimir Piast, whose intimate connection with Blok had preceded the period of the latters closeness to Ivanov-Razumnik’s Scythian group. Piast was close to Blok before World War I, when both of them admired Strindberg and when Piast went to Stockholm to prove their admiration. At that time Piast was the “nightmarish man reading Ulalume” (by Edgar Allan Poe), as described in an early Mandel’shtam poem. After 1912 Piast was no longer so close to Blok; following the publication of The Twelve he broke with its author for political reasons. At that time his position was opposed to that of Ivanov-Razumnik. Thus, the similarity in their views on the Silver Age may likely be ascribed to the environment of Blok in the broad sense, without taking into consideration political and aesthetic differences. Ronen rightly emphasizes the importance of Piast’s memoirs.6 Even among the several fine works of this genre published by the end of the 1920s, his book is distinguished by its natural style and the almost naive description of the atmosphere of the period. In the particular place where Piast discusses the qualities of different poetical generations his reasoning is also natural. Omry Ronen opens his exposition with a survey of typical recent statements concerning the Silver Age. His book may be compared to Eco’s Name of the Rose: he combines the exquisite knowledge of an erudite with the ability to construct a detectivestory type of search that draws in the reader. The “crime” committed at the beginning of his books plot is the offense directed against modern Russian poetry, and the scholar-investigator attempts to find out who might be responsible for this deed.

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Ronen’s remarks on several Soviet and émigré authors are illuminating though not uncontroversial. Perhaps a detective need not take on himself all the duties of a jury; I am not at all convinced that a book of this genre should be prescriptive about the use and misuse of the term it traces through time. But Ronen does it with all the artistic elegance inherent in his studies. He may sometimes appear unjust towards some authors. But his monograph is partly about a dispute concerning tastes. And according to Classical tradition, one does not argue about them. Ronen’s book is truly enjoyable. It seems to belong to the Golden Age of Russian literary scholarship. Vyacheslav Ivanov

Notes 1. On the interplay of Oriental (particularly Semitic) and Greek tendencies in the prehistory of the discrete world-view see, for instance, Ivanov 1993a. On the possible Semitic etymology of the term elephant, important for the problems discussed in this article, see West 1992. 2. To take one more example from semiotic terminology, one may remark that to explain the Slavic rendering of the Greek semeion “sign” (on the history of this term see Ivanov 1993b) we should consider early Iranian influences on the Slavic abstract preChristian religious terminology: Old Church Slavonic znaku can be historically identical to the Sogdian (’)zn’k “sign” (on this word see Livshits 1962:63 with references). 3. On the evident link to the tradition of Pushkin’s “Zoloto i bulat” see Ivanov 1994:14–15. 4. For general biographical information, besides the works mentioned by Ronen, see Leontiev 1993. 5. I have had at my disposal a copy of the book (Ivanov-Razumnik 1918) that had belonged to a well-known member of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) party, professor of the history of law Boris I.Syromiatnikov. From his numerous marginal notes dated early spring 1918, one can see that to him, as probably to many of his colleagues, Ivanov-Razumnik seemed to be fantastic, but also demagogical and false in his statements against the bourgeois parties, warmongers, and imperialists. These marginalia help us reconstruct differences of opinion in a state slowly

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becoming authoritarian: at that time open discussion in print was already impossible for the Kadets, while the turn of the Left SRs would come a few months later. Remarking on a passage in the beginning of the book (IvanovRazumnik 1918:1), where the author states that political freedom had been won, Syromiatnikov issues a denial: “Unfortunately, not.” Near the opening remarks on the worldwide social revolution (ibid.: 1) Syromiatnikov offers a historians conclusion: “Russian maximalism.” A sentence about the “speed of the flight of history” (ibid.: 7) provokes Syromiatnikov’s objection: “not of history, but of revolutionary fantasy.” After the phrase “For us it is enough to have one revolution” (ibid.: 10) Syromiatnikov retorts: “Even one was too much for us.” The cessation of the world war proclaimed as a goal by Ivanov-Razumnik (ibid.: 16) seems a beginning of the civil war to Syromiatnikov. IvanovRazumnik’s remark concerning the opinion of the “democracy of labor” (ibid.: 27) provokes Syromiatnikov to speak about “its selfappointed representatives.” Near the spot where IvanovRazumnik speaks of world revolution (ibid.: 158) Syromiatnikov inserts the question: “The end of civilization?” Close to the title of a book by Merezhkovskii criticized by Ivanov-Razumnik, From the War Towards Revolution (ibid.: 174), Syromiatnikov wrote his own suggestion: “From Revolution Towards Reaction.” 6. The publishing fate of this book was not fortunate. It appeared in a small number of copies and became a rarity soon after its publication. Neither the book nor its author were favorites among official Soviet literary scholars and their Western followers. At the beginning of the recent reform period, the book was included into the program of the series “Forgotten Writings” (“Zabytye knigi”) of the well-known Moscow publishing house “Khudozhestvennaia literatura.” I was asked to write a preface, which I did in the spring of 1990. It turned out, however, that the publishing house did not have money for the series, and the project was cancelled after the first books were published. While working on the preface I was lecturing in The Netherlands. There I found a rare copy of the first edition at the library of the University of Utrecht: the volume had been presented by Piast to his friend Georgii Chulkov with a warm inscription. Chulkov read the book very carefully, as may be seen from his marginalia, in which he tried to correct some of Piast’s factual errors. The

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copy was acquired by the former Lenin (now Russian National) Library, the stamp of which it bore. 1 do not know who stole it from there, or how it came to The Netherlands.

Works Cited Fontenrose, J. 1974. “Work, Justice and Hesiod’s Five Ages.” Classical Philology, 69. Ivanov, Vyacheslav Vs. 1988. “Antichnoe pereosmyslenie arkhaicheskikh mifov.” In: Zhizn’ mifa v antichnosti. The Life of Myth in Antiquity (Vipperovskie chteniia-1985, vypusk XVIII)Pt.1. Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 9–26 . ——. 1993a. “On the Etymology of Latin Elementa” Elementa 1, no.1: 1–5. ——. 1993b. “Origin, History and Meaning of the Term ‘Semiotics’.” Elementa 1, no. 2:115–143. ——. 1994. “K zhanrovoi predystorii prenii i sporov.” In: Tynianovskii sbornik. Piatye tynianovskie chteniia. Riga: Zinatne, 8–21. Ivanov-Razumnik [Razumnik Vasilievich]. 1918. God revoliutsii. Stat’i 1917 goda . Petrograd: “Revoliutsionnyi sotsializm”. Izdatel’stvo pri Tsentral’nom Komitete Partii Levykh Sotsialistovlnternatsionalistov. No. 12. Jakobson, Roman. 1971. “Krugovorot lingvisticheskikh terminov.” In: Selected Writings, vol. 1 . The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 378–387 . Leont’ev, Ia. V. 1993. “Ivanov-Razumnik.” In: Politicheskie deiateli Rossii. 1917. Biograficheskii slovar’. Moscow: Bol’shaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopediia, 121–122 . Livshits, Vladimir A. 1962. Iuridicheskie dokumenty i pis’ma. Sogdiiskie dokumenty s gory Mug. Vypusk 2. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vostochnoi literatury. Pucci, P. 1971. “Lévi-Strauss and the Classical Culture.” Arethusa 4: 103–117. Spitzer, Leo. 1948. Essays in Historical Semantics. NewYork: S.F.Vanni. ——. 1963. Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word Stimmung. Ed. A.Granville. Baltimore, MD: Hatcher. ——. 1988. Representative Essays. Ed. A.K.Forcione, H.Lindenberg, and M.Sutherland. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Toman, Jindrich. 1995. The Magic of a Common Language. Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vanstiphout, H.L.J. 1990. “The Mesopotamian Debate Poems. A General Presentation. Ot. l.” Acta Sumerologica [Japan] 12: 271–318. Vernant, J.-P. 1960. “Le mythe hesiodique des races. Essai d’analyse structurale.” Revue de l’histoire des religions, t.157:21–56 ——. 1966. “Le mythe hesiodique des races. Sur un essai de mise au point.” Revue de philologie, ser.3, t.40:247–276 . West, Martin. 1992. “Elephant.” Glotta, Bd. LXX, 3–4 Heft: 125–128.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Henryk Baran, John Bowlt, Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, and Aleksandr L’vovich Ospovat, whose erudite advice and practical assistance in providing me with rare sources have made this publication a reality rather than a conversation piece. I am obliged to Jindrich Toman for his astute correction of the infelicitous syntactic ambivalence of my original title, and to Andrey Ustinov for an important new bibliographical reference. I fondly recall my audiences at the University of WisconsinMadison, Cornell, and Princeton, whose stimulating questions contributed to the shape of my argument. My former and present students, especially Nancy Pollak, Olga Peters Hasty, Leslie Dorfman, Karen Evans-Romaine, Paula Powell Sapienza, and Karen Rosenflanz, have been genuinely helpful in a variety of ways. Special thanks to the editorial board of the journal Elementa for their kind attention to my work. This study was in the period of gestation when my youngest daughter Anna was born. It is dedicated to her mother.

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1 The Notion of the Russian Silver Age Today

There are some terms which have gained such a wide currency among the historians of Russian literature and literary critics that a modern scholar seldom stops to ask what the content of the notion presumably signified by the term is or whether the term actually suits the concept. The application of the term becomes quite mechanical, with all the consequences outlined by Viktor Shklovskii in his analysis of the automatism of perception, “habitualization” and “defamiliarization” (Lemon and Reis 1965:11–13). In due course, as it sometimes happens with other objects of unquestioned veneration, both the term and the concept it supposedly implies go stale, and an adverse reaction to it begins to take shape. “The Silver Age,” serebrianyi vek, in reference to a distinct, albeit not clearly defined, period or body of artistic works associated with Russian modernism, is one of such terms and concepts. The expression has become enormously popular since the late 1950s and early 1960s in the critical and scholarly literature, at first outside Russia, and then also in the metropoly. An unofficial and defiant slogan that used to provoke the blind rage of the authorities (Azadovskii 1993), it has been fully “rehabilitated” since the beginning of the current liberalization. Such locutions as “the silver age of Russian poetry,” “silver age of Russian literature,” “silver age of Russian culture,” and even “silver age of Russian thought,” are, especially in the more or less trivial critical writing, common cliches practically devoid of any historical, chronological, or even axiological meaning, except that they vaguely denote the aesthetic and spiritual blossoming associated in terms of time with the early twentieth century and in terms of place with St. Petersburg.

2 OMRY RONEN

There has been a Russian publishing enterprise in New York bearing the name “Serebrianyi vek,” The Silver Age; the trademark is now taken over by several ventures in Russia. In 1975, Carl Proffer published an anthology of English translations for college students under the title The Silver Age of Russian Culture (Ann Arbor: Ardis). John Bowlt, in his monograph The Silver Age: Russian Art of the Early 20th Century and the “World of Art” Group (1979), expanded the term to cover fine arts. In Russia there appeared a monstrously omnivorous medley Serebrianyi vek: Peterburgskaia poèziia kontsa XIX-nachala XX v. (Pianykh 1991). The editors of the sedate Histoire de la littérature russe. Le XXe siècle (Etkind, Nivat, Serman and Strada 1987) gave the first volume of their work the subtitle “L’Age d’argent.” It might seem that the term is now rooted so deeply in the popular and scholarly usage that it is too late to question it. Yet there are some unmistakable symptoms of an incipient movement away from the fashionable catchword. The Petersburg literary monthly Neva published in its 8th issue for 1992 an interesting essay by Elena Ignatova, entitled “Who Are We?” (it appeared originally as early as 1983 in the underground typewritten periodical Obvodnyi kanal). The author recollects critically the nostalgic longing for the so-called “Silver Age” culture, typical of the dissident 1960s, and observes that the somewhat puerile and naive legend of the Silver Age was accepted then as an article of faith, totally outside historical perspective and without any closer analysis. My purpose in this inquiry is not to engage in fashionable demythologization, but merely to trace the history of the term “Silver Age” as applied to the first two (or three, or four) decades of the twentieth century and to scrutinize its appropriateness for this particular stretch of time in Russian literary history. Widespread critical opposition notwith-standing, there appeared in 1992 alone at least two collections of scholarly essays with the words “Silver Age” in their title: Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age (Gasparov, Hughes and Paperno 1992) and The Silver Age in Russian Literature: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990 (Elsworth 1992). A disturbing feature shared by both otherwise impressive miscellanea is the manifestly uncritical attitude toward the metallurgical metaphors, the meaning of which they seem to take for granted. As it often happens with pseudomythological catchwords, the name and the current

THE FALLACY OF THE SILVER AGE 3

denotation of the “Silver Age,” as it gained in authority in contemporary Russian critical idiom, lost, under mysterious circumstances, its authorship and much of its original meaning. Traditio auctoris has imperceptibly been replaced by traditio auctoritatis. This, however, happened relatively recently, and a scholar of Russian philology is in a better position than a classical scholar who would attempt today to ascertain who has first applied the Hesiodic-Ovidian metal-age scheme to the Latin language and literature. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1921), Sandys (1903, 1908), and Duff (1927) are silent on this matter. Tronskii (1946:276) limits himself to stating that the tradition of distinguishing between the Golden and the Silver Latin can be traced back to the epoch of the Renaissance. M.Gasparov (1962:10) likewise refers to “habitual” usage, but astutely questions its justice:

The first century A.D. habitually bears the name of the “silver age of Roman literature” by analogy with the “golden age” of Augustus. This name should be understood merely as a matter of convention [lish’ uslovno]. It is impossible to consider the Julio-Claudian and Flavian epoch a time of decline. It was the time of search for new forms to fit new thoughts and sensibilities, and the quest often produced felicitous results. Whatever the case may be in regard to latinitas aurea and latinitas argentea, a historian of new literatures inevitably faces the fact that, beside the literary-historical periodization based on the succession of great styles, there is also an axiological tradition, which we have inherited from humanism, of defining literary ages on the basis of critical value judgment determined by linguistic, artistic, or even moral norms. In some crucial respects, the twentieth-century critical argument concerning the “Silver Age” in Russian literature and its relation to the “Golden Age” echoes, and, on particularly sophisticated occasions, is directly informed by, the celebrated polemic between Peacock and Shelley about the four ages of poetry (Brett-Smith 1923). The problem of the term “Silver Age” and its content, in this instance, in reference to Russian literature or culture, is not a problem of literary history and its general periodization, but rather that of the history of modern literary criticism in its intricate and

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generally seldom acknowledged and analyzed relation to the selfawareness and self-evaluation of the literary art proper. In his essay “The Cultural Renaissance,” Gleb Struve (Stavrou 1969) registered his extreme dissatisfaction with the term “Silver Age” and referred to his search for its author with helpless exasperation:

In speaking of Russian literature of the first decade and a half of the present century, it has become usual to refer to the Silver Age. I do not know who was the first to use this appellation, on whom the blame for launching it falls, but it came to be used even by some leading representatives of that very literature—for example, by the late Sergei Makovskii, the founder and editor of that important and excellent periodical, Apollon, and even by the last great poet of that age, Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). (Struve 1969:179) Like many of his distinguished coevals, of whom more will be said later, the late Professor Gleb Struve preferred Prince Dmitrii Sviatopolk-Mirskii’s term (Mirsky 1926:183; 1959:432), “a second golden age of verse inferior only to the first golden age of Russian poetry—the age of Pushkin.” In a personal conversation which took place in 1973, Struve spoke about the expression “Silver Age” with considerable irritation and, immediately after dismissing this “misnomer” (he spoke in Russian, but used this English word), began to discuss the poetry of Nikolai Otsup, trying to get his interlocutor interested in it as a subject of future research. As it turned out, the association between Otsup and the term “Silver Age” was not at all a matter of chance. Obviously, Struve had looked quite deeply into the history of the “blameworthy appellation” before giving up his attempts. Twelve years later the problem of the authorship of this term was raised, again in a personal conversation, by Professor John Bowlt, then of the University of Texas at Austin, who complained about being unable to find its source in the writings of the famous Russian thinker to whom it was habitually ascribed. The mystery, indeed, had been quite challenging, but, it transpired, not as hopeless as Gleb Struve thought it was.

2 “The Parnassus of the Silver Age” or “The Second Russian Renaissance”? Sergei Makovskii and Nikolai Berdiaev

Sergei Makovskii (1877–1962),1 mentioned by Gleb Struve (1969: 179) as the first example of those men of letters who used the expression “Silver Age,” gave the second of his books of recollections and thoughts about that period the title On the Parnassus of the Silver Age (Makovskii 1962). These memoirs became quite popular both among the historians of twentieth-century Russian literature and the general readers. As a source, they must be accepted with the greatest caution. Suffice it to say that the aged memorialist quoted, by heart as it were, a fairly long poem by Count Vasilii Komarovskii with a few errors and (acknowledged) omissions, but suggested that the piece had never been published [ne bylo, kak budto, napechatano] (1962: 239). Yet Makovskii had published it himself in Apollon (1916, No. 8:47). In the foreword to this book, Makovskii described some features characteristic of the period in question and, in passing, attributed to Nikolai Berdiaev its designation as the “Silver Age”:

The title On the Parnassus of the Silver Age points at the poets, writers, artists, and musicians who had expressed by their works the Russian cultural upsurge during the prerevolutionary epoch; of these, many completed their creative path in the West and had affirmed in the mind of the world the significance, not only of the “Silver Age,” but of all of our artistic culture. […] Vexation of spirit, a longing for the “transcendent,” had permeated our age, “the Silver Age” (so called by Berdiaev,

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in contradistinction to Pushkin’s age, “the Golden”), partly under the influence of the West. As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, from the first steps of romanticism, and in defiance of the endeavors of the catholic church, there took shape in the West a decisive turn toward a new individualistic spiritualism: Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Balzac, Blake, Allan Edgar [sic] Poe, the Pre-Raphaelites. Having received, after a certain delay, these master-poets, the “Silver Age” assimilated them after a Russian fashion [osvoil ikh po-russki] and sunk deep in the romance of an aestheticist quest for God [uglubilsia v romantiku èstetstvuiushchego bogoiskatel’ stva]. This came to pass during the years when the Russian Empire was already facing an imminent fall. […] The “Silver Age,” restless, God-seeking, and infatuated with beauty, is not forgotten to this day. The voices of its spokesmen still sound, although in a different way than they sounded then, after almost half-a-century of hostility in Russia towards that which used to fascinate us during the pre-revolutionary years, albeit in a contradiction-ridden and often morbidly decadent manner. This is the best evidence that the tradition continues. It is this tradition that will make fruitful a new, not Marxist, not slavishly unspiritual, Russia. (Makovskii 1962:9–11) Since the publication of Makovskii’s volume of recollections, with the reference to Berdiaev as the author of the coinage, the name of the famous philosopher has found its way into innumerable books and essays on the “Silver Age” in Russia. Two examples will suffice to show how, in the absence of any chapter and verse about the silver age to quote from Berdiaev’s prodigious corpus of writings, deceptively persuasive-looking acknowledgments proliferate both in serious original works and in compilative pot-boilers. The already-mentioned Lenizdat anthology Serebrianyi vek (P’ianykh 1991) belongs to the latter category. Its editor, the level of whose learning is characterized by his confusing Vladimir Gippius with Vasilii Gippius (P’ianykh 1991:497) and ascribing to the

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latter, a great Gogol’ scholar and, in his youth, a minor poet, the former’s poetic biographia literaria “Lik chelovecheskii” [“The Human Visage”] (1922),2 a poignant evocation of the epoch of symbolism, performed a particularly distressing sleight of hand when he credited Berdiaev with the term “Silver Age”; he tampered with a bibliographical reference:

Among those who attended the meetings at the Merezhkovskiis’ and, at the Same time, actively participated in Viacheslav Ivanov’s “Wednesdays” was N.Berdiaev. It was he who had called the beginning of the twentieth century “Russian Renaissance” and the “Silver Age.” These words are followed (P’ianykh 1991:517) by a footnote (2) which reads: “See: Berdiaev N.Russkii kul’turnyi renessans nachala XX veka//Knizhnoe obozrenie. 1988. 30 dekabria, # 52. S. 3, 10.” A check of the publication in Knizhnoe obozrenie, a somewhat shortened version of Chapter VI of Samopoznanie (Berdiaev 1949: 147ff.), reveals that the words “silver age” occur only in the editor’s notes to Berdiaev’s piece, in the following noncommittal context:

Yet, it is difficult to find a noticeable phenomenon in the culture of the “silver age” (this expression itself, incidentally [kstati], also belongs to Nikolai Aleksandrovich [Berdiaev]), in which he would not be involved. In serious studies, such as G.Nivat’s erudite “Le symbolisme russe” (Chapter II of Etkind, Nivat, Serman and Strada 1987), there are, needless to say, no misleading references, and the matter is treated in a frankly apodictic way:

C’est alors que le symbolisme donne une dimension culturelle et européenne à l’arène politique russe comparable à l’époque pouchkinienne, d’où l’appellation “Age d’argent” que lui conféra Nikolai Berdiaev. (Etkind, Nivat, Serman and Strada 1987:77)

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The efforts of several scholars to find the expression in Berdiaev’s corpus have so far been unsuccessful. “Makovskii refers to Nikolai Berdiaev as the expressions source,” writes one of these scholars, Boris Gasparov (1992:10), “but I have been unable to locate it in any of Berdiaev’s texts.” Of course, the prolific thinker might have used it in some inaccessible, uncollected, and unremembered article, tucked away in an obscure periodical, or in one of his lectures or conversations. This, however, is unlikely because Berdiaev always repeated on suitable occasions his ideas, definitions and mots justes, and he consistently called the early twentieth century a Russian Renaissance, cultural, sprititual, mystical, artistic, though not, he stressed (1971: 221), a religious one. The Silver Age and the Renaissance are not only distinct notions, but even antithetic as value judgments on the sheer intensity of a culture’s creative power. Berdiaev, in his periodization of Russian culture, used two terms, the Renaissance and the Golden Age. An early, perhaps the earliest, reference to the Russian Renaissance during the modern age is found in Berdiaev’s essay published in the “Eurasian” journal Versty in Paris (No. 3, 1928) and not yet reprinted in the collected editions of his works:

The beginning of the century was in Russia the time of great intellectual and spiritual excitement. There was an awakening of the creative instincts of spiritual culture, which have long been suppressed in the dominant forms of the intelligentsia’s consciousness. We went through a sui generis philosophical, artistic, and mystical renaissance. (Berdiaev 1928:40) The crisis of the Russian intelligentsia at the end of the past century occurred also in the artistic and literary movement. A liberation of art and aesthetics from the yoke of social utilitarianism and utopism was taking place. The creative activity in this sphere freed itself from the duty of serving the cause of social and political revolution, and the revolutionary drive became internalized in art itself. New currents formed in art; the flowering of Russian poetry, which characterizes the beginning of the twentieth century, was in preparation. There emerged a Russian aestheticism

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and a Russian symbolism. The Russian aesthetical Renaissance entered as another element in the Russian spiritual movement of the early twentieth century, and it not only complicated this movement, but also introduced in it features of decadence. Aestheticism by its very nature is inclined to subsist on reflections rather than on primary realities, and therefore leads to decadence. This decadence began to manifest itself in our upper cultivated stratum. Russian aesthetical and artistic movement, in a certain part of it, soon revealed a propensity for religious quests and mysticism. The mysticism here turned out to be the art of Dostoevskii and the symbolic poetry of VI. Soloviev. But religion and mysticism were imparted an excessively literary character, not primary and vital for this reason, but secondary and reflected. Russian symbolism was a very valuable phenomenon of Russian culture, but much falsehood has amassed around it. The most remarkable poets of this epoch, who had to the greatest extent blended their poetry with mysticism, turned out to be spiritually unprotected from the temptations of bolshevism. (Berdiaev 1928:53–54) One might object that in Berdiaev’s critique of what he calls the Russian Renaissance the suggestion that it has been tainted with decadence implies precisely the quality of the “Silver Age,” as it is generally understood. However, in the first place, in spite of this reproach, Berdiaev speaks of the Renaissance, and not of the “Silver Age,” and, secondly, even the original, Italian Renaissance was, in Berdiaev’s analysis, a failure, because the blood of the Renaissance was “poisoned” by the Christian consciousness of sin and Christian thirst for redemption:

The mystery of the Renaissance is in that it has not succeeded [Berdiaev’s italics]. Never has so much creative power been sent into the world, and never has the tragedy of creativity, the discrepancy between the target and the achievement, been revealed to such an extent. (Berdiaev 1985:267, 270)

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It should be emphasized that, contrary to the opinion popular today, Berdiaev did not consider the Russian Renaissance of the early twentieth century a religious revival:

The weak sides of the movement are undeniable and obvious. It remained enclosed in a narrow and closed circle. Some elements of the mood of decline [upadochnichestvo], of stylized archaism, Alexandrianism and impotent aestheticism penetrated it. One is forced to say this also about such an extraordinarily talented and interesting thinker as Fr. P.Florenskii. V.Ivanov, the most sophisticated phenomenon of our spiritual culture in the beginning of the twentieth century, likewise exercised some influence in this direction. Mysticism became a bad vogue. […] The philosophical and artistic renaissance, the significance and depth of the religious problems it had raised, were not accompanied by a strong and determined religious movement. There was no genuine religious renaissance. (Berdiaev 1928:56) These ideas are expressed in similar terms in Berdiaev’s article “The Russian Spiritual Renaissance of the Beginning of the Twentieth Century and the Journal “Put’” (originally published in 1935):

One can definitely say now that the beginning of the twentieth century was marked in Russia by a renaissance of spiritual culture, a philosophical and literary-aesthetical renaissance, an exacerbation of religious and mystical sensitivity. Never has Russian culture reached such sophistication and refinement as at that time. One can hardly say that we had a religious renaissance. For that there was not enough of the strong religious will, which transfigures life, and no participation of wider strata of the people in the movement. It was, after all, a movement of the cultural elite, detached not only from the processes which took place among the masses of the people, but also from the processes which took place among the wider

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circles of the intelligentsia; there was a resemblance to the romantic and idealistic movement of the beginning of the nineteenth century. (Berdiaev 1989:684–685) Obviously, in his choice of the term “Renaissance” Berdiaev is prompted by the notion of the rebirth of the early nineteenthcentury creative spirit and the overcoming of the social and revolutionary involvements, as well as the “positivistic enlightenment,” which steered the public opinion and culture of the second half of the century:

Eyes were opened to see other worlds, an other dimension of being. A passionate struggle was waged for the right to contemplate the other worlds. Among the most cultivated, most educated, and most gifted part of the Russian intelligentsia a spiritual crisis was taking place, a transition toward a different type of culture, perhaps more closely related to the first half of the nineteenth century than to the second. (Berdiaev 1989:685) However, when Berdiaev discusses the early nineteenth century, he does so likewise in the context of the Renaissance type of creativity, which he uses as the exclusive frame of reference. In fact, the sole occasion on which, as far as I know, Berdiaev has actually used a “metal-age” figure of speech is his discussion of the renaissance features of Pushkin’s art and Pushkin’s epoch in The Origin of Russian Communism, which appeared in English in 1937 and in the more complete original Russian version in 1955. The appellation he uses for the age of Pushkin, the “Golden Age,” has been in common use since the second half of the nineteenth century (B.Gasparov 1992:10–11), and originally introduced even earlier, by Pushkin himself. It was probably a vague recollection of this passage that affected and led astray the memory of Makovskii and of certain later scholars. It opens the chapter entitled “Russian Literature of the Nineteenth Century and Its Prophecies”:

Now we pass into another world, another mental atmosphere, the atmosphere of the great Russian literature

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of the nineteenth century. That literature is the greatest monument of the Russian spirit; it has attained a universal significance. But for our theme concerning the sources of Russian communism one of its features is of importance, which constitutes its most remarkable distinguishing trait. Russian literature is the most prophetic in the world; it is full of forebodings and predictions; its innate quality is the anxiety about the impending catastrophe. […] Russian literature of that age was not a Renaissance one in its spirit. Only in Pushkin there are glimmerings of the Renaissance. That was the golden age of Russian poetry [emphasis added]. This Russian Renaissance was carried out in the very narrow circle of Russian cultured nobility. It soon collapsed, and literature changed course and took other directions. Beginning with Gogol’, Russian literature has become instructive; it seeks what is right and teaches how to bring about what is right. (Berdiaev 1955:63) Elsewhere in The Origin of Russian Communism Berdiaev speaks of the prophetic poetry during the first decade of the twentieth century as the art of a decadent sunset and a glowing dawn at the same time (1955:68–69), and repeats again his evocations of the spiritual and cultural Renaissance, no longer dismissing its religious significance: “In the beginning of the twentieth century there was a real cultural Renaissance in Russia: religious, philosophical, and artistic” (1955: 90–91). Other, slightly different definitions of two Russian “renaissances” are given in The Russian Idea (Eng. ed. 1946; Rus. 1971) and in the already mentioned philosophical autobiography Self-Knowledge [Samopoznanie]:

Without Pushkin, Dostoevskii and L.Tolstoi would have been impossible. But in him there was something of the Renaissance, and, in this respect, the entire great Russian literature of the nineteenth century, which is anything but Renaissance in spirit, does not resemble Pushkin at all. The element of the Renaissance was present in Russia only in

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the epoch of Alexander I and in the beginning of the twentieth century. (Berdiaev 1971:27) The next relevant passage virtually repeats the Put’ article of 1935 (Berdiaev 1989:684–685):

Only in the beginning of the twentieth century the results of nineteenth century Russian thought were evaluated and summed up. But the intellectual concerns became very complicated in the beginning of the twentieth century, and involved new constituent elements and new ideas in the air. In Russia, in the beginning of the century, there was a real cultural Renaissance. Only those who have lived through that period know what a creative ascent Russia has undergone and what a wind of spirit has filled Russian souls. Russia has gone through a flowering of poetry and philosophy, and engaged in intense religious gropings, and occult and mystical preoccupations. As always and everywhere, fashion has joined the genuine ascent, and there has been no dearth of blatant humbug. We had then a cultural Renaissance, but it would be wrong to say that we had a religious Renaissance. (Berdiaev 1971: 220–221) Further on Berdiaev points out that the “cultural-spiritual” [kul’turno-dukhovnyi] Renaissance in the beginning of the twentieth century, as a reaction against the utilitarian radicalism of the previous epoch, has been a predominantly aesthetical movement, rather than an ethical and religious one. The second Russian Renaissance “stood not only under the sign of Spirit, but also that of Dionysus. A Christian Renaissance mixed in it with a pagan Renaissance” (1971:222). In The Russian Idea, Berdiaev isolates three “sources” of the spiritual turning point associated with the Russian Renaissance: the revival of the westernizing tendency in the radical social thought in the shape of Marxism, some early adherents of which, especially those who possessed a higher culture, eventually have turned to idealism and then to Christianity (here Berdiaev speaks pro domo sua but, no doubt, does not exaggerate the role of Marxist thought as a creative factor in Russian modernism, although the nationalist and racial

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ideas played an equally important part); the religious-philosophical fiction and nonfiction of Merezhkovskii and other representatives of new chiliastic Christian consciousness; and finally the “third current in the Russian Renaissance, linked with the flowering of Russian poetry,” which Berdiaev identifies almost exclusively with symbolism: “Russian literature of the twentieth century did not create the great novel similar to the novel of the nineteenth century, but created very remarkable poetry” (Berdiaev 1971:223–229). Both in The Russian Idea and in Self-Knowledge, the sixth chapter which is entitled “Russian Cultural Renaissance of the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” Berdiaev stresses the non-classical, romanticist qualities of the period:

I call the Russian Renaissance that creative upsurge which we have had in the beginning of the century. But it did not resemble, in its character, the great European Renaissance. There were no Middle Ages behind it; behind it was the epoch of the Enlightenment which the intelligentsia had lived through. It would be more accurate to compare the Russian Renaissance with the German Romanticism of the beginning of the nineteenth century, which was similarly preceded by the epoch of the Enlightenment. However, in the Russian movement of that time there were specifically Russian traits, tied to the Russian nineteenth century. Those were, first and foremost, the religious anxiety and religious quest; the recurrent transition, in philosophy, beyond the limits of philosophical cognition; in poetry, beyond the boundaries of art; in politics, beyond the boundaries of politics, toward the eschatological outlook. Everything occurred in a mystical athmosphere. The Russian Renaissance was not classical, it was romanticist, if one is to use this conventional terminology. But this romanticism was different from the Western one; it was striving toward a religious realism, though it had never actually attained it. (Berdiaev 1971: 251–252) […] The Russian cultural Renaissance of the beginning of the twentieth century may be called the Russian romanticism, and it is undeniable that it carried in itself romantic traits.

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In relation to the romanticism of these trends, to which I was vitally tied, I had often felt myself to be an antiromanticist; not a classicist, of course, but a realist and an opponent of illusoriness and of pompous humbug. The very problem of romanticism and classicism, which plays such a role in the French mentality, appears to me exaggerated and incorrectly raised. […] The categories of classicism and romanticism are particularly inapplicable to Russian literature. (Berdiaev 1949:112–113) To sum up this more or less complete digest of Berdiaev’s references to, and definitions of, the period which, according to Makovskii, Berdiaev has allegedly named the “Silver Age”: Berdiaev mentioned the “Golden Age of Russian poetry” during Pushkin’s lifetime (1955:63) and, on a number of occasions, spoke about the two cultural or spiritual renaissances in Russia, in the early nineteenth and early twentieth century respectively, very much as Mirsky spoke of the two “Golden Ages” of Russian poetry (Mirsky 1926:183; 1959:73, 432). This parallel, the notion of the recurrent “Renaissance” and multiple Golden Ages, especially in connection with Berdiaev’s remark about the French preoccupation with normative definitions of styles, makes oddly relevant, mutatis mutandis, the caustic observation V.Belinskii made in his review “The Complete Collected Writings of A.Marlinskii” (1840):

French literature, which had celebrated [otprazdnovavshaia] in the seventeenth century its first golden age, the representatives of which were Corneille, Racine, and Molière, in the eighteenth century, its second golden age, the representative of which was Voltaire with the congregation of the Encyclopedists, and in the nineteenth century, its third age, the romantic [Belinskii’s emphasis] age, is now, for want of anything better to do, performing a burial service in everlasting remembrance of all the three of its golden ages, having somehow noticed by chance that they all were of tinsel, not of real gold…(Belinskii 1954:25)

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Obviously, Struve, too, checked Berdiaev’s corpus and found no reference to the Silver Age in Russia. He took over, however, Berdiaev’s appellation, “The Cultural Renaissance,” and used it for the title of his essay (1969), but, absent-mindedly, failed to acknowledge that, or to mention Berdiaev in connection with the nomenclatorial problem in hand:

[…] And though “the Second Golden Age” can be quite legitimately applied to the poetry of this period, for an overall description of it I should prefer such a term as Renaissance. It was indeed a Russian cultural renaissance, encompassing all the areas of cultural and spiritual life— arts, letters, philosophy, religious, social, and political thought; a period of great richness, variety, and vitality (Struve 1969:180–181) A footnote appended to this passage refers to “Ippolit Udushiev’s” use of the terms “Golden Age” and “Silver Age,” of which much more will be said later, but not to Berdiaev. As for Anna Akhmatova, whom Struve has mentioned as one of the users of the term “Silver Age,” it should be pointed out that the expression appeared in her long “Petersburg Tale” in verse, Poèma bez geroia (the title that, by direct analogy with the twin title of Thackeray’s “Novel Without a Hero,” invites the subtitle “Vanity Fair”3), at least seventeen years before the publication of Makovskii’s Na Parnase “Serebrianogo veka,” the book which the poetess found insultingly “absurd buffoonish tattle” (see, for example: Akhmatova 1989b: 8, 12). An analysis of the relevant lines in A Poem Without a Hero will help to clarify some of the sources and certain nuances of the meaning that the appellation “Silver Age” has developed in modern Russian poetic and critical contexts.

3 The Silver of Akhmatova,Tsvetaeva, Mandel’shtam, and Gumilev

The lines about the silver age in Poèma bez geroia (400–402 in Akhmatova 1976, edited by V.M.Zhirmunskii) are in the Third Chapter of Part One, in the evocation of Petersburg in 1913, on the eve of what Akhamatova called, in lines 425–426, “not the calendar, but the real twentieth century.” Lines 393–426 of this chapter, according to Akhmatova’s “stage directions” (which precede every chapter of this essentially dramatic, or libretto-like poem), are “muttered by a wind, whether reminiscent, or prophetic, one cannot tell.” They were originally published, as part of an excerpt which comprised lines 268–285, 393–402, and 415–420 under the title “Nineteen-thirteen” and was included in the cycle “The Pace of Time” [“Shag vremeni”], during the brief period when Akhmatova could appear in print before the disaster of 1946, in Leningradskii al’manakh (1945: 211):

Na Galernoi chernela arka, V Letnem tonko pela fliugarka, I serebrianyi mesiats iarko Nad serebrianym vekom styl. [The black arch loomed on the Galley Street; The weather vane was singing thinly in the Summer Garden; And the silver moon was brightly Freezing over the silver age.] Zhirmunskii’s commentary to the words “silver age” is extremely laconic: “The beginning of the twentieth century used to be called

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[nazyvali] the silver age of Russian poetry in contradistinction to the “golden age” of Pushkin’s epoch” (Akhmatova 1976: 516). R.D.Timenchik, in his indispensable edition of Poèma bez geroia (Akhmatova 1989a) that includes a rich selection of conveniently arranged contemporary background literature, adduces, in the section entitled “The Last Year,” a passage from Vladimir Veidle’s [Wladimir Weidlé] essay “Three Russias,” originally published in Paris, in 1937, in the 65th issue of Sovremennye zapiski, and later reprinted in New York (Veidle 1956: 71–108). It is this passage that B.Gasparov (1992: 16) mentions, with an expression of indebtedness to Timenchik, as an example of the use of the term “Silver Age” preceding that by Akhmatova. A subtle though superficial essayist and a minor poet, V.Veidle (1895–1979) was quite influential as a critic, and his study of Russia as a brilliant failure cannot fail to impress those readers who are not familiar with the sources of his inspiration (he seldom acknowledged borrowed ideas). This is what he wrote about the silver age in 1937:

The most striking in the modern history of Russia is that the silver age of Russian culture which preceded its revolutionary wreck turned out to be possible at all. Although this age did not last long, only about twenty years, and was exclusively and entirely built by those educated and creative Russian people who did not belong either to the intelligentsia, in the exact meaning of the word, or to the bureaucracy, so that not only the common people knew nothing about it, but also the bureaucracy together with the intelligentsia partly ignored it and partly treated it with unconcealed hostility. Admittedly, its brightness, as befits the ages of silver, was, to a certain degree, a reflected one: its thought and its taste turned toward the past and toward the remote; its architecture was retrospective, and all of its art bore an imprint of stylization, of the admiration for the alien; its poetry (and literature in general), in spite of its outward novelty, lived off the heritage of the preceding century; it did not create as much as it resurrected and rediscovered. But it did resurrect St. Petersburg; it resurrected the old Russian icon; it restored sensuality to the word and melody to verse; it

THE FALLACY OF THE SILVER AGE 19

relived again everything that Russia had once lived by and opened for it anew the entire spirtitual and artistic life of the West. Of course, all this could not have been done without a creative achievement of one’s own, and, no matter how sternly we judge what has been attained in the course of these twenty years, we are bound to recognize them as one of the peaks of Russian culture. These years have seen the long-awaited awakening of the creative powers of the Orthodox church, an unprecedented flowering of Russian historical self-awareness, a hitherto unknown general, almost frenetic quickening in the field of philosophy, science, literature, music, painting, and theatre. The vital concerns of these years, what these years have given, will not die in the realm of spirit; yet, for Russia, today, all this has, as it were, never happened. This might have been tentatively a threshold of flowering, but has actually become a portent of the end. (Veidle 1956:97–98) This expostulation by Veidle is an echo, partly polemical, of Berdiaev’s notions of Russias spiritual Renaissance in the early twentieth century as formulated in 1928 and 1935, but even more apparently, especially in Veidle’s use of the term “silver age,” it is a development of the terminology inaugurated in the émigré Russian press by Nikolai Otsup, whose essay “The Silver Age” (1933) will be discussed in the next chapter. There is only one respect in which the passage by Veidle is relevant to Akhmatova’s treatment of the silver age in Poèma bez geroia. Like Veidle, Akhmatova concedes that the beginning has become the end; unlike Veidle, Akhmatova believes also that the end was a beginning. This is the true, subtextual significance of the epigraph from T.S.Eliot with which Akhmatova prefaced Part Two of Poèma bez geroia:

In my beginning is my end. The final line of “East Coker,” in which the words “In my beginning is my end” are a leitmotif, reads:

In my end is my beginning.

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Without identifying at this point the exact actual sources of Akhmatova’s reference to the silver age, by analyzing the intrinsic thematic structure of Akhmatova’s imagery and the literary subtexts of her poetry, it is possible to perceive immediately several features in her treatment of vek—“age, saeculum,” which are part of the general acmeist “historicist” poetics. She clearly distinguishes between the age as a historical, sociopo litical, economic, ideological, and so forth, chronological entity, which is more often than not denoted synecdochically as, for example, the iron age, the age of bronze, the age of steam, or of discovery, of heroes, of electricity,4 and so on, and the age as an axiological category pertinent to higher values alone, first and foremost, the “poetic age” the appellations of which are metaphoric: the golden age, the silver age (“symbolic” rather than “technological metals,” according to Lamberton 1988: 118–119). Lord Byron made use of the oxymoronic potential of such symbolic tropes in his last epic tale, The Island, by transforming gold as a metaphor into gold as a metonymy when he described the utopian golden-age paradise in the Pacific, “The Goldless Age, where gold disturbs no dreams,” while almost at the same time composing, as Viacheslav Ivanov astutely pointed out (1909:126, 131), the topical political satire The Age of Bronze. It is fitting to point out in this connection that the other great Russian poet who used the term “Silver Age” in the modern sense, Marina Tsvetaeva, constructed a pun very similar to that of Lord Byron in her essay “The Devil,” which was first published in Sovremennye zapiski in 1935, that is, two years earlier than the essay “Three Russias” by Veidle. The passage quoted had been suppressed by the editors of the journal as insulting to the church, and was published subsequently (Tsvetaeva 1980: 144–145) from her handwritten additions in the offprint of Sovremennye zapiski 59 (editorial note in Tsvetaeva 1980: 499–500):

It never worked between me and the Orthodox priests, golden and silver, cold as the ice of the crucifix—finally pressed to one’s lips. […] —Madame! The priests are here. Will you order to invite them in?

THE FALLACY OF THE SILVER AGE 21

And right away—silver stirring in the palm, silver running over from one hand to the other, from the hand into a piece of paper: so much to the reverend father, so much to the deacon, so much to the sexton, so much to the woman who makes communion bread…They should not have, in front of the children, or, if they must, they should not have told us, children of the silver time, about the thirty pieces of silver [Tsvetaeva’s emphasis]. The ringing of the silver blended with the ringing of the thurible, its ice merged with the ice of the brocade and the crucifix, the cloud of incense, with the cloud of one’s inner indisposition, and all this heavily crawled up toward the ceiling of the white hall, with the frosty pattern on its wallpaper[…] “Ne nado by—pri detiakh, libo, togda uzh, ne nado by nam, detiam serebrianogo vremeni, pro tridtsat’ srebrenikov.” Obviously, Tsvetaeva was already quite familiar with the appellation “Silver Age” in 1935 and, apparently, accepted it with the same somewhat ironic resignation as Akhmatova. She liked silver rings: this is one point on which all of Tsvetaeva’s biographers agree. Unlike Tsvetaeva, however, Akhmatova was quite indifferent, it seems, to the synecdochic silver in “l’Age d’argent,” and never used the image of the thirty pieces of silver, although the theme of betrayal is very prominent in her poetry, her literary-historical prose, and in her recollections of the treacherous “Parnassus of the Silver Age,” in particular (see, for example, Akhmatova 1989b: 12). Her artistic and moral concerns are elsewhere. She juxtaposes, on the one hand, the “poetic age” and the “historical age,” and, on the other, the abstract, chronological twentieth century and the historical age as a distinct moral entity, saecu lum. On several occasions Akhmatova attempted to define the ter minus a quo delimiting her age from the preceding one, and the “real” twentieth century from the nineteenth. The dates she offered did not always coincide with those accepted by historians and philosophers of history. For S.A.Vengerov, as “for every historian of nineteenth century Europe, the account of that century begins not in 1800, but with the French Revolution, that is, 1789” (Vengerov 1914:1). G.P.Fedotov, in “Carmen Saeculare” (Put’, No. 12, Paris, 1928), wrote: “XX contra XIX. The twentieth century versus the

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nineteenth, the dates of which are: 1789–1914” (Fedotov 1967: 198). In Poèma bez geroia, too, the “real twentieth century” would begin a year after the events described, in 1914:

A po naberezhnoi legendarnoi Priblizhalsia ne kalendarnyi— Nastoiashchii Dvadtsatyi Vek. [Along the legendary embankment, There approached not the calendar, but The real Twentieth Century.] However, in “Putem vseia zemli” [‘The Way of All the Earth”], which she wrote in March 1940, nine months before she conceived the initial idea of Poèma bez geroia, the terminus is moved back, and the three events which inaugurate the new age are associated with what would become the myth of the twentieth century, race and soil:

I kto-to “Tsusima!” Skazal v telefon. Skoree, skoree— Konchaetsia srok: “Variag” i “Koreets” Poshli na vostok… Tam lastochkoi reet Staraia bol’… A dal’she temneet Fort Shabrol’, Kak proshlogo veka Razrushennyi sklep, Gde staryi kaleka Oglokh i oslep. Surovy i khmury Ego storozhat S vintovkami bury. “Nazad, nazad!!”

THE FALLACY OF THE SILVER AGE 23

[“Tsushima!” said somebody/on the phone./Hurry up, hurry up!—the time is running out:/the Varangian and the Korean/have gone to the east./Like a swallow, there hovers/ an old ache…/ And farther there looms the dark/FortChabrol,/as the past age’s /ruined crypt,/where the old cripple/had gone deaf and blind./ Grim and gloomy,/stand guard over it/the Boers with their rifles. /“Step back, step back!!”] The defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the siege of the strong-hold of the anti-Dreyfusard “Ligue antisemitique” in August–September 1899 in Paris (51, rue de Chabrol), and the Anglo-Boer War are the termini of the new age, and the race range of the future cataclysms is suggested even by the names of the Russian cruiser and gunboat sank on the first day of the war with Japan. All the three events in the enlightened Russian mind of the early twentieth century were images of tragic injustice; there was no one in Russia who did not know the song about the Varangian and the Korean, or about the fighting Transvaal:

My pred vragom ne spustili Slavnyi Andreevskii flag, Net! my vzorvali “Koreitsa”, Nami potoplen “Variag”! (Russkii romans 1987:472) [We did not lower before the foe/The glorious flag of St. Andrew; /No! we blew up the Korean,/The Varangian was scuttled by us!] Da, chas nastal, tiazhelyi chas Dlia rodiny moei… Molites’, zhenshchiny, za nas, Za nashikh synovei!… (Russkii romans 1987:473) Transval’, Transval’, strana moia,—

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Bur staryi govorit: “Za krivdu Bog nakazhet nas, Za pravdu nagradit”. (Russkii romans 1987:493) [Yes, the hour has struck, the grave hour/For my native land…/ Pray women, for us,/For our sons!…//Transvaal, Transvaal, my native land,—/The old Boer says:/“For injustice God will punish us,/For truth He will reward.”] For Akhmatova in 1940 those were, in retrospect, the portents of the atonement by the allied powers of 1914, with which she identified herself: by France, by Britain, and by the imperial Russia, the poets beloved and sinful “native Sodom.” In Poèma bez geroia, the eventual retribution is represented as a recollection of the prophetic omens of the realm’s downfall in the art of Akhmatova’s contemporaries Blok and Belyi, and, deeper in the past, Pushkin. V.N.Toporov (1981:133) registered the parallel between Akhmatova’s “weather vane singing in a thin voice” (V Letnem tonko pela fliugarka) and Blok’s lines written in July 1905: Tol’ko fliugarka na kryshe Sladko poet o griadushchem [“Only the weather vane on the roof Sweetly sings about the future”]. This parallel, for our purposes, requires further analysis because of the significance of Blok’s subtext for Akhmatova’s theme of atonement. Blok’s poem “Moei materi” [“To My Mother”] reads:

Tikho. I budet vse tishe. Flag bespoleznyi opushchen. Tol’ko fliugarka na kryshe Tonko poet o griadushchem. Vetrom v polnebe raskinut, Dymom i solntsem vzvolnovan, Bednyi petukh ocharovan, V siniuiu glub’ oprokinut. V kruge okna slukhovogo

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Lik moi, kak nimbom, ukrashen. Profil’ litsa voskovogo Pravilen, prost i nestrashen. Smoly pakhuchie zharki, Dali izvechno tumanny… Sladki mne pesni fliugarki: Poi, petushok oloviannyi! [It is quiet. And it will be even quieter./The useless flag has been lowered./Only the weather vane on the roof/Sweetly sings about the future.//Spread out by the wind over half the sky,/Disturbed by the smoke and the sun,/Poor weathercock is spellbound,/ Toppled over into the blue deep.//In the circle of the dormer/My visage is adorned, as it were, with a nimbus./The profile of the waxen face/Is regular, simple, and not frightening.//The aromatic resins are hot,/The distant views are forever misty…/The songs of the weather vane are sweet to my ear:/Sing, tin cockerel!] One of the memorable achievements of Akhmatova as a Pushkin scholar was her analysis of Pushkin’s “Tale of the Golden Cockerel” and her discovery of its main source in Washington Irving’s The Alhambra. Her study “Pushkin’s Last Tale” was first published in 1933 in the journal Zvezda, No. 1, pp. 161–176 (Akhmatova 1977: 8–38; 229–231). She returned to the subject also in 1939, in an essay containing profound moral allusions to the contemporary situation (Akhmatova 1977:39–49; 232). Her choice of images in the text of Poèma bez geroia, the singing weathercock under the silver moon of the silver age echoing or altering the tin cockerel’s song of the future in Blok’s 1905 poem about the ominous silence, creates a sequence of traditionally vengeful figurines (Jakobson 1975), nemeses of the unrighteous realm. The unnamed bird figure is traced by what Akhmatova used to call a “shadow portrait,” created by analogy, sometimes negative. During the golden age of Pushkin, the avenger was the golden cockerel, an early warning device, so to say, given to the ungrateful Tsar Dodon by a learned “star gazer and castrate.” During what

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Akhmatova called the “silver age,” whether it was the last reign or the fruitful cultural interlude of 1905–1914, the vengeful bird is the silver cock of Andrei Belyi: the blend of the imperial eagles, nicknamed “golubki,” on the helmets of the horse-guards, and the dove of the Spirit hatching from the bosom of the millenarian religious sect golubi (“the doves”), a mixture of khlysty and of skoptsy (the Russian sect of castrates refers to itself as “white doves,” belye golubi), in Belyi’s novel The Silver Dove (Serebrianyi golub’, 1909). This is quite typical of Akhmatova’s treatment of the relationship between the twin source of power in Russia: the secular political power and the spiritual sovereignty of the poet. There are two traditions, as will be demonstrated in a subsequent chapter, of defining and treating the poetic golden age, or rather poetry itself as the golden age or its tangible manifestation (as conceived by Novalis in Heinrich von Ofterdingen and by Shelley in A Defence of Poetry5): Pushkin’s aspiration of “divining the golden age in the iron” and Baratynskii’s tragic resignation to the decline and demise of poetry during the “age that struts along its track of iron.” Akhmatova and, in general, acmeism as a synthetic “final style” endeavored to neutralize and overcome this opposition, along with many other dichotomies of Russian poetic and critical thought (Ronen 1983:23, 198–199, 211; Toddes 1986:92; Toddes 1988: 213; Ronen 1990:1633–1635). The “overcoming” of the opposition is achieved by purely poetic means of raising coincidence to the status of an obligatory and reciprocal bond: nomen est omen. For Akhmatova, whether the age is gold or silver, the political age and the poetic age, the reign, the realm, and poetry, the poet and the sovereign are namesakes. So Byron’s political Age of Bronze (1823) is apparently similarly related, as a namesake, to Peacock’s poetic “age of brass” which, in his “Four Ages of Poetry” (1820), is used to describe the Lake Poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, who profess to revive the age of gold. That poets are namesakes of sovereigns is one of the underlying figurative patterns in the historicist poetics of the acmeist movement and a source of belief in the occult bond of resemblance between the ruler and the poet. Thus in one of the earlier versions of Poèma bez geroia (Vozdushnye puti II:125) there was an epigraph from Byron’s Don Juan: In my hot youth—when George the Third was king. When, on the other hand, Akhmatova evokes the funeral of Shelley (lines 597–601), she calls Byron “George”:

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I na bereg, gde mertvyi Shelli, Priamo v nebo gliadia, lezhal,— I vse zhavoronki vsego mira Razryvali bezdnu èfira, I fakel Georg derzhal. [On the shore where the dead Shelley,/Gazing straight into the sky, reposed,—/And all the skylarks of all the world/ Rended the abyss of the ether,/And George was holding the torch.] The Georgian Age is the age of George Byron. The Alexandrian Age of Russian history, the epoch of Alexander I, is represented in Mandel’shtam’s poems in such a way as to appear simultaneously Alexander Pushkin’s and the tsar’s (Ronen 1983:86; Timenchik 1986:130):

Zasnula chern’. Ziiaet ploshchad’ arkoi. Lunoi oblita bronzovaia dver’, Zdes’ arlekin vzdykhal o slave iarkoi I Aleksandra zdes’ zamuchil Zver’. Kurantov boi i teni gosudarei… Rossiia, ty, na kamne i krovi, Uchastvovat’ v svoei zheleznoi kare Khot’ tiazhest’iu menia blagoslovi! [The rabble has fallen asleep. The square gapes with its arch./The bronze door is doused with the moonlight./Here the Harlequin sighed for the bright glory,/And here the Beast baited Alexander to death.//The chiming of the belltower clock and the shadows of the sovereigns…/Russia, you, upon rock and blood/To take part in your iron vengeance/At least by heaviness give me your blessing!] O bud’, Rossiia Aleksandra, Blagoslovenna i v adu!

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[O be, Russia of Alexander,/Blessed even in hell!] […] zachem Siialo solntse Aleksandra Sto let nazad, siialo vsem? […why/Did the sun of Alexander shine/One hundred years ago, why did it shine for all?] The last quotation is from a 1917 poem addressed to Akhmatova, “To Cassandra,” who commented in her “Pages From the Diary (About Mandel’shtam)”: “The sun of Alexander shone/One hun dred years ago, it shone for all (December 1917),—this is, of course, also Pushkin. (So he [Mandel’shtam] reports the words I have said)” (Akhmatova 1989c: 198). Following this pattern, the age of Nicholas I is that of Nikolai Gogol’, whose bizarre interpretation of Pushkin’s poem “K N**” seems to be an evidence of the possibility of such an association on the part of Gogol’ himself (Gogol’ 1952:253–255; see also: Kallash 1909; Vatsuro 1991). The last reign is identified with Nikolai Gumilev, who shared the lot of his sovereign Nicholas II; Vladimir Maiakovskii was a namesake of Lenin; Osip [Iosif] Mandel’shtam projected some of his own attributes upon Iosif Stalin, and vice versa (“I am myself like that,” he wrote in his poem about the six-fingered injustice) (see: Ronen 1983:86–87). It was the brief democratic republic, with Aleksandr Kerenskii as minister-president, that Mandel’shtam had described as the short-lived return of “the sun of Aleksandr”: in the poem about the October bolshevik take-over and in the poem “To Cassandra” there are tragic echos of Pushkin’s “Liberty” ode, written exactly one hundred years earlier (Ronen 1983:125–126; 1990:1638). As for Akhmatova, the link between her and the dynasty develops as a suppressed element in the theme of Tsarskoe Selo, the imperial summer residence, on the one hand, and the school of Russian poetic genius, on the other. In a variant of her unfinished poem “The Russian Trianon,” which she called “a Tsarskoe Selo poèma” (the published fragments are subtitled “V Tsarskosel’skom Parke” [“In the Tsarskoe Selo Park”] and dated 1925–1935, 1940), there makes a brief appearance one of the tragic and ambivalent personalities of the last reign, Anna Aleksandrovna Vyrubova (nee

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Taneeva, 1884–1964), the maid of honor and trusted confidante of the Empress Alexandra, and a go-between in the imperial family’s contacts with Rasputin:

S voksala k parku legkie karety, Kak s pokhoron torzhestvennykh, speshat. V nikh damy—v sarafanchiki odety, A s angliiskim aktsentom govoriat. Odna iz nikh (kak razglashat’ sekrety, Mne ètogo, naverno, ne prostiat) Popala v vavilonskie bludnitsy, A tezka mne i luchshii drug tsaritsy. (Akhmatova 1976:424) [From the station vauxhall to the park, light carriages,/As if returning from a state funeral, hurry./The ladies in them are dressed in Russian little sarafans,/Yet speak with an English accent./One of them (how can I divulge secrets,/ They, probably, will not forgive me this)/Came to be known as the harlot of Babylon,/Yet6 she is my namesake and the best friend of the czarina.] Like Akhmatova (who wrote about it in her poem “Kleveta” [“Calumny”]), and like the age itself, Vyrubova became a victim of repulsive slanderous rumors, and, also like Akhmatova, she remained virtually the sole survivor of her set: hence the parallel that Akhmatova draws. Persistent sound reiterations, both salient and concealed by synonymic substitution of the repetend (Ronen 1989), create a pattern linking Vyrubova and “Serebrianyi vek.” The most prominent intermediate term between them, a phonic tertium comparationis, as it were, is serebrianaia iva, “silver willow,” the close synonym of which is in Russian verba (compare: Vyrubova), “pussy willow,” associated with Verbnaia nedelia “Palm Week,” the special significance of which in Akhmatova’s poetic personal calendar can be deciphered from the 1916 poem “Zhdala ego naprasno stol’ko let [I waited for him in vain for so many years].” The pattern of juxtapositions between the imperial age and the age of poetry, the court and the Parnassus, thus created, includes therefore, not only

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the names and destinies of Gumilev and the emperor, but also the chain: Anna-Vymbova-*verba-sere brianaia iva-serebrianyi vek. The silver willow, serebrianaia iva, appears in a number of poems by Akhmatova. Besides the Shakespearean allusions (and Desdemona, too, is a victim of slander), it is for her a souvenir of Pushkin’s days in the park of Tsarkoe Selo, for she identified Pushkin’s evocation of driakhlyi (in one instance, Akhmatova, guided by sound associations, misquoted the epithet as vetkhii) puk derev— “decrepit clump of trees” with the weeping willow on the bank of the lake, which was still there in the 1890s (Gershtein and Vatsuro 1972; Slinina 1973; Timenchik 1974). The mutation of the “gold” of Pushkin’s era into the “silver” of the later days is yet another development of the idea of the “silver age” in Akhmatova’s poetry, and the fact that the poem quoted below is very obviously based on a subtext out of Afanasii Fet suggests that, during her later years, she reverted to the traditional, late nineteenth-century application of the term “silver age” to the epoch of Fet, Nekrasov, Polonskii, and Count A.K. Tolstoi. This matter will be discussed in greater detail in a subsequent chapter, but one should note here in this connection that Gumilev, who avoided “metallurgical epithets” generally, defined the age of Pushkin and Lermontov as the “heroic age of Russian poetry” and, in describing the next generation, which became active in the 1840s, stressed the great popularity of A.K.Tolstoi’s novel Kniaz’ Serebrianyi, “Silver Prince,” a subtle hint at the quality of the generation, which, according to Gumilev, “did not possess the genius of its predecessors, or the breadth of their poetic outlook,” and “substituted smoothness for Pushkin’s clarity and simple warmth of feeling for Lermontov’s ardor of soul” (Preface to A.K.Tolstoi’s Izbrannye sochineniia, 1921; Gumilev 1990: 280–281). Akhmatova’s poem in which the age of Pushkin and the age of Fet are placed side by side and confronted with the subsequent memorable years and oblivious days of the twentieth century is dated October 4, 1957, and dedicated to “the town of Pushkin” gorodu Pushkina (Tsarskoe Selo had been renamed “Pushkin”: for Akhmatova it is not Pushkin, but Tsarskoe Selo, the town of Pushkin, the namesake and rival of the czar):

Ètoi ivy listy v deviatnadtsatom veke uviali, Chtoby v strochke stikha serebrit’sia svezhee stokrat.

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Odichalye rozy purpurnym shipovnikom stali, A litseiskie gimny vse tak zhe zazdravno zvuchat. Polstolet’ia proshlo…Shchedro vzyskana divnoi sud’boiu, Ia v bespamiatstve dnei zabyvala techen’e godov,— I tuda ne vernus’! No voz’mu i za Letu s soboiu Ochertan’ia zhivye moikh tsarskosel’skikh sadov. [The leaves of this willow had faded in the nineteenth century,/ So that in a line of verse their silver would be fresher a hundredfold./The roses, gone wild, became crimson briers,/ But the hymns of the Lycée sound as ever full of salute.// Half-a-century passed. Generously sought out by a marvellous fate,/In the unconsciousness of the days I would forget the course of the years,—/And I shall not return there! But I shall take with me even across the Lethe/The living outlines of my Tsarskoe Selo gardens.] Fet’s willows, an allegory of Weltschmerz in the direct sense of the word, for in his poem “The Willows and the Birches” he expresses a preference for the grief of the more memorable willow over the sadness of the endemic northern birch because the willow bends its branches to the earth throughout the world, are the trees of “your sister Desdemona,” as he wrote in his “Poems to Ophelia.” In the piece which Akhmatova chose as the subtext (dated June 1890, the year when, according to Vengerov 1914, twentieth-century Russian poetry began), the species of the tree is not named, but its withered leaf turns into eternal gold. It is entitled “To Poets”:

[…] V vashikh chertogakh moi dukh okrylilsia, Pravdu providit on s vysei tvoren’ia; Ètot listok, chto issokh i svalilsia, Zolotom vechnym gorit v pesnopen’i. Tol’ko u vas mimoletnye grezy

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Starymi v dushu gliadiatsia druz’iami, Tol’ko u vas blagovonnye rozy Vechno vostorga blistaiut slezami.[…] [In your mansions my spirit grew wings,/It penetrates the truth from the heights of creation;/This leaf, which has shriveled and fallen,/Glows as eternal gold in songs.//Only your fleeting daydreams/Peer into my soul as old friends;/ Only your fragrant roses/Eternally shine with the tears of delight.] Akhmatova’s poem about the willow that withered in the past century is her final contribution to the discourse about the eternal roses of poetry that was inaugurated by Pushkin during the golden age:

Kto na snegakh vozrastil Feokritovy nezhnye rozy? V veke zheleznom, skazhi, kto zolotoi ugadal? [Who has grown on the snow Theocritus’s tender roses? In the iron age, tell, who has divined the golden?] The roses of Tsarskoe Selo are now briers, Akhmatova wrote, probably remembering the proud assertion of Khodasevich:

I kazhdyi stikh gonia skvoz’ prozu, Vyvikhivaia kazhduiu stroku, Privil-taki klassicheskuiu rozu K sovetskomu dichku. [And driving every verse through prose,/Pulling out of joint every line,/I grafted, after all, the classical rose/To the Soviet wilding.] Yet the hymns of Pushkin’s youth, composed in the Lycée of Tsarskoe remained fresh as ever, as did the silver of Fet’s willow: the one point regarding which Akhmatova takes issue with Fet. In this

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respect, it is significant that Mandel’shtam, too, identified Fet with silver. His four-line poem written in Voronezh early in 1937 contains the same confrontation of iron and a precious metal, and the opposition is overcome through reference to a poem by Fet:

Kak zhenstvennoe serebro gorit, Chto s okis’iu i primes’iu borolos’, I tikhaia rabota serebrit Zheleznyi plug i pesnetvortsa golos. [How the feminine silver burns,/Which struggled with oxide and impurity,/And quiet toil silvers/The iron plough and the song-maker’s voice.] Poetry is consistently compared to a plough in Mandel’shtam’s work (Ronen 1983:83–84, 177; Powell 1992), but, in this instance, it is the silver age heritage of “quiet effort” that is invoked by Mandel’shtam’s allusion to Fet’s “First Furrow,” “Pervaia borozda” (1854):

So stepi zeleno-seroi Podymaetsia tuman, I torchit eshche Tsereroi Nenavidimyi bur’ian. Rzhavyi plug opiat’ svetleet; Gde voly, sklonias’, proshli, Lentoi barkhatnoi cherneet Glyba vzrezannoi zemli. Chem-to bleshchut svezhim, nezhnym Solntsa veshnie luchi, Vsled za pakharem prilezhnym Khodiat zhadnye grachi.[…] [Off the gray-green steppe/Rises the mist,/And, hated by Ceres,/ Still bristle the weeds.//A rusty plough brightens again;/ Where the oxen, bent, have passed,/As black as a

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velvet ribbon/ Is the clod of the earth cut open.// Something fresh and tender shines/In the spring beams of the sun;/Following the diligent ploughman/There walk greedy rooks….] Mandel’shtam never used the appellation “silver age.” His term for the epoch of Russian modernism was “Storm and Stress,” “Buria i natisk” is the title of one of his critical essays. However, he did mention silver, and especially “silver voice,” in reference to those poets, who, in his opinion, represent “a canonization of the junior line” of literary succession. To understand the passage quoted below, one should bear in mind that Catullus was for Mandel’shtam (as he was for T.L.Peacock) a silver poet, and Mandel’shtam spoke of “the silver trumpet of Catullus” in “The Word and Culture” (Mandel’shtam 1990:169) in a very special stylistic sense (Ronen 1990:1632):

Symbolism in Russia had its Virgils and Ovids, and it also had its own Catulli, not so much by their age as by the type of their creativity. Here it is fitting to mention Kuzmin and Khodasevich. These are typical junior poets, with all of the purity and charm of the sound that is the property of the junior poets. [Mandel’shtam uses the term “mladshie poety” in the sense of poetae mino-res, and translating the expression as junior poets serves to avoid any possible pejorative shade of meaning.—OR] For Kuzmin, the senior line of world literature seems not to exist at all. The ferment of all of his art is the preference for, and a canonization of, the junior line, not higher than Goldoni’s comedy and the love songs of Sumarokov. In his verse he quite fortunately cultivated a con scious casualness and awkwardness of the speech, peppered with gallicisms and polonicisms. Catching his light from the junior poetry of the West, Musset, to mention the obvious example, “The New Rolla,” he gives the reader an illusion of the totally artificial and premature decrepitude of the Russian poetic speech. The poetry of Kuzmin is the premature senile smile of the Russian lyric.

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Khodasevich cultivated the theme of Boratynskii: “My gift is meager, and my voice not loud,” and created different variations of the theme of the prematurely born, aborted creature. His junior line is formed by the verse of the minor poets of Pushkin’s epoch and immediately after: amateur poets for home consumption, such as Countess Rostopchina, Viazemskii, and so on. Proceeding from the best period of Russian dilettantism, from the home album, the friendly epistle in verse, or the ordinary epigram, Khodasevich brought even to the twentieth century the fanciful and tender coarseness of Moscow’s common colloquial idiom, such as was used in the literary circles of the nobility during the past century. His poems are very folklike, very literary, and very sophisticated. (Mandel’shtam 1990:287) In another essay, “The Furcoat” (1922), Mandel’shtam directly mentions the “subdued, old-man’s, silver voice of Khodasevich, which, for the two decades of his poetic toil, rewarded us with only a handful of poems as captivating as the trill of the nightingale, as unexpected and sonorous as a girl’s laughter on a frosty winter night” (Mandel’shtam 1990:274). Finally, to support the initial supposition that a definite kinship exists between Fet and the notion of the “silver poetry” in the critical mind of the acmeists, the reader may recall that Mandel’shtam, in his “Notes on Poetry” (1923), described the advent of Fet and his new poetic pleophony, “fullness of sound” and “fullness of life,” by quoting Fet’s two lines which had “brought excitement to Russian poetry” (1990:209):

Serebro i kolykhan’e Sonnogo ruch’ia. [The silver and the swaying Of the sleepy stream.] Apparently, the silver verse is, for Mandel’shtam, the poetry of the age of Fet, whereas in the twentieth century there are only individual poetic voices which cultivate a “silver voice” in poetry. As would be

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demonstrated, this idea was shared by several critics who introduced the appellation “silver age” or adopted it. In conclusion, it should be emphasized again that the actual words “silver time,” “silver age” were used by only two great Russian poets of the twentieth century in reference to their age: Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova. Both used it distinctly as indirectly reported speech, the “alien word,” “borrowed word,” “somebody else’s word,” in short, chuzhoe slovo, in Bakhtin’s sense, as well as in the sense of Vinogradov, who first described chuzhoe slovo for the poetry of Akhmatova in his 0 poèzii Anny Akhmatovoi (stilisticheskie nabroski) in 1925 (Vinogradov 1976:451–459). Akhmatova’s use of the expression is polemical, but only partly polemical. Just as Akhmatova’s Petersburg (in which she geographically localizes the silver age, while “the real twentieth century approaches along the embankment” apparently coming from elsewhere) is divided into the sacred city of Kitezh and the sinful Sodom, the virgin city and the harlot city (Toporov 1987: 121–132; Ronen 1976: x-xii; 1978: 73–74), so the age, too, is morally and aesthetically ambivalent. This ambivalence can be traced in all of Akhmatova’s poems dealing with the age, just as the age of Pushkin is gold for Akhmatova only where Pushkin’s poetry is concerned. That the appellation “silver age” for the age of Blok was basically incorrect, in Akhmatova’s opinion, was astutely noted by A.G. Naiman (1989:44):

The concept “silver age,” invented subsequently by its representatives, pulled the new art up to the “golden age” both incorrectly and purely nominally [i nekorrektno, i chisto formal’no]: everything that had been between Pushkin and Blok was ignored, as it were, by the “silver age.” Akhmatova and less definitely— Mandel’shtam called things by their right names only twenty years later, and did so rather in defiance of the “new art,” the art of the “twentieth century.” It now remains to ascertain who invented the term, or, at first, whose words Akhmatova was reporting when she wrote about the silver age under the silver moon in Poèma bez geroia. With time, this issue becomes increasingly confused as new claims of authorship, sometimes tragically ambitious (Gershtein 1995: 135), contribute

THE FALLACY OF THE SILVER AGE 37

new phantasmagoric episodes to the cultural legend in the making that threatens to supplant with its epiphenomenal riddles the multiform but single-minded historical mystery of Akhmatova’s poem.

38

4 “The Silver Age” of Numbers

The attitude of Anna Akhmatova toward what appears to be in Poèma bez geroia a reported evaluation of her epoch by some contemporaries as the “silver age,” I serebrianyi mesiats iarko/ Nad serebrianym vekom styl— “And the silver moon was brightly / Freezing over the silver age,” is tensely ambivalent, in her typical proud and, at the same time, self-effacing manner, not so much because the age has been somehow overpraised, but because it may have been underestimated. The age had been reviled quite sufficiently by the socially minded critics before and after the revolution as the age of decadence. However, whether good or evil, beautiful or ugly, life-giving or deadly, it was not second-rate, weak, imitative, or pale. Hence Akhmatova’s precise pinpointing of the poles of that era:

Zolotogo l’veka viden’e Ili chernoe prestuplen’e V groznom khaose davnikh dnei. [Is there a vision of the golden age Or a black outrage In the menacing chaos of the days long gone.] (A Poem Without a Hero, lines 361–363) There is no evidence that Akhmatova ever shared the condescending skepticism of Georgii Adamovich (1967:87), who wrote, blending a reference to Mark Twain’s “Gilded Age” and the expression applied to the Latin of the Middle Ages, latinitas argentata (rather than argentea): “[…]our Silver Age, which ought to be called actually a

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silver-plated age” (kotoromu vprochem luchshe bylo by nazyvat’sia vekom poserebrennym). In the dialogue between the poet and the poèma, in Part II of A Poem Without a Hero, the work itself proclaims its solar, rather than lunar, origin, disclaiming, as it were, the earlier reference to the “silver moon over the silver age”:

Vovse net u menia rodoslovnoi, Krome solnechnoi i basnoslovnoi, I privel menia sam Iiul’. [I have no pedigree, Except for the solar and the mythological,7 And July itself brought me here.] (Lines 605–607) Thus Osip Mandel’shtam wrote in 1915 about the end of the era:

Now the monstrance, like a golden sun, Is suspended in the air—a magnificent moment. […] The solemn zenith of the divine service, Light in the rotund edifice, under the dome, in July, To make our brimming breast heave with a timeless sigh For the meadow where time does not run. […] In 1923, in “He Who Found a Horseshoe,” he looked back at that era, now gone, but its golden ringing still alive:

Èra zvenela, kak shar zolotoi, Polaia, litaia, nikem ne podderzhivaemaia, Na vsiakoe prikosnovenie otvechala “da” i “net”. […] Zvuk eshche zvenit, khotia prichina zvuka ischezla. [The era rang like a golden globe, Hollow, cast, supported by no one.

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To every touch it answered ‘yes’ and ‘no’. […] The sound is still ringing although its cause has vanished.] This imagery is very far from the concept projected by the appellation “silver age” even in its strictly historical sense. It is even farther, as will be demonstrated, from the ideas of those who introduced the term, and especially those who borrowed it and made it so immensely popular. Vladimir Veidle’s casual use of the term “silver age” in reference to the decades which preceded the revolution, mentioned in the previous chapter, did not imply that the term had already become common property by 1937, or was “in the air.” It merely indicated that Veidle, like many artistically inclined critics and unlike academic scholars, seldom bothered to acknowledge quotations or borrowings. In this instance, he behaved exactly in the same way as the author from whom he borrowed the idea had acted before him. That author had been N.A.Otsup, as Gleb Struve suspected but, apparently, did not wish to affirm in print, and as was more recently suggested in two studies (Ronen 1990: 1619; B.Gasparov 1992:16 n. 4) and, while this book was at the printers, also in Roman Timenchik’s plentiful commentaries to the new edition of Otsup (1993:609). Before him, nobody used the expression “silver age” in the Russian literary diaspora. A minor poet and critic, Nikolai Otsup (1894-December 27 1958; some reference books give 1959 as the year of his death) was born in Tsarskoe Selo and died in Paris. For a while, he exerted considerable authority, especially among the younger Russian men of letters in Paris, as the founder and editor of the literary journal Chisla, a somewhat incongruous venture which strove to combine the external elegance of Sergei Makovskii’s old St. Petersburg Apollon with the austerity of artistic and moral quests.8 A former member of the third Guild of Poets, a pupil of Nikolai Gumilev, personally faithful to him but quite inept, he is frequently made fun of in the literature of the late teens and the twenties, as well as in numerous recollections of that period. His surname was facetiously interpreted as a Soviet acronym O.Ts. U.R, standing for Obshchestvo Tselesoobraznogo Upotrebleniia Pishchi (Society for Expedient Utilization of Food).9 Blok immortalized this joke in his skit “A Scene from the Historical

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Presentation [showing a meeting of the editorial board of the publishing house] World Literature]”:

Chukovskii […]! read in the Proletcult, In the Studio, and in the Petrocompromise, And in Otsup,* and in the Rev. Milit. Council! *This verse does not give a clue to the notion of “Otsup”; if this was a human being, Chukovskii could “read” only in his soul; if it was some kind of institution then, apparently, there existed in it a cultural enlightenment section in which Chukovskii read his lectures.—Blok’s footnote. One of his grammatical mistakes, umerevshii instead of umer shii as a past active participle of umeret’—“to die,” is mentioned in all the commentaries to an epigram by Mandel’shtam (“Polkovniku Beloventsu”), ascribed on one occasion to Gumilev (Forsh 1964:178– 179). Gleb Struve, however, expressed both in print and in personal communications a very positive opinion regarding Otsup’s later poetry. Not unlike Adamovich, Otsup attempted to play the part of the arbiter of taste among the new generation in exile and to serve as an envoy, as it were, from the Petersburg poets of 1921, the martyred Gumilev and Blok, the gagged Akhmatova and Mandel’shtam, to the literature in exile, while ignoring or ridiculing the great émigré artists: Khodasevich, Tsvetaeva, Sirin (Nabokov). This role of Otsup must be fully understood in order to account for his notion of the silver age as a suitable background and the ultimate justification of such artistic gifts and such ideological ambitions as his own. After his death, there appeared in Paris a somewhat carelessly put together and privately published collection of his essays Sovremenniki [‘The Contemporaries”] (Otsup 1961). The volume includes an article entitled “‘Serebrianyi vek’ russkoi poèzii” [“The ‘Silver Age’ of Russian Poetry”], which opens with the words that sound as a pro domo sua response to Makovskii’s (1962)—at that time still unpublished —attribution of the designation “Silver Age” to Berdiaev:

THE FALLACY OF THE SILVER AGE 43

Pishushchii èti stroki predlozhil èto nazvanie dlia kharakteristiki modernisticheskoi russkoi literatury. [The author of these lines offered this appellation to characterize modernist Russian literature.] (Otsup 1961:127) Whether Otsup could have known about Makovskii’s having credited Berdiaev with the invention of the catchword in question is a moot point. That Otsup’s title, Sovremenniki, echoes Makovskii’s earlier book of recollections Portrety sovremennikov (New York: The Chekhov Publishing House, 1955) may be a simple coincidence, especially because the posthumous collection may have been given its name by the author’s heir or executor. It seems to be more likely that Otsup decided to reaffirm his prior claim as an answer to Veidle (1956:97 ff.). This was, apparently, how Veidle himself interpreted Otsup’s defense of his presumable invention when he later expressed a partial repudiation of the term at the same time as he actually (see below) was taking it over: “Metallurgicheskie metafory èti primeniaiu ia neokhotno“[“I use these metallurgical metaphors unwillingly”] (Veidle 1973:113). L.I.Strakhovsky’s10 banal compilation “The Silver Age of Russian Poetry: Symbolism and Acmeism” (1959:61– 87), in which the expression is used as a matter of course, without any questions concerning its authorship or references to earlier use, likewise appeared after Otsup’s death. Otsup’s opening declaration is followed by a rambling discussion of the golden age and the silver age in Russian literature, in general, not only in poetry. Most of what Otsup says about the golden age is quite trivial. The golden age, to which he assigns “Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol’, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Tiutchev, Turgenev, Nekrasov, and other poets and writers of genius,” and “the phenomenon of which is as striking” (porazitel’no, the same word that Veidle [1956:97] used to describe the emergence of the silver age) “as the era of the great tragedians in Greece and the blossoming of the painters of genius in the epoch of the Italian Renaissance,” is characterized, according to Otsup, by the following three main features: “1) the breadth and grandeur of the tasks it had set itself; 2) the high tragic tension of poetry and prose; their prophetic effort; 3) the incomparable perfection of form.” Then Otsup asks the question: “When did the silver age succeed the golden age? Did it preserve the treasures of its antecedent?” The

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response to the first question follows, more or less, the chronology of Mirsky (1926) and Vengerov (1914). Otsup (1961:128) places the “demarcation line between the two ages in the 1880s,” making an exception for “the aging Tolstoi” and for Chekhov, “who belong to the very best of what has been created during the peak of the golden age.” As for the value of the “silver age,” Otsup is, in this last, and rather pathetic testament of his on this subject, obviously confused and often self-contradictory, because, for all of his igno rance, enviousness, and mediocrity, he loved great poetry. In the beginning of his consideration of the silver age, he stresses, correctly, the low level of the literary taste among the intelligentsia of the eighties; yet, he expresses this quite common idea in the manner which intolerably vulgarizes the profound observations of Osip Mandel’shtam and, sometimes, seems to be a direct distortion of The Noise of Time (1925):

[…] gody vos’midesiatye. Khudozhestvennye trebovaniia rezko ponizhaiutsia. Sentimental’nye zhaloby Nadsona kazhutsia vysokoi poeziei. Pafos grazhdanskoi doblesti kak by iskliuchaet vse drugie interesy: “poètom mozhesh’ ty ne byt’, no grazhdaninom byt’ obiazan”… Povtoriaia èti slova Nekrasova, russkaia intelligentsiia mleet [emphasis added] ot blagogoveniia pered terroristami revoliutsionerami, no dal’she sochuvstviia delo ne idet.

[…] 80-e gody v Vil’ne. Slovo “intelligent” mat’ i osobenno babushka vygovarivali s gordost’iu. […] Ne smeites’ nad nadsonovshchinoi—eto zagadka russkoi kul’tury i v sushchnosti neponiatyi ee zvuk […] Siuda shel tot, kto khotel razdelit’ sud’bu pokolen’ia vplot’ do gibeli,— vysokomernye ostavalis’ v storone s Tiutchevym i Fetom. […] Kak vysokie prosmolennye fakely, goreli vsenarodno narodovol’tsy s Sof’ ei Perovskoi i Zheliabovym, a èti vse, vsia provintsial’naia Rossiia i “uchashchaiasia molodezh’”, sochuvstvenno tleli [emphasis

THE FALLACY OF THE SILVER AGE 45

[…] The eighteen-eighties. The artistic demands are sharply lowered. Nadson’s sentimental plaints are seen as sublime poetry. The pathos of civic virtue precludes, as it were, all other concerns: “you need not be a poet, but you have a duty to be a citizen…” As it repeats these words of Nekrasov, the Russian intelligentsia swoons [mleet] from pious admiration for the revolutionary terrorists, but its involvement does not go beyond sympa thy.] (Otsup 1961:128–129)

added],—ne dolzhno bylo ostat’sia ni odnogo zelenogo listika. […] The 1880s in Vilno. The word “a man of the intelligentsia” was uttered by my mother, and especially by my grandmother, with pride…. …Laugh not at the sway of Nadson: it is the enigma of Russian culture and, actually, its misunderstood sound…. Here came those who wanted to share the lot of their generation unto death; the supercilious ones stayed aloof, with Tiutchev and Fet…. Like tall tarry torches, the People’s Will, with Sofiia Perovskaia and Zheliabov, burned for all the people to see, while all the rest, all of provincial Russia, the high school and university students, smouldered in sympathy [sochuvstvenno tleli]: not a single little leaf was to be left green.] (Mandel’shtam 1990:15–16)

Otsup’s disorientation is especially pitiful when he attempts to navigate between the radical concept of social involvement, professed by the intelligentsia, the ideology of decadence, and the new, millenarian social involvement of the second, Solovievian wave of symbolism. In fact, Otsup is so preoccupied with the social aspect of literary history and so erratic about it that his formal value judgments are invariably impaired, except for those instances when he freely borrows from G.P.Fedotov, or N.S. Gumilev, or D.P.Sviatopolk-Mirskii. The principal fault of Otsup’s reasoning,

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which makes it almost a caricature of critical discourse, is his mixing the purely metaphorical analogies, sometimes totally ignorant or ridiculously strained, with honest but narrow-minded and ineffectual endeavors to trace the actual occidental sources of the Russian modernisms inspiration. The focal point of his speculations concerning the “silver age” is the following passage:

[…] what we have termed “the silver age,” too [like “the golden age”], in its force and vigor, and in the abundance of marvellous works of art, has almost no analogy in the West: it represents, as it were, those phenomena which, in France, for example, took all of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, but in Russia were compressed into just three decades. Indeed, the epoch of Pushkin, Dostoevskii, and Tolstoi should be compared, as far as its significance is concerned, rather with the age of Corneille, Racine, and Molière, and by the depth of its national, religious, and purely artistic aims it resembles, one might say, the Italian quattrocento with its triad: Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio [sic!]. (Otsup 1961:130) The most trivial of Otsup’s errors are the most symptomatic. The point is not that Otsup did not know when the quattrocento was any better than he knew when the silver age of Russian poetry was, but that he found it perfectly permissible to paraphrase and to presume to correct the very important and memorable response of G.P.Fedotov to the literary questionnaire (“Literaturnaia anketa”) that appeared in Chisla, the almanac which Otsup edited, in 1930. Fedotov wrote:

It is somewhat embarassing to speak about the decline of Russian literature if one remembers that lamentations about its decline for over a century accompanied its truly miraculous flowering. Yet I am ready to admit that I, too, am not a stranger to the sensation of the decadence [oshchushchenie upadochnosti] of the contemporary literature. But I am doing so with the following reservations. It is permissible to speak about a natural

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decline of the twentieth century only if one compares it with the giants of the nineteenth, our golden age. Just as Italy will never forget its tre cento [emphasis added; Otsup decided that this was Fedotov’s error and that quattrocento, not trecento, means “the fourteenth century”], or France, le grand siècle, so Russia will always remember the blossoming brought about by its nobility [svoego dvorianskogo tsveteniia]. It would be quite against nature, that is, against history, to expect a second youth of the nation, having just buried Tolstoi. (Fedotov 1967:320) Needless to say, Fedotov’s analogy has to do with the place of an especially fruitful and inspiring age of cultural creativity in the memory of a nation that has already quite outlived the social and political structure of that age: the land-owning nobility of Russia is gone, as are the medieval Italian city states and the French absolutism, but not their cultural achievement. Otsup’s parallels are trite when they are not meaningless: there are grounds for juxtaposing Pushkin and Dante, and even Gogol’ and Dante, but a comparative analysis of the respective roles of Boccaccio and Dostoevskii, or Petrarch and Tolstoi, would be as meaningless as a permutation of these quite arbitrarily paired names. When Otsup addresses the later poetry, he tends to exaggerate the lessons of those poets from whom he tried to learn during his later years (Hugo and Vigny; Gumilev and Akhmatova occasionally quoted both, but so did Dostoevskii), or else safely adheres to those names and literary currents which are mentioned in poetic manifestoes or standard handbooks:

As for the epoch of the Russian symbolism and acmeism, it makes one think, on the one hand, of the French romanticism, that is, of Victor Hugo and especially of A.de Vigny, this most remarkable and even now insufficiently appreciated poet, and on the other hand, of the overcoming of romanticism both within romanticism itself [these are distorted recollections of Zhirmunskii’s “Those Who Overcame Symbolism,” “On the Classical and Romantic Poetry,” etc.; see Zhirmunskii 1928)], that is, of Théophile Gautier, who was elected (along with

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François Villon and Rabelais) by the Russian acmeism as its teacher, as well as outside romanticism, that is, a return to the national sources, by way of the coolness of the Parnassian school [here Otsup probably has in mind Gumilev’s early involvement with the “romanic” school of poetry, founded by Jean Moréas, rather than the quite cosmopolitan French Parnassians; see Gumilev 1990:180, 225, 234, 344; Ronen 1990:1626]. The French symbolism, with its imprecision and melodious vagueness, which betray its German origin, only in the beginning of the decadent fashion finds an analogy in the Russian poetry. After the tragically-tense vacillations expressed best of all in the poetry of Blok and Gumilev (the Germanic principle in the former, and the Romanic, in the latter), the silver age of Russian literature has been finally defined by a profound penetration into the destinies of the nation. (Otsup 1961: 130–131) After a digression on the feeling of “culpabilité collective” (it is quite typical of Otsup that he uses the French translation of a perfectly idiomatic Russian expression krugovaia poruka) in the Russian people and in Russian literature, he attempts to delineate the social and ethnic distinctions between the age of gold and the age of silver. In this, he relies heavily on Mirskii (for example, his essay in Blagonamerennyi 1926/1, reprinted in Mirsky 1989: 222–229), but manifests none of Mirskii’s neatness in identifying the succession of the ages of poetry and of prose in Russian literary history:

There are several major features in the silver age of Russian poetry which distinguish it from the golden age. The Russian reality has changed. The membership [sostav] of the Russian writers, the class composition, so to say, the social composition has changed. The writer as a human being has changed. Are these changes for the better or for the worse? […]

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When Turgenev wrote about Belinskii, he remarked, in spite of all of his admiration for the famous critic of Pushkin’s epoch, that he, Belinskii, was of plebeian origin. A nobleman himself, Turgenev still belonged to the Russia of the lords [k Rossii gospod]. As is known, the serfdom was abolished as late as 1861. Feudal Russia, Russia of the estates [soslovnaia] gave place to a new Russia. But even Dostoevskii, not belonging to any estate [raznochinets], still is a somewhat unaccustomed phenomenon in the predominantly aristocratic milieu of the prominent writers of the age of gold. During the age of silver, the complement is quite different: there are many writers who are of common stock, and many of alien blood [mnogo inorodtsev], of Polish and Jewish origin. (Otsup 1961:134–135) [Compare Mirsky’s provocative statement (1989:223): “During the “desolate years” [glukhie gody] between the First of March and the assassination of Plehve [1881– 1904] (just as during the desolate years between the Polish uprising and the Crimean war [1830–1853]: let IvanovRazumnik develop this parallel), the crop on the Russian soil was poor. (And it should be noted, to boot, how many writers of “alien blood” [“inorodtsev”] there are among the very best: Mandel’shtam, Pasternak, Babel’).”] At the end of Otsup’s evocation of the literary and (tragic) personal destinies of Russian modernists (Blok, Gumilev, Esenin, Tsvetaeva, Maiakovskii, Mandel’shtam), there follows what appears to be his final conclusion in the matter, the discussion of which he claims to have inaugurated, the metaphoric “metallurgical” evaluation of the present age in Russian literature:

Perhaps, we are already in the bronze age, or even the iron age. It will take quite some time for our descendants to sort out this and to give a correct answer to this question. (Otsup 1961:135)

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At this point, without any explanation, the article just described, composed, judging by such events mentioned in it as the death of Mandel’shtam, not before the mid-fifties, is continued as an unidentified reprint of Otsup’s much earlier essay (1933:174–178), namely the one to which he referred in the beginning (1961:127), when he introduced himself as the initiator of the designation “Silver Age” for Russian modernism. That essay, in Chisla 7/8, was entitled simply “Serebrianyi vek.” The only passage excluded from the original article in the new publication is a two-sided compliment addressed to Georgii Adamovich (1933:174): “This is not the proper place to speak of Adamovich’s own poetry, but his critical works possess what Pasternak has justly noticed in Andrei Belyi” [the reference is to Pasternak’s description of Belyi listening to Maiakovskii in Safe Conduct, Pt. III, Ch. 13], the ability to admire in an unselfish manner the achievements of others, without regard for one’s own rank among the generals of literature.” In this essay, the silver age is not so much a historical period as a type of creativity, and the essay, a vindication, as it were, of the creative weakness and lassitude identified with the so-called “Parisian note,” distinguishes and celebrates the “silver poets” during the golden age (Baratynskii and, partly, Lermontov) and, in a synchronistic sense, affirms the existence of a poetic golden age in the twentieth century, represented by Tiutchev and Blok as the “golden poets” of the silver age. All this, as will be demonstrated, is a muddled distortion of the ideas lifted from Piast (1929). Yet, it is apparently the 1933 essay of Otsup that indeed made the term “silver age” a household word in the literary diaspora and provoked Akhmatova’s reserved response. Some selected passages from Otsup’s early disquisition should therefore be quoted in extenso, confusing and incoherent as they are:

…Yet I love verse—and there is no emotion more sacred: Thus only a mother can love and only her sick children. I have wanted to take these lines by Annenskii as an epigraph to my article, but as it only begins here in actual fact and as epigraphs are not generally accompanied by any explanations, I am using my right in this place. And what can one add to these most eloquent lines?

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There is a golden age and a silver age of art. During either, people are worth one another [liudi drug druga stoiut’, this is very peculiar in Russian, and Otsup actually means that the people of the silver age are as good as those of the golden age]. It is doubtful that the former are of a different nature than the latter. The balance is disrupted by the elemental force [stikhiei]. The element of the renaissance, choosing receptacles, as it were, slows down and collects in the great artists of their time. These are remarkable by themselves, but it is the elemental force that makes them great. Once the element has had its say and receded, those artists are replaced by others, hardly less genuine. But they are left to their own devices and have only their own forces to rely upon. Nothing speaks or acts on their behalf any longer. It is not enough for them, as for those more fortunate ones, just to look and to listen closely. What has just recently been full of light and sounds is now more similar to silence and twilight. An artist of the silver age is not helped by the elemental force. But man’s organization is still the same, and without his irrational ally he is still doing his job. This is what makes the silver age heroic [Geroizm serebrianogo veka v ètom i sostoit] And something in the creations of its artists, in spite of their unavoidable paleness, is even better than the golden-age art. There everything is too sonorously voiced [polnoglasno] and excessively running over the brim. Here is the measure of human strength. Everything is drier, poorer, purer, but also, acquired at a higher price, it is closer to the author, closer to the height of a human being.

[…] Not at all the minute finishing of diminutive, fleeting and charming bibelots constitutes the essence of the silver

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age. This, too, exists. But only just so, by the way, to quench the excessive refinement [dlia utoleniia “pereutonchennosti”], which is perhaps the only indication of decadence. No, the artist of the silver age does not seek more trifling themes than his happy predecessor. He is as much a seeker and a bearer of the last truths. He endeavors, with immeasurably more effort than those whom the elemental force has been helping, to give an image of his and, in general, the entire human life. He is the toiler of art, not its pampered pet. […] There is, naturally, no possibility at all to determine accurately the boundary between the golden and the silver age. It would be the simplest, perhaps, to consider the golden age the two or three best decades in the life of “the genius who holds his age spellbound.” The golden age of the Russian poetry of the past century, the “first love” of Russia, are the life and poetry of Pushkin. Thanks to Baratynskii, the silver age exists simultaneously with the golden. Not so in the case of Iazykov. By the freedom and sonority of his voice, he is a specimen of the golden age, but this is a second-or third-rate specimen. Upon Lermontov, the golden age lingers, as it were, before vanishing. The historical decade and century, it goes without saying, have nothing to do with the chronology of poetry. Its golden age for the twentieth century are Tiutchev and Blok. It is immaterial that the two are separated by decades. Between Virgil and Dante, two peaks of the European golden age, there are centuries. On an incomparably smaller scale, for Russia and her poets now active, Tiutchev and Blok are poets of the same element. There is in this element also something of Lermontov, but Lermontov mixed half and half with

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Pushkin, with that “past perfect” [davno-proshedshim] golden age. Tiutchev is completely in the twentieth century, and our contemporary Blok does not at all dismiss or replace him, but merely stands side by side with him. Both are in the heart of what moves the contemporary poetry. Blok, moreover, had given a voice to “the evil of our day” and was a physically perceptible, as it were, terrible and angelic face of our golden age. With the disappearance of its genius, the time loses its voice; it appears stifled and hoarse. Yet, the same theme persists in it, and even an underground deepening of that theme, as it were. One wishes to believe that it is precisely this that is present in the contemporary, post-Blokian poetry and that this will sooner or later serve as its justification. (Otsup 1933:175–178) Obviously, it is this confused and ambitious declaration on the first and the second ages of Ovid in the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Russian poetry that has provided the inspiration for Veidle’s passage on the silver age in “Three Russias”(1937; Veidle 1956:97– 98) and for his chronological notion, stated in “The St. Petersburg Poetics,” 1968 (Veidle 1973:113, 126), of “the golden season” [zolotaia pora] of “our silver age” (although, as will be demonstrated subsequently, Veidle’s vocabulary is borrowed from Viacheslav Ivanov’s “Zheleznaia osen’”); for Tsvetaeva’s reference to the “silver time” in “Chert” (1980:145); for the felicitous title of the memoirs by the forgetful old Makovskii (1962), for Strakhovsky’s (1959) and other émigrés’ lyrical outpourings on “the Silver Age of Russian Poetry”; and for the general uncritical and confused acceptance of this ambiguous appellation. Otsup’s sole justification in this matter of letting loose a borrowed and completely distorted idea is, not that his role has been totally forgotten by his contemporaries, but that he has tried to follow up, not wisely and not too well, but certainly with a great deal of devotion, the wistful ambition of Innokentii Annenskii’s poem

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“Dozhdik” [“Rain”]:

I vsekh uveriat’, chto ne dozhit I pervyi Ovidiev vek: Iz serdtsa za Imatru let Nichto, mol, u nas ne ukhodit— I v mokrom asfal’te poet Zakhochet, tak schast’e nakhodit. [Won’t you like to keep reassuring everybody That even the First Age of Ovid is not over yet: You would claim that from our heart Nothing goes away beyond the Imatra cascade of the years And in the wet asphalt the poet, If he wants, finds happiness.] The question that remains is whether Akhmatova, in the Soviet Union, could have known what was being published in the émigré magazines in Paris. She could, and the sparsity of evidence concerning her reading of the literature published in exile before the war can be easily explained by her carefully concealing her sources. There is an obvious tribute in Poèma bez geroia to Amari’s (M.O.Tsetlin’s) long poem about the Decembrists, Krov’ na snegu [“Blood on the Snow”], parts of which appeared in Sovremennye zapiski in the 1930s (complete edition in book form: Paris, 1939):

Ty zheleznye pishesh’ zakony, Khamurabi, likurgi, solony U tebia pouchit’sia dolzhny. [You write iron laws; The Hammurabis, Lycurgi and Solons Ought to learn from you.] (Poèma bez geroia, lines 162–164) Compare Amari’s meter, strophe, and vocabulary:

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Pust’ chitaiut ikh tam v Peterburge Benkendorfy, Solony, Likurgi, Vse zavesiat zimnie purgi, Pered sovest’iu budu ia prav. [Let them read it in Petersburg, Let the Benckendorfs, Solons and Lycurgi read; The winter snowstorms will curtain everything; I shall be right as I face my conscience.] (Krov’na snegu, p. 52) Apparently, Akhmatova did hear the call of Tsetlin’s righteous personage, “Let them read this in Petersburg!” She read, and she responded. It is not known who supplied Akhmatova with information about the émigré publications kept on the closed shelves of the national Soviet libraries. There is also a possibility that her source in this instance has been Count Jozef Czapski. They became friends in Tashkent during the war, and some of Akhmatova’s poems are dedicated to him. Czapski knew Otsup and occasionally attended the meetings of the Russian writers in the editorial office of Chisla (Ianovskii 1983:258). However this may be, Akhmatova was, no doubt, familiar with those sources, published in Soviet Russia, from which Otsup had borrowed his idea of the silver age.

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5 Vladimir Piast’s Chronology and the Original Meaning of the Term “Silver Age of Russian Poetry”

In his apology of the silver-age type of creativity, N.Otsup (1933: 176) claimed, as we have seen, that the silver age means desperately hard work, not exquisite workmanship, as some aesthetes might believe (the undisclosed but easily identifiable target of his challenge was certainly Bunin and Bunin’s admirers). Otsup was faithful in this respect to the classical distinction between the golden and the silver age. According to Hesiod’s “historicist” myth, indeed, during the golden age, earth yielded crops by itself, and men merely took as much wealth from it as they wanted, just as the Renaissance artist could always draw on “the elemental force” in Otsup’s scheme of the ages of poetry. According to Ovid (Metamorphoses I:114–124), though not according to Hesiod, whose “silver generation” is childish and impious, men actually began to toil and to plough the land during the silver age, when the primeval springtime had been reduced and four seasons created (hence the possible “silver age” implication in Mandel’shtam’s poem about the plough “silvered” by work, as well as in its subtext out of Fet, with its Ovidian images, quoted on pp. 34–35). The people, however, are the same breed for Otsup. The golden artists are not more gifted than the silver ones; they are “worthy of one another,” “equivalent” [drug druga stoiut]. Here the analogy with the classical mythological tradition is disrupted. Of course, already the Romans, in translating Hesiod’s Greek word genos—“generation, race,” by the Latin aetas or saeculum, introduced in the original, purely anthropological unit of succession upon which the “historicist myth” (Lamberton 1988: 116–118) is based the extraneously associated additional meaning of the “age,” a period of human life, a more or less prolonged period of time, as

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well as its content and moral value (compare the analysis of the concept of veröld in Gurevich 1972:85 ff.). To what extent Otsup has been aware of such mythological associations of his concept of the silver age as the correspondence between gold and the divine, and silver and the human spirit, is not particularly important, considering the fact that imprecision and deliberate ignorance were quite fashionable and deliberately flaunted in the circles of Adamovich and Chisla as a challenge to the more “pedantic” critics such as Khodasevich. The principal source of confusion in the tangle of Otsup’s reasoning was that he blended the genos and the aetas and, at the same time as he proclaimed the equivalence of the golden and silver gifts, affirmed the presence of certain “silver poets” during the golden age and “golden poets” during the silver age. The reason for this was his obvious misunderstanding of the source, or two sources, from which he freely helped himself. Otsup, after all, was not the originator of the appellation “silver age” in modern Russian literary criticism, and both this author (Ronen 1990:1619) and B.Gasparov (1992:16) were wrong in attributing the first use of the term (or misnomer) to him. Two close friends of the late Aleksandr Blok developed the “metalage” allegory in relation to the history of Russian literature, including its modern age. One, the unfortunate and noble poet and critic Vladimir Piast (Vladimir Alekseevich Pestovskii, 1886–1940),11 did so earnestly, in the astute and poignant “fore word substitute” (“Vmesto predisloviia”) to his remarkable and insufficiently known and appreciated book of memoirs Vstrechi [“Encounters”] (1929). The other, Ivanov-Razumnik (Razumnik Vasil’evich Ivanov, 1878– 1946), a prominent publicist, critic, literary scholar, and ideologist of the “Scythians,”12 used the metallurgical terminology somewhat ironically, at least as far as the “silver age” was concerned, in 1925, in the essay entitled “Vzgliad i nechto” [“A Glance and a Something”], a caustic piece of criticism directed mainly against Zamiatin and the Serapion Brotherhood, and signed with the nom de guerre Ippolit Udush’ev (both the title and the pen name were taken out of Griboedov’s Woe From Wit to celebrate the continued relevance of that comedy at its centennial). Ivanov-Razumnik has been mentioned in this connection briefly and in a somewhat garbled fashion in Gleb Struve’s essay “The Cultural Renaissance” (1969: 181), in a small-print footnote:

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The term “Golden Age” was also used without hesitation, in speaking of this period [twentieth-century Russian cultural renaissance], by a critic who in many ways stood much closer than the Modernists to the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, R.V.IvanovRazumnik. He used it in an article signed “Ippolit Udushiev” (a personage mentioned in Gore ot uma) in the collection of essays Sovremennaia literatura (Contemporary Literature) (Leningrad, 1925), p. 161. For Ivanov-Razumnik, when he wrote, the Second Golden Age was already over, and the Silver Age, the period of decline, had begun. In general, the pseudonymous article of his is full of interesting thoughts and observations. There are several inaccuracies in this note, as will be shown eventually. One of them is that Ivanov-Razumnik consistently uses the designation “silver age” on quite a few occasions in that article, in fact, on every page from 161 to 174, and in the meaning considerably more derogatory than it appears from Struve’s summary. Ivanov-Razumnik and Piast were probably aware of each other’s ideas in this regard. The fact that Piast’s Vstrechi appeared in print four years after “Ippolit Udush’ev’s” article is an indicator, not of the direction of intellectual influence, but of the vicissitudes of publishing such books in the USSR. Piast had been working on his memoirs a long time before 1929: in 1925, he gave P.N.Luknitskii his recollections of Gumilev and the Guild of Poets (Luknitskii 1989: 84, 89; Luknitskaia 1990:116, 128–131). The memoirs of Piast were an extremely important constituent in one of the most significant literary developments marking the end of the era of “Storm and Stress,” to use Mandel’shtam’s appellation. The dominant genre of the era s end was nonfiction, “literatura fakta,” as the theoreticians of the Left Front of Art called it. It was then that the retrospective essays and memoirs began to appear both in exile (Gippius, Khodasevich, Tsvetaeva, and, before them, Maxim Gor’kii) and in the Soviet Union, where the wave of documentary recapitulation and artistic evocation of the age which was about to end included such masterpieces as The Noise of Time, Safe Conduct, The One-and-a-Half-Eyed Archer and crested with Andrei Belyi’s trilogy (Lavrov 1989:7).

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Aleksandr Parnis very accurately defined the part which Piast’s book played in the retrospective stock-taking of that period in his afterword to a recent edition of Polutoraglazyi strelets (Livshits 1991:231):

[…]several literary and historical periods had succeeded each other; the thunder of the futurist battles was over, and the polemic between various literary alignments became a thing of the past. Memoirs began to appear, summing up the grand total. In 1928, in Paris, the book entitled Peterburgskie zimy, “The Petersburg Winters,” came out. Its author, G.Ivanov, was one of the former egofuturists, who subsequently went over to the group of the acmeists. […] Actually, The Petersburg Winters are not memoirs but, so to say, “imaginary portraits” or, if one may use the title of G.Ivanov’s later collection of poems, “portraits without any resemblance.” As a matter of fact, Ivanov himself, in the fifties, described his so-called memoirs as “semifictionalized [polubelletristicheskie] feuilletons” about his contemporaries. In 1929, one year after the appearance of The Petersburg Winters, one of the later symbolists V.Piast published in Moscow his memoirs Vstrechi, “Encounters,” devoted to the symbolists and the acmeists and to the “incinerating years,” as Blok had called them, setting off, as it were, the documentary authenticity of his recollections against the frankly counterfeit “memoirs” of G.Ivanov. Piast’s memoirs were not only an important event in the development of the new wave of literary memoirs and an invaluable historical source. In the introductory remarks to his book, Piast hinted at the new function of the old genre, by comparing the new vogue with the old one, described by Balzac:

I think that the natural landmark with which the recollections of the man of our epoch should begin cannot be other than 1905. In my personal instance, precisely this

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year coincided with “my beginning to pursue the career of a man of letters,” a pursuit which I would not consider my only one, but which nevertheless I have never abandoned. Of course, the reasons which, according to Balzac (see La Peau de chagrin in the edition of “Vsemirnaia Literatura”),13 existed a century ago for the abundance at that time of “memoirs” and for the readers’ interest in them are quite different from those which in our days of the USSR prescribe [sic] a possibility of discerning an analogous phenomenon. Our reader, who avidly enters the new life, has an avid thirst for various knowledge, including the knowledge about the “old” life, which directly preceded our epoch. I can help this reader only in one field, the field purely of literature […] However, one must say that the reminiscences offered here to the reader’s attention possess one property or quality, their truthful authenticity [pravdivost’], and do not resemble in this respect either the counterfeit “memoirs” of the time of La Peau de chagrin, or some books that come out in our days, such as The Petersburg Winters by Georgii Ivanov, published abroad; with the exception of certain minor details, dear personally to the author, the present book might serve, to an extent, as an example of typical literary memoirs of this literary age group (it would have been too audacious to claim: this literary epoch) [mogli by sluzhit’ primerom tipicheskikh literaturnykh vospominanii ètogo literaturnogo vozrasta (bylo by slishkom smelo skazat’: literaturnoi èpokhi)] [Piast’s emphasis throughout]. Piast’s style, at times deliberately convoluted, while carefully concealing the true meaning of his historical analogy (Balzac’s episodic character specializes in producing spurious historical memoirs of the revolution and the pre-revolutionary era in France, written from the point of view of the ultimate victors, men of the Restoration, in the days of Balzac, and, logically, men of the Bolshevik party, in the case of Piast), is perfectly lucid when Piast

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distinguishes between vozrast—“age” in the sense of “age group,” that is, genos, and èpokha—“epoch,” “period,” aetas or saeculum. It is here that Piast offers his original model of the succession of literary generations in Russia, which has later been used by a number of critics and scholars, including Roman Jakobson in his Harvard lectures in winter 1967. The major difference between Piast’s scheme and those of earlier literary historians and of Sviatopolk-Mirskii is Piast’s emphasis on the chronology of the literary age groups, homogeneous in their purpose and comparable in the overall quality, if not the actual level, of achievement. This is what Piast wrote (1929:6–7):

The point of the matter is that in the nineteenth-century “poets” were born, commenced their “earthly” existence, so to say, in “clusters,” at periods separated from each other by the intervals consisting of an even number of decades. The poets of the “Golden Age,” of the Pushkin period, Boratynskii, Iazykov, Tiutchev, and a swarm of less famous, but very fine poets [t’ma menee izvestnykh, no prekrasnykh poètov] were born in the “zero” years, the eighteenhundreds [v “nulevykh godakh,” 18…]. The “Silver Age” is characterized by the poets whose years of birth range from 1817 to 1824. Before us are the names of the near coevals: Aleksei K.Tolstoi, Ia. P.Polonskii, Ap. N.Maikov, A.A. Fet, L.A.Mei, N.F.Shcherbina, A.A.Grigor’ev, N.A.Nekrasov, and to this brilliant pleiad are joined the names of the creators of contemporary Russian prose, some of which were of comparable magnitude also as “poets” in the broad sense of this word: I.S. Turgenev, F.M.Dostoevskii, M.E.SaltykovShchedrin, and others. Thus, we have the “zero” years, the twenties, and then a blank interval of two times twenty years, and the next generation of poets was born “densely” during the sixties. Between the twenties and the sixties, one can name the birth dates of just not more than five votaries of Russian poetry, who have left a noticeable trace in it…In forty years, five poets; whereas during the sixties there were

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born, almost at once, all the “senior” symbolists and such poets as Bunin, Fofanov, Lokhvitskaia, and others. We are far from engaging in the pretense of identifying our coevals, “the men of the eighties” by their year of birth, with the representatives of some kind of the “Silver Age” of the Russian, shall we say, “modernism.” [My daleki ot pretenzii sravnivat’ nashikh sverstnikov, “vos’midesiatnikov” po rozhdeniiu, s predstaviteliami kakogo-nibud’ “Serebrianogo veka” russkogo, skazhem, “modernizma.”] However, in the mid-eighties, too, a quite considerable number of people came into the world, whose vocation was “to serve the Muses.” These memoirs come from one of this group of coevals…The responsibility for them, though, does not rest, needless to say, upon all of his age group… As one can clearly see, Piast distinguished in a perfectly sure manner the Golden Age and the Silver Age in the classical Russian literature of the nineteenth century.14 He introduced the notion of two such “ages,” or, rather, “generations,” in the twentieth century, in Russian modernism, tentatively, cautiously, and very modestly, by a guarded analogy with the nineteenth century and in full awareness of the difference in proportion. In identifying the Silver Age of Russian poetry in the nineteenth century, Piast followed an earlier, established critical tradition, according to which it was placed chronologically after the Golden Age of Pushkin and roughly coincided with what was termed by Sviatopolk-Mirskii “the Golden Age of the Russian novel” (Mirsky 1958:302). In fact, Sviatopolk-Mirskii himself adhered to that tradition and used the appellation “Silver Age” in that chronological sense. His section dealing with the Russian poetry in the age of realism is entitled “The Eclectic Poets” and commences with the following brief statement on the decline of the art:

After the death of Lermontov it became the general conviction that the age of poetry was over. In the fifties there was a certain revival of interest in poets and poetry. But in the sixties the school of Pisarev launched a systematic campaign against all verse, and some of the most

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prominent poets were actually hooted into silence. With few exceptions the poets of this Silver Age [emphasis added] lack vitality, and with hardly an exception their technique is lax and insufficiently conscious. A feature common to the poets of the period, which they do not share with the novelists, is their eclecticism [Mirsky’s emphasis], their submission to compromise. They did not believe in the rights of the poetical imagination and sought to reconcile it with the modern spirit of science and positive knowledge. Only two poets remained free from this eclecticism: Fet, who had a genuinely transcendent poetic vision, and Nekrasov, who was truly in tune with the stream of history. But Fet was appreciated only by the extreme literary right, and Nekrasov only by the left—the middle poets met with much more universal approbation. (Mirsky 1958:230; see also: Mirskii 1924: VII, XI) Among the poets of this silver age, which completely coincides with the 1817–1824 “silver generation” of Piast, SviatopolkMirskii listed, in addition to Fet and Nekrasov, the following:A. N.Maikov (1821– 1897), N.F.Shcherbina (1821–1869), L.A.Mei (1822–1862), Ya. R Polonskii (1819–1898), Count A.K.Tolstoi (1817–1875), A.N.Pleshcheev (1825–1893), A.M.Zhemchuzhnikov (1821–1908), I.S.Nikitin (1824–1861), but not Apollon Grigor’ev (1822–1864). Similar to Piast, but using the time of the beginning of the literary activity, rather than the year of birth, as a point of reference, Sviatopolk-Mirskii acknowledged the blank interval of several decades, during which the only poet “of real significance” to emerge was Konstantin Sluchevskii (1837–1904) (Mirsky 1958:243). Prince Sviatopolk-Mirskii did not share many of the tastes of the famous late nineteenth-century critics, but, unlike Otsup, Makovskii, and Strakhovskii, he knew their work very well and adopted much of their historical classification, chronological divisions, intellectual judgment, and reliable terminology. The designation “silver age” was part of the contemporary critical idiom in the 1890s. Vladimir Solov’ev, to quote an authoritative source, used it in his essay “Impressionizm mysli” [“The Impressionism of Thought”], devoted to a review of the poetry of Sluchevskii and originally published in 1897 in Cosmopolis (Solov’ev 1990:530). He reduced the scope of

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the concept, however, to the lyric poetry alone, implying, apparently, a complete decline of other poetic kinds, or, perhaps, his lower opinion of Sluchevskii’s narrative and dramatic verse. The chronological reference of the term is the same as with Mirskii and Piast; it is the age of Fet:

Not only these chance slips of the pen, but also more serious shortcomings in the poems of K.K.Sluchevskii, cannot prevent him from possessing the merit, already rare today, of being a genuine poet and from being one of the few still surviving worthy representatives of the “silver age” of the Russian lyric poetry [“serebrianogo veka” russkoi liriki]. (Soloviev 1903:71) Similarly, and probably as a corollary to Solov’ev’s “silver age of the lyric poetry,” Vasilii Rozanov, in his newspaper article marking the twentieth anniversary of Turgenev’s death,15 expanded and reformulated the notion to cover also the prose of the second half of the nineteenth century:

Pushkin was the zenith of that movement of Russian literature which was setting down beautifully as it gradually declined during the “silver age” of our literature of the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, in Turgenev, Goncharov, and a whole pleiad of story tellers of Russian daily life [rasskazchikov russkogo byta], dreamers and contemplators of the still calm [tikhogo shtilia: Rozanov’s untranslatable pun is based on the double meaning of the word shtil’—“calm weather” and, usually ironically, “style,” as in vysokii shtil’ (Rozanov 1903) Otsup and Veidle, who never referred to Piast although they could not have been ignorant of his book, reviewed in Paris, some time after its publication, by V.F.Khodasevich in Vozrozhdenie (15 January 1931; Khodasevich 1991:647), when they borrowed from him the idea of the two ages of Russian modernism, dropped the golden age from the twentieth century and were left with the silver, and with such pitfalls in their periodization and classification as “the

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golden poets of the silver age” (Otsup) and “the golden season of the silver age” (Veidle). Veidle (1973:113, 126), at least, had an illustrious forerunner in addition to Ovid, as he introduced the concept of seasons in his silver age. Viacheslav Ivanov, in several poems, identified the beginning of the twentieth century as a creative age with the fall: the harvest of the years of plenty (“Pharaohs Dream”) before famine; Pushkin’s “golden autumn” and its “magnificent wilting of Nature,/ the forests clothed in crimson and gold” before the onset of the iron season, “the glistening winter of the world growing decrepit,” evoked in “The Last Poet,” “Autumn,” and other poems by Baratynskii. The Hesiodic metals, gold and iron, become symbolic stages of the change in the autumnal landscape in Ivanov’s “Zheleznaia osen’” [“The Iron Autumn”] (Prozrachnost’—“Transparence,” 1904), so that the “iron autumn” is contrasted with the “golden autumn” as the Iron Age with the Golden Age (Ronen 1985:113):

Gde ognevoi pory Chervlenets liubeznyi? O, zolotoi igry Konets zheleznyi! Dol potemnel i smur. Kak oruzh’ia, rzhavy S kholma, gde stebel’ bur, Ia vizhu dubravy. Legli vesny boitsy V sechi bespoleznoi. Gde khmel’ i gde ventsy Na trizne zheleznoi? Kak kharaluzhnyi stroi, Utesov otvesy, Grozia, mel’knut poroi Iz-za khmuroi zavesy. [Where is the fiery seasons/Lovely vermilion?/O, the golden game’s/ Iron end! [The ‘golden game’ here is, likewise, an echo of

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Baratynskii’s Igra stikhov, igra zlataia—“The game of verse, the golden game” (“Byvalo, otrok, zvonkim klikom…”—“A boy, I used with my ringing call…”).]//The dale has grown dark and is somber./ Like weapons, rusty,/From the hill, where the stalk is brown,/I see the oak groves.//The springtime fighters fell/In a useless battle./ Where are the cups and where are the wreaths/At the iron funeral feast?// Like steel-clad ranks,/The sheer slopes of the cliffs/Flash menacingly at times/From behind a gloomy veil.]

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6 The Detractors of Postsymbolism “Ippolit Udush’ev” and “Gleb Marev”

The spring blossoms of Russian modernism, ver sacrum, were sacrificed too early, according to Viacheslav Ivanov’s early (1903) estimate. During the following year, he proclaimed, in “Carmen Saeculare,” a totally new age, to overcome the opposition of silver and gold: the Age of Adamant, of steel and diamond. These ideas and symbols of Ivanov, however, left no trace in the writing of the critics, though they have profoundly affected the historical selfawareness of the younger generation of poets. The only historian of Russian literature who eventually decided to dispense with the old metals of Hesiod, Oleg Maslennikov, as will be shown later, ignored the synthetic concept of Ivanov; but then Ivanov’s admantina proles presupposed also an abolition of the chasm between art and the social being. One of those radical and socially involved critics who might have adopted the terminology of Viacheslav Ivanov along with his ideas of all-national art, but did not (Lavrov 1981:374), was R.V.IvanovRazumnik. An erudite and perceptive interpreter, though a maximalist in more senses than his association with the left-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries implies, Ivanov-Razumnik, in full cognizance of the gold-and-silver terminology in reference to nineteenth-century Russian poetry and prose, applied the designation “silver age” to the second period of Russian modernism, of which he did not approve for a number of reasons, aesthetical, political, and even frankly personal. His use of the appellation “silver age” is definitely disparaging, not to say contemptuous, in salient contrast with Vladimir Piast’s modestly self-deprecating attitude toward his own “silver generation” of modernism and, especially, with the glowing image of the silver age as the age of modernism in Russia, constructed and propagated by the later authors, mainly in

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the second half of the twentieth century. Perhaps it was in part because of Ivanov-Razumnik’s unconcealed disdain for precisely those names which Otsup, Veidle, Makovskii, and Gleb Struve considered the pillars of the silver age that the latter decided to forgo any textual quotations from Razumnik’s satirical essay “A Glance and a Something” (Struve 1969:181). A few words should be said about the collection of articles where Ivanov-Razumnik published his pseudonymous satire, the first version of which, very recently discovered by V.G.Belous (IvanovRazumnik 1993), was drafted as early as September 1922. In many respects, the miscellany Sovremennaia literatura, put together apparently by Ivanov-Razumnik himself, although, perhaps for political censorship considerations, according to Belous, this was not acknowledged in the edition, represented a relatively broad spectrum of free literary thought. Except for Struve and Berberova (1983: 654), Russian scholars in the West did not seem to be aware of this book, and it is not represented in the Union Catalogue. The contributors to the volume included Andrei Belyi (on Blok’s Snezhnaia maska [“The Snow Mask”]), Evgeniia Knipovich (“The Cause of Blok”), Ol’ga Forsh (“Propetyi gerbarii” [“A Herbarium Cantabile”], an astute analysis of Belyi’s Petersburg as the summing up of the theme of the intelligentsia in Russian literature), A.Veksler (on Belyi’s Epopee), Zamiatin on Sologub (“The White Love”), A.Gizetti (on Sologub as a lyric poet), Iu. Verkhovskii’s essay on Gumilev, B. Tomashevskii (“The Formal Method”), but its ultimate meaning was set by its frame: the posthumous article by Aleksandr Blok “Bez bozhestva, bez vdokhnoven’ia” [“Without a Deity, Without Inspiration”], which opened the miscellany, and Ippolit Udush’ev’s piece, which closed it. Ivanov-Razumnik had always been an excellent editor (an appreciation of his work can be found in Ol’ga Forsh’s roman a clef The Ship of Fools, in which he is depicted under the name of “Chernomor,” Pushkin’s coach of the thirty-three amphibious warriors in “The Tale of Czar Saltan” [Forsh 1964:203–205]). While granting ample space to such opponents as the presumed tutor of the Serapion Brotherhood Evgenii Zamiatin and the most cautious and the least provocative of the formalists, Boris Tomashevskii, Ivanov-Razumnik directed the full force of his radicalpopulist fury of the former publisher of Zavety and the leader of the “Scythians” against what he believed to be the three principal foes of the great, sacred, spiritually inspired, soulful, national, and social art.

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Those foes were, according to Ivanov-Razumnik, the partisans of the silver-age propensity for pure craftsmanship in the place of the golden inspiration: the Serapion Brothers, the formalists, and, first and foremost, the acmeists and other bearers of the heritage of Nikolai Gumilev. It was for this reason that Ivanov-Razumnik published the extremely hostile, quite unfair, and frequently rude article by Blok as the opening polemical shot in his critical barrage. Originally, Blok’s article was to appear when Gumilev was still alive, as part of their acrimonious polemic, in the first (and last), suppressed issue of Literaturnaia gazeta, the paper of the board of the All-Russian Union of Writers (Petersburg; May 1921).16 There is evidence that the friends of the martyred Gumilev expressed strong objections to the publication of Blok’s article in this edition. Kornei Chukovskii, for example, recorded in his diary both the insulting behavior of IvanovRazumnik toward Gumilev and the acmeists in 1919 (1991:132) and Akhmatova’s indignation in connection with Ivanov-Razumnik’s intentions in November 1923: “She is outraged that for the Critical Miscellany [“Kriticheskii Sbornik”] undertaken by the “Mysl’” Publishing House Ivanov-Razumnik picked the article by Blok which contains many affronts against Gumilev.—I did not like Gumilev’s verse, you know, but to attack him after he had been shot! …Go to “Mysl’,” tell them they should not dare to print this. Ivanov-Razumnik is doing this out of spite…[Èto Iv.-Razumnik narochno…]” (Chukovskii 1991:257). Luknitskii’s records (May 26, 1926) confirm that the entire polemic, revived by Ivanov-Razumnik after the death of both opponents, has been a source of great distress for Akhmatova:

We talked about Gumilev and the people around him during those last years. In this connection, A.A. [Akhmatova] spoke about Blok, expressing the opinion that Blok, when he entered the polemic which ended with the article “Without a Deity, Without Inspiration,” acted extremely unethically and unfairly. As for Gumilev, she reproached him for his lack of sensitivity, which permitted him to engage in a polemic the asphyxiating, despondent, sick, and bilious Blok. A.A. did not justify the last years of Gumilev’s life; the reasons she gave were all of the conditions of life then. She believed that if Gumilev had

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not died he would have greatly changed very soon, once he found out about the Kelson affair [?], he would have cut all relations with G.Ivanov and N. Otsup [NB!]. There is a footnote to this record, referring to P.N.Luknitskii’s Trudy i dni N.Gumileva, v. II, p. 292, who relied on the information provided by Sofiia Kaplun, a member of the Free Philosophical Association (Vol’fila) in the twenties: “1921. April. Al. Blok wrote the article “Without a Deity, Without Inspiration.” This article (N.S. [Gumilev] read it in manuscript) led to the break in the personal relations between N.S.Gumilev and Al. Blok…Gumilev wrote a rejoinder to Blok’s article, but did not have the time to publish it. It was impossible to locate this rejoinder [after Gumilev’s death]” (Luknitskaia 1990:238–239). Obviously, Gleb Struve, who was not aware of these circumstances, decided to ignore Ivanov-Razumnik’s critique of the “silver age” and all of its implications, and simply to dismiss the appellation as misleading. He was correct in his evaluation of the term, but the arguments of Ivanov-Razumnik should be taken into consideration by any future historian of the Russian literary criticism in the twentieth century. What follows is a complete digest of all of Ivanov-Razumnik, references to the “metal-ages” of Russian literature in his Ippolit Udush’ev piece (Ivanov-Razumnik 1925:154–182):

[…]To become a chapter in the history of Russian literature, it is not enough to have learned the literary craft. One needs to know it, either to learn it by oneself, or by attending a workshop of an experienced master, that is immaterial; but, in addition to the craftsmanship, one’s soul must also have some possessions [nado imet’ eshche chto-to za dushoi]. Karolina Pavlova once had called poetry “a holy craft”—and hit the bull’s eye. Of course, without craft there is no art. But the contemporary craftsmen of poetry and prose, the artisans, or whatever their name may be, forget too easily that literature, like any other art, like any creative occupation, is not only craft, but also a holy place, and that this Jerusalem of human spirit cannot be conquered by compositional devices, sharp sound

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orchestration, refined rhythms, and tricks of plot construction. There is a need for something else, too, a little thing: the burning of the spirit. If this is absent, everything else is in vain, everything fails. Here is a great master, a poet who, as the years passed, abandoned everything for the sake of pure craftsmanship. And, lo, all of his work of thirty years turns into dust; one often would like to address him with the words of Tolstoi’s Akim: “Come to your senses, Mikita! One needs to have a soul”… [Ivanov-Razumnik quotes The Power of Darkness as he speaks about Valerii Briusov.] Here are his younger contemporaries, the two big poets who have combined in their art enormous skill [masterstvo] with the highest soaring of the spirit, with the unceasing fervor; their names are the peaks of Russian literature in the first quarter of the twentieth century. [The reference is, of course, to Blok and Belyi.] Which of these two paths does Russian literature take now? One does not need to be a Cassandra to foresee that its more likely choice will be the first path. […] it is unlikely that after the enormous cresting of the creative wave in the Russian literature of the first quarter of our century we would not have to face (as we already do) its abatement, which might also last for decades. […] A characteristic symptom of the receding wave and the beginning of the silver age [emphasis added here and throughout the quotation] is always the appearance of experienced teachers in the field of the “holy craft.” Such teachers were, for example, in the field of poetry, while it was still in the period of its flowering, Val. Briusov and Viach. Ivanov; later came Gumilev, not a major poet at all, but an assiduous master; at present, in the art of fiction, such an experienced coach is Zamiatin. This, too, is symptomatic. Russian prose is destined, apparently, to follow the same path as her older (as far as her development in the twentieth century is concerned) sister, Russian poetry.

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Thus we are entering, and have already entered, a new literary time. “The golden age” of the Russian literature of the first quarter of the twentieth century has come to an end. It still persists by virtue of the strength of a few of its older heroes [nemnogimi starshimi bogatyriami]; we are entering, and have already entered, the headwaters of the silver age. (A marxist critic would have said: the epoch of the decomposition of the bourgeois literature). Quite a few new talents are already noticeable in these headwaters, which are linked by the general current, flowing downstream, with their older predecessors. […] Their main distinguishing mark has always been a technique that is self-sufficient, a lowering of the spiritual flight with a concomitant apparent rise in the technical level and the brilliancy of the form. It’s an old story, doch bleibt sie immer neu; Greece, and Alexandria, and Rome, and the high Renaissance have all taught us this lesson. […] These “Serapions,” which are nothing as a literary phenomenon, are very indicative as one of the symptoms. We can find another symptom in the field of the current poetry; a third one, in the “formal method” fad, and so on. The symptom I have chosen is a minor one, but characteristic, and the conclusions might turn out to be major. The future will tell whether mine are correct. The silver age is in its beginning; its heroes only begin to come out on the stage. There will be more of them, still more experienced and gifted, patient and conscientious, but willing to forsake the summits of the spirit for a bit of summer coaching in the country, for a modest consideration. […] […] the main branches of the genealogical tree of Russian prose (not only its ideological pedigree) are quite clearly outlined even now. If one considers the top branches of the “golden age” of the early twentieth century symbolism and realism, the blood line Gogol’-Belyi (in The Silver Dove) and Dostoevskii-Belyi (in Petersburg) should hardly cause much argument; another such line leads from

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Leskov to Remizov. Turgenev’s novella receives a new and revolutionary development in Chekhov, and, from both of them, and crossing with the line of Leskov, such artists branch off as Sergeev-Tsenskii, then such as Bunin, and even lesser ones (such as Kuprin and the like), and M.Gorkii with his followers; the line Gogol’-Sologub remains selfcontained. The “new realism” (Bunin, Sergeev-Tsenskii, and down to Shmelev, a very small, but overpraised artist), “symbolism” (Belyi), and “impressionism,” issuing directly from Chekhov (Zaitsev and a great many similar writers),— these are the final developments in prose during the prerevolutionary and pre-war years.

[…] How does it stand then “de stilo et deo” in the art of Russian prose? Or, to put it in more contemporary words, what pivot holds together its contemporary form? If we have indeed entered the headwaters of the silver age, then, as far as “form” goes, everything ought to be more than safe and sound, whereas in regard to the “pivots” the affairs ought to be in a sorry state. Or, to put it in still other, oldtime words: the craft ought to be prospering, and the fervor of the spirit, kept down. What an epoch has just passed! Fires and thunderstorms. The art should have caught fire with an uprecedented force. But it has not. Minute lights glimmer here and there; cunning little homemade fire works nicely trace out an intricate ornamental pattern; the themes are enormous, but the artists are short of breath. This is not the fault, but the misfortune of every silver-age literature. […] This is the lot of the writers of any silver age: they find themselves too quickly and too easily. Indeed, it is easy for them: excellent examples are before their eyes. They forget that in creative art “every cock sings in its own manner” [“vsiakii molodets na svoi obrazets”]; on the contrary, they

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quite easily, without any irony or bitterness, find a response for themselves to the bitter and ironical words: Gde, ukazhite nam, otechestva ottsy, Kotorykh my dolzhny priniat’ za obraztsy? [Where are, show us, those fathers of the fatherland, whom we should follow as the examples?] Where? Here they are, right in front of you. It is not for nothing that the sources of the silver age feed from the outfall of the gold en age [here the critics metaphors get somewhat out of hand]. This is, let me repeat, not the fault, but the misfortune of the epigones. […] This is the grave tragedy of the “silver-age” youth, and they are fortunate if they recognize it. […] Here is Vsev. Ivanov. A fine writer.[…]the trouble is that Vsev. Ivanov is a direct continuation of the old model, of M.Gorkii. The themes are new, the life forms [byt] are new, but the form is old. This, too, is the lot of the silver age: to put new wine into old bottles. Here is Èrenburg. A fine writer. Sorry: after the appearance of his Julio Jurenito one had to say about the author “a writer”; but now, after the appearance of additional tens, or is it already hundreds of titles, one might have to say about him: “a scribbler.”[…] What writer can publish several scores (or hundreds?) of novels, short stories, and tales every year or two? There is a simple possibility: every new work is written in a new manner, but following some ready model. In this respect, Èrenburg is quite the opposite of all the silver celebrities, yet his adaptability is but another typical feature of the epoch of epigones. Andrei Belyi’s rhythmical prose: please, here is The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov; a russified Dickens prepared under the guise of a thriller: here is Jeanne Ney. A cinematographic novel: The Death of Europe. And even Julio Jurenito is Anatole France smartly adapted for the

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Russian reading public.[…] This is not a new phenomenon. Let us take Russian painting, in which such “headwaters of the silver age” showed up a decade earlier. Do you like the paintings by B. Grigor’ev or Iu. Annenkov? Then you must love the novels of Èrenburg, too. […] […] Unless a new rise of the creative wave is forthcoming, soon there will come the copper age of literature. (Ivanov-Razumnik 1925:160–167) Up to this point, Ivanov-Razumnik discussed literature in general, and prose in particular, while only tracing the causes of the current “decline” to the pernicious influence of such poets as Briusov and Gumilev. It is when he addresses the contemporary poetry that the reasons why Struve and any other historian of the so-called “silver age” refrained from quoting him become obvious. It was easy to make fun of Èrenburg. The same kind of attitude toward Akhmatova and Mandel’shtam could, and did, backfire. It should be noted that in the beginning of his discussion of the modern currents in Russian poetry he uses the expression Sturm und Drang, which is missing from the first version of his article (1993:48– 50), the term used in the same connection by Mandel’shtam in his essay “Buria i natisk” [“Storm and Stress”], first published in February 1923 (Mandel’shtam 1990:282–291, 447). In many respects, Ivanov-Razumnik argues with the critical opinions of Mandel’shtam, without ever referring to his articles directly. It will be recalled that in his appreciation of Aleksandr Blok (first published in August 1922) Mandel’shtam wrote of Ivanov-Razumnik in the context of an all-out attack against unscholarly, impressionistic criticism:

The marsh vapors of Russian criticism, the heavy poisonous mist of Ivanov-Razumnik, Aikhenval’d, Zorgenfrei, and others, which thickened last year, have not yet dispersed.

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The lyric about lyric continues. The worst kind of lyric interpretation. Conjectures. Arbitrary premises. Metaphysical surmises. Everything is shaky, unfounded, ad-libbed. One cannot envy the reader who might wish to obtain some knowledge about Blok from the literature of 1921–22. The works, and “works” is precisely the right word, of Èikhenbaum and Zhirmunskii drown in the marshy vapors of the lyrical criticism. (Mandel’shtam 1990:187–188) Ivanov-Razumnik’s aversion, no doubt, predated this episode by at least nine years (he commissioned an anti-acmeist piece for his Zavety as early as 1913). However, the polemic between Mandel’shtam and Ivanov-Razumnik should some day be studied in greater detail. Here only the passages relevant to the concept of the silver age will be quoted, without any special reference to the polemic with Mandel’shtam. It is quite evident that IvanovRazumnik identifies the beginning of the “silver age” with the rise of acmeism:

The flowering of the Russian poetry which fed from its old roots but found new sap in the ground lasted for a quarter of a century. That flowering was not only technical. Each of the greater poets, each of the quantitatively small groups of that epoch (1890–1915) had something to say [IvanovRazumnik’s emphasis]; new forms contained also new words. […] Briusov had what to say in Tertia Vigilia and in Urbi et Orbi, during the first decade of his literary work, while during the remaining twenty years he continued to write verse as a good master who had painstakingly learned his craft. It was then that he became in Russian poetry the first “experienced coach,” the destiny which befell Russian prose ten or fifteen years later.

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There appeared also the first disciples, the first epigones who became the link between the golden age of Russian poetry, then coming to its close, and the approaching silver age. The first epigone, originating directly from Briusov, was Gumilev, who, in his turn, became the “experienced coach” for the epigones of the second rank, such as O.Mandel’shtam and others; this process continues further and further, and eventually will reach the differentials of the n-th rank. This is a characteristic process: I have already said that the first appearance of “experienced coaches” is symptomatic of the beginning of the onset of the silver age. The silver age creates its own ideologies, its own appliqué theories of plated metals [compare “silver-plated age” in Adamovich 1967: 87]. To replace symbolism there came acmeism, a wretched offspring of undigested theories [ubogoe detishche plokho perevaren nykh teorii, a characteristically mixed metaphor, confusing two functions of the lower body]; it was followed by imaginism, expressionism, dadaism, and so forth, and so forth, tumbling down from one step to another. Yet another “experienced coach,” himself a poet of distinction, Viach. Ivanov, creates his disciples, the epigones of symbolism; a theoretical bastard of symbolism is “emblematism”; in poetry there are entire flocks of the epigones of symbolism, all of them very gifted poets. Entire flocks follow in the footsteps of Blok, who has never been a “coach,” though; the Alexandrian surfeit offers the mincing poetry of Kuzmin [presyshchennoe aleksandriistvo daet zhemannuiu poeziiu Kuzmina]. Thus, little by little, the golden age passes into the silver age. On their border the last genuine poets appear, sometimes not of a sweeping force, but certainly of real talent. Akhmatova proceeds from the coupling of Blok and Kuzmin; Maiakovskii breaks the path for a general recognition of the tamed and domesticated futurism; the deep gift of Kliuev, a genuine and prominent poet of the golden age, develops during the years of the war and revolution; finally, there comes, not merely “the last poet of the village,” as he calls himself, but the last sizeable

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poet of this golden epoch, in general,—Esenin. After his arrival ten years have already passed, but nobody came to replace him. There appeared, however, six hundred (or is it sixteen hundred?) registered poets in Moscow alone… […] Thirty years ago many of them would have entered as a chapter in the history of Russian poetry. Is it their fault that they came too late? This is the lot of all the poets of the silver age. […] Here is Pasternak. A fine poet. My Sister Life is a keen and subtle book of verse, constructed not without certain technical innovations. Had it appeared during the early years of the decadent nineties, it would have firmly entered the history of Russian poetry. Because this book, because Pasternak himself, are entirely part and parcel of the decadence, its keenness, its form, and its ideology. […] Let us console ourselves: tarde venientibus—… argentum! […] What can one do that even a genuine poet, if he comes too late, cannot overcome the fact of the timing: “subiit argentea proles”… And the more those late-comers lean over backwards, the less they are in tune with the present day of history. […]‘the starry abyss’ no longer sounds in the poetry of the silver age. What is in these days the true “left front,” in which one senses life and forward movement? It is the return to the old simplicity, the return to oneself, not perverted, not mechanized, not over-sophisticated. As soon as one returns there, one finds oneself ahead of the rest. This is why the enormous long poem by Vl. Gippius (Lik chelovecheskii —“The Human Visage”), and the thin brochure of verse by Kazin (Rabochii mai—“The Labor May”), and the thin manuscript of verse by Elena Dan’ko (“Prostye muki,” “Plain Torments”)17 are “weightier than many volumes” [“tomov premnogikh tiazhelei,” Fet’s inscription “On the Little Book of Tiutchev’s Poems”]. Their considerable technical skill and ultimate degree of craftsmanship has not blinded these poets to the “abyss of the stars.” This abyss is the soul of everyone; but in the silver age, as it proceeds

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farther along its path, it becomes more difficult for the poets to find themselves, to be able at the same time stilum vertere et deum congnoscere. Finally, there is one more way forward, pending the arrival of a new culture which will open new ways. This way is, as yet, the path of the tongue-tied genius, it is not open for many. Instead of showing it, one can simply utter the name: Khlebnikov.[…] His amazing poem “Zangezi,” speaking in tongues, is a rock rising above the shallow poetic streams of the last decade. It overcomes the cheap “trans-sense” [preodolenie deshevoi “zaumi”], and truly deepens it; it can stand side by side with Andrei Belyi’s Glossolalia, his “poem about sound.” Of course, not Maiakovskii and Aseev, but Guro and Khlebnikov are the true “futurists,” hopelessly perishing among the subtle, sophisticated and talented epigonism of the silver age poetry. To sum up: both in prose and in poetry we have come to the time of the epigones. The kingdom of Alexander of Macedon has fallen apart: his Diadochs would create new and refined values, proceeding from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides toward alexandrianism. However, correctly understood, alexandrianism is already a new rise of the wave of the new culture. With our automobiles and aeroplanes we might cover this path not in hundreds of years, but in decades or a few years. But the fact of the current “fall of the wave” remains a fact. (Ivanov-Razumnik 1925:170–174) In the penultimate section of his essay, entitled “Something on the Method” and directed against the formal school, “Udushiev” compares the literary scholarship of Andrei Belyi, as a representative of the golden age of modernism, with the “dead letter” of the formalist epigones in the age of silver:

In his book Symbolism, Andrei Belyi placed the cornerstone of the “formal method” in the study of Russian versification. His subsequent works in this field (“Aaron’s

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Rod”; “On the Rhythmic Gesture”) represent already an intrinsic overcoming of formalism; it could not have been otherwise during the golden age of Russian literature. The dead aspects of formalism were to develop in the epoch of the epigones of the artistic prose and poetry. Like priest, like people. (Ivanov-Razumnik 1925:175) The conclusion of Ivanov-Razumnik’s article contained an optimistic denunciation of contemporary Russian “Spenglerizers” and an expression of characteristically populist faith in the eventual birth of a truly new art from the seeds planted by the social revolutions, which would replace the art of the degenerate decadence, characteristic of the “silver age”:

Perhaps I am right; perhaps I am wrong; perhaps someone will prove to me that it is precisely now that we are entering the golden age of Russian poetry and prose. Possibly. […] […] But if you believe me […] and ask: if so, what next, this should mean that we are indeed entering the headwaters of the silver age. […] And if this is so, what is in store for us? Is Russian literature finished? Do we face a hopeless night, the silver kingdom, then the copper kingdom, then the iron kingdom [here Razumnik substitutes the images of a Russian folktale for the classical ages]? Nonsense! […] The revolution burned to the ashes the weak souls […] The new seeds planted by it will germinate perhaps after many years and even decades. […] One should not despair: Oh, the silver age, with the brass and iron yet to come! The old civilization was indeed destroyed in Russia so that a new culture might be born, no matter what our little Spenglers spenglerize. […] Precisely because I believe in our future, I do not accept in the present all that which is merely a weakening and a decline of the past. The contemporary Russian literature is not the new literature, which is yet to come, but merely a degeneration of the old literature. Not a degeneration, in actual fact, but

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just a decline, with a simultaneous broad development of the old patterns. (Ivanov-Razumnik 1925:181) A.V.Lavrov (1981:381–382; 1992:388), the only scholar who commented on Ivanov-Razumnik’s dismissal of the Russian postsymbolism, was very cautious as he juxtaposed Razumnik’s value judgments with the currenly prevailing views on the “silver age” of Russian poetry:

Today there is widespread opinion on the flowering of Russian poetry early in the twentieth century as on its “silver age,” to parallel the “golden age” of Pushkin. In “Vzgliad i Nechto,” Razumnik also used these definitions, but in a different meaning: the symbolist epoch was for him the true “golden age,” while the “silver age” was the literary reality of the early 1920s. […] In this sense, he diagnosed the general lowering of the level set in 1890–1915 and proclaimed his own attitude: “The true literary contemporaneity for us is not Pasternak, but Blok; not Èerenburg, but Belyi. With these companions I fear not for our future; with them, I know for sure: I shall set out today and arrive tomorrow” [Ivanov-Razumnik 1925:181]. (Lavrov 1981:381–382) *** The designation “silver age” has now been traced to its main sources in the Russian critical thought of the 1920s, to which Otsup, Veidle, Makovskii, and other partisans of this term never referred. In their chronology, Piast (1929) and Ivanov-Razumnik (1925) have a great deal in common, although for Piast argentea proles is a dignified self-appraisal of the poetic generation born after 1885, whereas Razumnik, in his neo-populist pamphlet against the alleged predominance of vacuous form, takes into account the year of the literary debut, rather than birth, and begins his “silver age” around 1915. The main difference between Piast and Ivanov-Razumnik, on the one hand, and their émigré epigones, on the other, is that for the former two there have been two ages of Russian modernism, the golden age and the silver age, whereas for Veidle, Makovskii, and, to a lesser degree, for Otsup (who is less historically and more

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typologically oriented than the rest) the appellation “silver age” is expanded and generalized to cover the entire era of modernism in Russia before the revolution, so that Veidle actually had to speak (1973: 113, 126) about the “golden season” or “golden time” [zolotaia pora] of the “silver age.” The connotations and even the principal meaning of the term have changed radically since Ivanov-Razumnik and Piast, although Otsup’s interpretation of the “silver age,” while definitely apologetic and even laudatory, is quite close to Ivanov-Razumnik’s. For both, the phenomenon of the silver age is immanent to the history of art. For Otsup, the art of the silver age is heroically lonely, not helped by the “elemental force” (here Otsup is inspired by Blok’s traditional pun: “stikhi, ne sviazannye so stikhiiami, ostanutsia stikhami”—“verse not linked with the elements will remain verse” [Blok’s speech at the Union of Poets, August 4, 1920, in Blok 1962 6:436]). For Ivanov-Razumnik the silver age is, at all times and everywhere, the age of secondary, epigone, excessively subtle, overwritten, but spiritually empty literature. One wonders whether Otsup’s first essay on the silver age was not, in part, an indirect defense of Gumilev and post-symbolism against the ideological and critical verdict of the old “Scythian.” It is symptomatic that the later critics and the contemporary sophisticated readers who habitually use the expression “silver age” are not at all sensitive to its negative connotations. On the contrary, the designation now conveys mainly the notion of pro found, somewhat catacombal spirituality and the ultimate degree of aesthetic accomplishment, with just the proper proportion of such artistically desirable tragic faults as creative hubris, moral aloofness or, on the contrary, chiliastic impatience, obscurity of expression, on the one hand, and rhetorical and intellectual irresponsibility, on the other. The importance of Ivanov-Razumnik and Piast as the pioneers of the metal-age scheme of axiological metaphors for the stages of Russian literary history in the twentieth century is beyond doubt. Yet this survey of the history of the appellation “silver age” in reference to Russian modernism would not be complete without the name of the mysterious stranger who seems to be the only forerunner of Ivanov-Razumnik and Piast. Gleb Marev, one of the enigmatic figures in the history of Russian futurism,18 published in 1913 a manifesto of the Final Age of Poesie in the brochure entitled Vsedur’. Rukavitsa sovre men’iu

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[“Allfoolishness. A Gauntlet to Contemporaneity”]. V. Markov (1967:165–166) allows that the manifesto may have been a parody, but “cannot be completely sure of it.” Actually, the manifesto is very interesting from several points of view, including the history of poetry expressed in metallurgical metaphors. This is, in part, what Marev wrote (the translation is, needless to say, approximate) on the ages of poetry:

Nedavnii parad “Chèmpionata poètov” uvershil istoriiu Poezi predel’nym dostizheniem. Pushkin—zoloto; simvolizm—serebro; sovremen’e—tusklomednaia Vsedur’, puglivaia vyiavlen’em Dukha Zhizni (perpetuum mobile) veka Zheleza. Chelovechestvo u mertvoi tochki: naivno opoznanoe samotsel’iu, ono ne bolee, kak tok Razuma k soversheneishim formam. […] Fakel “izlomstva” i prozrenie “iskustva” Zheleznogo Veka po pravu prinadlezhit “Chèmpionatu”, predteche priemami poèticheskogo boksa katastrofy Vseduri. […] Genii Poezi pretvoritsia v zhurchanii materii, vsesuti i otkrovenii Konechnogo Veka; otsiuda vyrazhenie ee neobiazatel’no. […] […] poka “Chèmpionat Poètov” ne vostrubit perpetuum mobile i ne proizneset svoe ZHELEZNOE SLOVO. Noiabr’, 913 [The recent parade of the “Championate of Poets” has summitted the history of Poesie with an ultimate achievement. Pushkin— gold; symbolism—silver; contemporaneity—tarnished-bronze Allfoolishness, fearful of the manifestation of the Spirit of Life (perpetuum mobile) of the age of Iron. Mankind is at the dead end: naively identified as an end in itself, it is nothing more than the current of Reason in the direction of increasingly perfect forms. […]

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The torch of “affectedness” and the insight into the “art” of the Iron Age rightfully belongs to the “Championate,” the precursor, by means of its poetic boxing tactics, of the catastrophe of Allfoolishness. […] The Genius of Poesie will be transubstantiated in the murmur of matter, allessence, and the revelation of the Final Age; hence its expression is non-obligatory. […] […] until the “Championate of Poets” should sound the trumpet of perpetuum mobile and utter its IRON WORD. November, 913].

7 The Adamantine Age, “The Golden Age in One’s Pocket,” and The Platinum Age

The circle is now closed, and the earliest identification of a modern period in the history of Russian poetry with silver has been traced back to 1913, that is, the very year that provided the title and the setting for the chapter of Akhmatova’s Poèma bez geroia, in which she evoked so memorably and so ambivalently the image of the past “silver age”:

I serebrianyi mesiats iarko Nad serebrianym vekom styl. [And the silver moon was brightly Freezing over the silver age.] Whether that age ended in 1917; or in 1921, with the death of Gumilev and Blok; or in 1930, with the suicide of Maiakovskii; in 1934, with the death of Andrei Belyi; in 1937–39, with the death of Kliuev, Mandel’shtam, and Khodasevich; or in 1940, after the fall of Paris, when Akhmatova began Poèma bez geroia, and Nabokov, having escaped from France, was about to compose Parizhskaia poèma, the émigré counterpart of Akhmatova’s summing up of the age, the designation “silver age” was an outside sobriquet, given either as a wistful and ironically self-deprecato ry reminiscence by the surviving poets, or as an, at best, apologetic, and at worst, scornful, evaluation by the critics, or as a largely meaningless classificatory term, used by the latter-day scholars of literature and historians of art for the lack of a better appellation. The great poets of that great age of Russian poetry, whatever its ultimate name in history might eventually be, had their own idea of

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the ages of man, ages of poetry, their own age, and the metamorphoses of metals and of time. Since the golden age of Russian poetry in the nineteenth century, there have existed two traditions of defining the age of poetry, or the poet as such, in relation to the age of mankind. One stemmed essentially from Schiller’s “Resignation” (Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren) and “Der Antritt des neuen Jahrhunderts”:

In des Herzens heilig stille Räume Musst du fliehen aus des Lebens Drang, Freiheit ist nur in dem Reich der Träume, Und das Schöne blüht nur im Gesang. Baratynskii followed this tradition in “Poslednii poet,” in which the last poet commits suicide during the iron age, given to “industrial cares,” which “silver-plates and gilds/Its lifeless skeleton”:

Serebrit i pozlashchaet Svoi bezzhiznennyi skelet…19 Blok inherited the spirit of scornful resignation from both Baratynskii and Lermontov, especially in the historical introduction to Chapter I of Vozmezdie [“Retribution”] with its hateful image of the iron nineteenth century and the still more “terrible and homeless” twentieth century, the ages of “half-sized gifts” (tak spravedlivei—popolam), which will eventually be avenged by the new breed of artist-men, coal that has turned into diamond:

Sozrela novaia poroda,— Ugl’ prevrashchaetsia v almaz. This faith in the ultimate transmutation of base substance into precious gem is part of the other tradition which inspired Blok, the “alchemical” tradition of Novalis, Shelley (see note 5), Pushkin, and, eventually, Vladimir Solov’ev. The term “golden age” in reference to what Blok described in his Pushkin speech of 1921 (1962 6:166) as “the only cultured epoch in Russia during the past century” was used for the first time, prophetically, by Pushkin himself in a poem dedicated to Del’vig and describing the present he was sending to his friend, a bronze sphinx:

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Kto na snegakh vozrastil Feokritovy nezhnye rozy? V veke zheleznom, skazhi, kto zolotoi ugadal? Kto slavianin molodoi, grek dukhom, a rodom germanets? Vot zagadka moia: khitiyi Èdip, razreshi! [Who has grown on the snow Theocritus’s tender roses? In the iron age, tell, who has divined the golden age? Who is a young Slav, a Greek in spirit, and a German by birth? This is my riddle: cunning Oedipus, solve it!] Blok would return to these roses on the snow in several of his poems:

I rozy, osennie rozy Mne sniatsia na kazhdom shagu Skvoz’ mglu, i ogni, i morozy, Na belom, na legkom snegu! [The roses, the autumnal roses Are my dream at every step Through the murk, and the fires, and frost, On the white and weightless snow!] (“Zakliatie ognem i mrakom”— “A Spell by Fire and Darkness”) Starinnye rozy Nesu, odinok, V snega i morozy, I put’ moi dalek. [The ancient roses I carry, alone, To the snows and frost, And I have a long way to go.] For Viacheslav Ivanov, Pushkin’s bronze sphinx poem was not only a proclamation of the golden age of poetry that had been created in

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the iron age of Alexander and Nicholas by Pushkin and his pleiad, but also a chiliastic insight into the mystery of the future golden age of Russia and mankind:

Budet vremen polnota i Saturnovo tsarstvo nastanet, Brat’ia, kogda rastsvetut alye rozy v snegakh. (Cor Ardens) [There will be the fulness of times and the reign of Saturn will come, Brethren, when the scarlet roses blossom out in the snows.] The reign of Saturn is, of course, the golden age; it will return when, according to the teaching of Vladimir Solov’ev, poetry attains its ultimate aim of transubstantiating reality. As has been briefly mentioned before, Viacheslav Ivanov described in his earlier “saecular song,” “Carmen Saeculare,” the future age of man’s transition, in Nietzschean symbols, from the beast of burden to lion and, finally, to child. Here the age is a synthesis of the steel of social violence and the diamond as a magic crystal of poetic insight and a talismanic gem giving human spirit the ultimate power of resistance. The first and the third poems of “Carmen Saeculare” are quoted below in full. It is easy to recognize in the title of the third poem, “Adamantina proles,” an allusion to Ovid’s second age, argentea proles “the silver race”: I. SUBTILE VIRUS CAELITUM

V nochi, kogda so zvezd Providtsy i Poèty V kristally vechnykh form nizvodiat tonkii iad, Ikh tainodeian’ia soobshchnitsy—Planety Nad mirom spiashchim vorozhat. I v drozhi tel slepykh, i v oshchupi ob”iatii Zhivotvoriashchikh sil bezhit astral’nyi tok, I novaia Dusha iz khaosa zachatii Puskaet v staryi mir rostok. I novaia Dusha, priboem pokolenii

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Podmyv obryvy tain, po znaku zvezdnykh Chisl, V nasled’e tvorcheskom neponiatykh velenii Rodnoi razgadyvaet smysl. I v kel’iakh bashennykh otstoiannye iady Preobrazhaiut plot’, i pretvoriaiut krov’. Kto, seia, provodil, dozhdlivye Pleiady,— Ikh, serp tocha, ne vstretit vnov’. III. ADAMANTINA PROLES

Detei, za mater’iu ne lepetavshikh “Zhalost’”, I dev s sekirami, v kristalle, zvezdnyi iad Mne pokazal, volkhvu. Smoi zharkoi vlagoi, Alost’, S riz belykh gnoi polu-poshchad! Kol’ on—ne vyia ves’, dukh svergnet krest Atlanta; Iz gliny sleplennyi s zhelezom, Chelovek, Kol’ on ne ves’—skudel’, skuet iz Adamanta Iz stali i almaza—Vek. Chu, koni v broniakh rzhut, i lavr shumit, gusteia; Zabudut rodshie synov,—smesitsia rod; I esli zhertvu igr nastignet Adrasteia,— Tesnei splotitsia khorovod. I dushi plennye nesti vzlikuiut maski; I, tiazhkie, topcha vesennii rai tsvetov, Kuretov-iunoshei vskruzhatsia s gikom pliaski Pod adamantnyi stuk shchitov. I. SUBTILE VIRUS CAELITUM [SUBTILE CELESTIAL POISON]

At night, when from the stars Prophets and Poets bring down subtile poison into the crystals of eternal forms,

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the accomplices of their occult action, the Planets witch over the sleeping world. And in the trembling of the blind bodies, and in the groping of their embraces runs an astral current of life-giving forces, and a new Soul, from the chaos of conceptions, sends forth into the old world a sprout. And the new Soul, having undermined the cliffs of Mysteries with the waves of generations, at the signal of the stellar Numbers, in the creative legacy of the commands not understood unravels the kindred meaning. And the poisons precipitated in the tower cells transfigure flesh and transmute blood. Whoever, sowing, ushered out the rainy Pleiades,— whetting his sickle he will not meet them again. III. ADAMANTINA PROLES [THE ADAMANTINE BREED]

Children who did not babble “Pity” after their mother, and maidens with pole-axes were revealed in a magic crystal to me, the soothsayer, by the stellar poison. With your torrid fluid, Scarlet, wash off the white vestments the pus of half-mercies! Unless it is all neck, the spirit will cast off the cross of Atlas; molded out of clay and iron, Man, unless he is all earthenware, will forge of Adamant— of steel and diamond—an Age.

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Hark! armor-clad steeds neigh, and the laurel rustles, growing denser; child-bearers will forget their sons: bloodlines will mingle; and should Adrastea overtake a victim of the games, the choral ring would rally more closely. And the captive souls will rejoice in bearing their masks; and, heavy, trampling down the vernal paradise of flowers, the dances of the youthful Curetes will go round with whooping to the adamantine beat of their shields. It was in “Adamantina proles” that Ivanov created a poetic locution which became memorable both because it exploits the traditional “metallurgical” image of the ages and because it is held together by the sound reiteration in the Russian words vykovat’ vek—“to forge an age.” In Ivanov’s poem, the paronomastic potential of the phrase is supported, moreover, by the reiteration of the initial sounds of skudel’—“earthenware, clay” and skuet—“will forge.” The components of Ivanov’s symbolism in this poem are discussed in some detail in an earlier study (Ronen 1983:245–247, 349–350), in connection with Osip Mandel’shtam’s “saecular poems” of 1924, “1 January 1924” and “The Variant.” Mandel’shtam, at the close of the age of the artistic and social experiment, admitted that a new age had not been forged and one must remain faithful to the old one. His pun was a further development of Ivanov’s “Kol’ on ne ves’ skudel’, skuet iz Adamanta—/Iz stali i almaza—Vek”:

Nu chto zhe, esli nam ne vykovat’ drugogo. Davaite s vekom vekovat’. [Well, then, if we cannot forge another, Let us spend the remainder of our age with this one.] Between Ivanov and Mandel’shtam there was a number of radical poets who used the paronomastic figure quite routinely. A better example among these was the proletarian poet Dmitrii Semenovskii, whose collection of poetry Mir khorosh was published in 1927 with a

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foreword by Aleksandr Blok (1962 6: 341–344) and included an earlier (1913) poem entitled “Kuznets”—“The Smith”:

[…] Metallov moguchim vladykoi Stoi v zloi, miatushcheisia mgle, I vek zolotoi na zemle Iz veka zheleznogo vykui! [As a powerful lord of the metals, Stand upright in the evil, stormy dark, And forge the golden age on earth Out of the iron age!] Along with the idea of the new age, of adamant or gold, to be forged in the future reunion of the poet and the people, as expected by Viacheslav Ivanov, there persisted, first and foremost in the poetic thought of Blok and Annenskii, the idea stemming from Novalis, from Schiller’s “Die vier Weltalter,” from Shelley, and from some of the later romantics that the golden age is eternally present in poetry. Blok, in general, never identified the traditional golden age with justice, plenty, and other blessings of such nature, but only with creativity, and was not afraid to tell that straight in the face of the Red Army men on 15 March 1919, as an introduction to Much Ado About Nothing, produced in Petrograd for “the defenders of the revolution”:

To vremia, kogda zhil velichaishii v mire angliiskii pisatel’ Shekspir, nazyvaetsia Zolotym Vekom ili vekom Vozrozhdeniia. Èto ne znachit, chto liudiam zhilos’ legko i privol’no, chto ne bylo ni bednykh, ni bogatykh. Èto znachit tol’ko, chto liudi v to vremia ne rastratili zria svoikh velikikh sil, a nakopili ikh stol’ko, chto v odno i to zhe vremia u raznykh narodov rodilis’ velikie liudi, koto rye do sikh por daiut svet vsemu chelovechestvu. [The time when the greatest in the world English writer Shakespeare lived is called the Golden Age, or the age of the Renaissance. This does not mean that at the time people had a free and easy life. It means only that people at

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that time did not waste their great strength for nothing, but stored up so much that during the same time various nations gave birth to the great men who still bring the light to the entire mankind.] (Blok 1962 6:378) In two essays, “Bezvremen’e” [“The Desolate Years”20] (1906) and “Pamiati Vrubelia” [“In Memoriam Vrubel’”] (1910), Blok used emphatically the curious expression of Dostoevskii (1981 22:12): zolotoi vek v karmane—“the golden age in ones pocket.” In the first essay, Dostoevskii’s meaning, his reference to the Christmas ball at the artists’ club ub (Diary of the Writer, January 1875, Chapter One, IV. “The Golden Age in Ones Pocket”), was substantially preserved. Blok wrote about the Russian Christmas as a recollection of the golden age, but expressed concern about Dostoevskii’s “eternal hurry, his hysterical fits [nadryvy], his “Golden Age in ones pocket”:

We no longer desire this Golden Age: it resembles too much a strong dose of medicine with which a doctor wants to prevent a terrible outcome of the disease. But even the medicinal herbs of the Golden Age did not help: the great gray beast was already snaking in through the door, sniffing, looking around, and, before the doctor knew it, it began to ingratiate itself to the members of the family, make friends with them, and infect them. […] an enormous gray female spider of boredom grew out of the kind and pure life of the Russian family. (Blok 1962 5: 66–67) There is also another reference to the golden age in The Diary of the Writer, in Chapter Four (I) of July/August 1876. Here Dostoevskii ironically predicts “the golden age which is all in the future, while now we have the industry,” but perceives a “likeness of the golden age” [podobie zolotogo veka] in the roses brought in for the clients of a German spa. “And if you are a person with some imagination, it should be enough for you”:

[…] kak obrabotany èti rozy, kak podobrany, kak obryzgany vodoi! […] Zolotoi vek eshche ves’ vperedi, a

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teper’ promyshlennost’; no vam-to kakoe delo i ne vse li ravno: […] vykhodit deistvitel’no tochno rai. […] poluchaetsia podobie zolotogo veka—i esli vy chelovek s voobrazheniem, to vam i dovol’no. (Dostoevskii 1981 23:87) The association between the golden age and roses is in the tradition established by Pushkin’s sphinx poem, but the illusion of the golden age in a German spa is Dostoevskii’s parody of Schiller and the romantics. Blok, however, developed the idea of “the golden age in ones pocket” as the image of the eternal golden age, to be found in the base reality by the artist, under the influence, not of Dostoevskii’s passage on the German roses, but of the posthumous volume of poems by Innokentii Annenskii, Kiparisovyi larets. On 13 April 1910, Blok wrote to Annenskii’s son, Valentin Krivich, thanking him for The Cypress Chest. It can be safely assumed that the changes he introduced in his essay “Pamiati Vrubelia” after he presented its first version as a speech on April 3 (compare the text of that speech in Blok 1962 5:689–691) were made after reading one of Annenskii’s poems. Here is one of the passages which Blok added to the text of his original speech:

Ob oshibkakh i o vremeni pust’ plachet publika, no ne dolzhny plakat’ my, khudozhniki, u kotorykh “zolotoi vek v karmane,” komu dorozhe to, chto Venera naidena v mramore, nezheli to, chto sushchestvuet ee statuia [Blok’s emphasis]. (Blok 1962 5:422) Let the public weep about the errors and about time, but we should not weep, we, the artists, who carry “the golden age in our pocket,” for whom it is more important that Venus has been found in the marble than that its statue exists. The poem by Annenskii, dated June 1909, is about the metamorphosis of what Shelley had called in A Defence of Poetry (see note 5) “the poisonous waters that flow from death through life” into “potable gold,” the change of the filthy rain water into the golden

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shower of Danae and the unceasing “first age of Ovid,” discovered by the poet on the pavement and transformed into the poem itself. The key word in Blok’s essay that establishes the kinship with the idea of Annenskii is naidena—“found.” The golden age is not “forged,” but “discovered” or “divined” in the iron reality:

DOZHDIK

Vot sizyi chekhol i rasporot,— Ne vse zh emu prazdno viset’, I s liazgom asfal’tovyi gorod Khlestnula kholodnaia set’… Khlestnula i stala motat’sia… Sama serebristo-svetla, Kak maslo v ruke sviatotatsa, Glazety vokrug zalila. I v mig, chto s lazur’iu liubilos’, Stydlivykh molchanii polno,— Vse temnoiu penoi zabilos’ I naglo stuchitsia v okno. V pesochnoi zaroetsia iame, Po trubam bezhit i burlit, To zhalkimi biyznet slezami, To radugoi parnoi gorit. ......................................................... O net! Bez tvoikh prevrashchenii, V odno chto-nibud’ zastyvai! Ne khochesh’ li dremoi osennei Okutat’ koketlivo mai? Il’sdelat’sia Mnoiu, byt’ mozhet,

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Odnim iz upriamykh kalek, I vsekh uveriat’, chto ne dozhit I pervyi Ovidiev vek: Iz serdtsa za Imatru let Nichto, mol, u nas ne ukhodit— I v mokrom asfal’te poet Zakhochet, tak schast’e nakhodit. RAIN

Now the dove-gray slip cover is ripped open: It could not hang idly forever, And, with a clang, the cold net Has lashed the asphalt city… It lashed and began to dangle… Itself silveiy-bright, Like holy oil in a church-thief’s hand, It spilled on the brocades around. And the erstwhile modest and reticent Lover of the azure In an instant whipped up dark foam And is now insolently knocking at the window. It buries itself in a sand pit, Runs and seethes in the drainpipes; Now it bursts in piteous tears, Now it burns as a steamy rainbow. ......................................................... Oh, no! None of your metamorphoses! Congeal into some single shape! Won’t you like with autumnal somnolence

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To wrap demurely the month of May? Or turn into Me, perhaps, One of the obstinate cripples, And keep reassuring everybody That even the First Age of Ovid is not over yet: You would claim that from our heart Nothing goes away beyond the Imatra of the years And, in the wet asphalt, the poet, If he wants, finds happiness. Otsup did not quote this poem of Annenskii as he discussed the poet as the most eloquent representative of the “silver-age heroism”(1933: 175). Indeed, the “silvery brightness” of the rainnet is but a stage in its metamorphosis. No poet spoke of the silver age before the thirties. The self-image of the age was a unity of the extremes, not argentea mediocritas. For Mandel’shtam, the past age was, as in “The Concert at the Station,” the iron age of railroads and the golden age of music (Ronen 1983:XVII-XX; B. Gasparov 1992: 10, 12), and the modern age, that of “Storm and Stress.” It is for this reason that some of the most prominent historians of literature and theoreticians of verbal art found the term “silver age” so unsatisfactory. Gleb Struve’s opinion on this matter was discussed in the beginning of this study. To conclude it, the opinion of his permanent opponent, the greatest Russian philologist of the past age, should be quoted, for, in this instance, the two agree. In his famous essay “Marginal Notes on the Prose of the Poet Pasternak” (1935), Roman Jakobson followed Osip Mandel’shtam in defining the modern age of poetry in Russia “the epoch of Storm and Stress” [èpokha “Sturm und Drang”] (Jakobson 1987:326). In his Harvard lectures on modern Russian poetry, on 17 February 1967, he totally dismissed “Sergei Makovskii’s misleading term “the silver age,” which vulgarly distorts the character of that age, which was the great age of verbal experiment” (quoted from this writers student notebook). Further, after tracing the succession of the literary generations in Russia in the manner similar to that of Piast (1929:6–7), Jakobson said that he would follow, “being a traditionalist in such matters,” Mirsky’s designation “the second

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golden age of Russian poetry,” although he found that expression inadequate, too.21 At that point, he quoted quite enthusiastically “the ingenious metallurgical metaphor” coined by Oleg Maslennikov, of Berkeley, California, to designate Russian symbolism and postsymbolism: the Platinum Age. Jakobson was hampered, it seems now, not so much by being a “traditionalist” but by the fact that Oleg Maslennikov (1907–1972) had not yet used that designation in print. In his book The Frenzied Poets, he still spoke of a “new ‘golden age’ in Russian literature” (Maslennikov 1952:8). As far as one can judge, the term “Platinum Age of Russian poetry” appeared in print for the first time in the posthumously published Lyrics From the Russian: Symbolists and Others, in the translator’s foreword (Maslennikov 1972:iv). This is, indeed, an excellent appellation, and a true overcoming of the opposed points of view on the quality of the age. Platinum is not inferior to gold, it is of noble silvery tint, and it is a new metal, discovered as a result of the technological advances of the eighteenth century. No wonder that Roman Jakobson, for whom the age had been the age of the great experiment, the age of the avant-garde, approved of it. The term “silver age,” outside of the negative associations quite arbitrarily attributed to it by Ivanov-Razumnik, is questionable even in regard to the post-Augustan era. It implies certain debasement, imitation, weakness, pale stylization, verbosity (Adamovich 1967: 108), and is often identified aesthetically with the popularizers, with the second- and even third-rate artists, with Voloshin, Cherubina, and even Agnivtsev. Moreover, it rightfully belongs as an “axiological designation” to the second half of the nineteenth century, especially from the current critical point of view, which tends to revise the earlier adulation of the socalled “golden age of the novel” in Russia in favor of the age of Pushkin and Lermontov in prose, not only in poetry. In his monograph The West in Russia and China, Donald Treadgold, as he mentioned Gleb Struve’s repeated challenge to the phrase “Silver Age,” suggested that, “as in the case of a number of other dubious but common historical usages of the kind, it is probably too late to change this one” (1973:300 n. 23). The pious hope of the author of the present study is that, perhaps, more awareness of the history of this misnomer might help exorcise its pallid, deceptive, and meddlesome ghost.

Notes

1. On S.K.Makovskii, see the obituary by Iu. Terapiano (1987: 81–186); Sergei Diagilev i russkoe iskusstvo 2 (1982:411–412); Berberova (1983:633); Lavrov and Timenchik (1976); Piast (1929). 2. The same error is made in A.Tarasenkov’s bibliography Russkie poèty XX veka. 1900–1955. Moscow: “Sovetskii Pisatel’”. 1966: 100. 3. See, in this connection, the elegantly elliptic remarks by Miron Petrovskii (1992:14, 18) in his essay entitled “Vanity Fair, or, What Is Cabaret.” Compare Boris Kats’s earlier suggestion in: B.Kats, R. Timenchik (1989:243 n. 3). 4. An occasional mixed metaphor and metonymy superimposing a technological or political property of the age upon its presumed cultural quality sometimes led to conclusions unusual both from the rhetorical and the factual point of view. J.H.Billington (1966), for example, divided the early decades of the twentieth century in Russia into a “silver” and an “electric” age: The 1890s began the richly creative final period of imperial culture known variously as “the Russian Renaissance” and “the silver age.” There was a kind of renaissance quality to the variety and virtuosity of new accomplishment. If silver is less precious than gold, it nonetheless enjoys wider circulation. Never before had the high culture of art and theater, of politics and ideology, involved so many people. (Billington 1966:446)

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The revolution of 1917 occurred in the midst of a profound cultural upheaval which Bolshevism had not initiated and did not immediatedly curtail. Between the late 1890s and the “great change” (perelom) effected by Stalin during the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32), Russian culture continued to sputter and whir through what might be called its electric age. Like electricity—which spread through Russia during this period—new currents of culture brought new energy and illumination into everyday life. The leading revolutionary rival [Chernov] of Lenin and Trotsky later complained of the “electric charges of will power” that they imparted in 1917; and those leaders in turn sought to move from power to paradise by defining Communism as “Soviet power plus electrification.” Many assumed that the bringing of light and energy to the intellect was equally compatible with Soviet power. Just as amber, long thought to be merely decorative, had revealed the power of electricity to mankind, so the theater was “destined to play the part of amber in revealing to us new secrets of nature” [N.Evreinov]. Just as raw electricity often ran wildly through new metal construction in the rapidly growing cities of early-twentieth-century Russia, so these new artistic currents broke through the insulation of tradition to jolt and shock the growing number of those able to read and think. As with electricity, so in culture it was a case of old sources for. new power. Man had simply found new ways of unlocking the latent energy within the moving waters and combustible elements of tradition. Thus, the new, dynamic culture of this electric age [emphasis added] was, in many ways, more solidly rooted in Russian tradition than the culture of the preceding, aristocratic era. (Billington 1966:475)

Professor Billington’s witty analogy between the wide circulation of silver and electricity, on the one hand, and the supposed expansion of culture, on the other, is an interesting development of the pun coined by Luk’ian Timofeevich/ Timofei Luk’ianovich Lebedev, the usurer and interpreter of the Revelation of St. John in The Idiot: “[…] v nash vek

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porokov i zheleznykh dorog…to est’ nado by skazat’ v nash vek parokhodov i zheleznykh dorog, no ia govoriu: v nash vek porokov i zheleznykh dorog, potomu chto ia p’ian, no spravedliv! […] i ne pugaite menia vashim blagosostoianiem, vashimi bogatstvami, redkost’iu goloda i bystrotoi putei soobshcheniia! bogatstva bol’she, no sily men’she […]”([…] in our age of sin and railroads…that is, one ought to say in our age of steam and railroads, but I say: in our age of sin and railroads, because I am drunk but fair! […] and don’t you intimidate me with your welfare, your great fortunes, rareness of famine and speed of communications! there is more wealth, but less strength […]) (Dostoevskii 1957:430). 5. The relevant passage in A Defence of Poetry, which, in Bal’mont’s translation, exercised an enormous influence upon the poetic selfawareness in Russia in the beginning of the twentieth century, reads: Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters that flow from death through life [emphasis added]; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.

It is, apparently, the last phrase of this passage that has been the original source of the two principal concepts of early Russian formalism: ostrannenie—“defamiliarization” and obnazhenie priema— “laying bare the [formal] device.” 6. Yet is a close but not entirely adequate rendering of the conjunction a in this context. On the poetic and semantic value of Akhmatova’s conjunctions, especially contrastive ones, see B.Èikhenbaum’s 1922 study of her poetry (1969:93–98) and a recent essay by N. Vilenkin (1993:106–119), philologically naive but containing some interesting intuitions.

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7. See a tentative explication of this line in: Ronen 1985:122–123. 8. See G.P.Fedotov’s description of Chisla as the opposite of Apollon and a renunciation of acmeism by its wayward children in his essay “On Death, Culture and Numbers”: “O smerti, kul’ture i ‘Chislakh’,” 9. See: Gollerbakh 1930:167; Chukovskii 1979:265–267, 1991:92; Berberova 1983:231–407; Ianovskii 1983:255–260; Shvarts 1990: 361 (according to his recollection, Chukovskii deciphered the acronym OTsUP as Otdel tselesoobraznogo upotrebleniia paika — “Department for Expedient Utilization of [food] Rations”). Otsup is one of the prototypes of Galakhov, the unprincipled editor in Nabokov’s story “Lips to Lips,” and of the episodic name of a poet whose verse is “serious, at the expense of art”: Tsipovich in Chapter V of The Gift (Otsup+Zakovich). Iu. Terapiano (1987:172–175), in his appreciaton of Otsup (1971), could not help noticing that the service of the Beatrice-like feminine ideal, which Otsup undertook in his poetry, may have been too heavy for his gift: “Otsup […], konechno, iznemogal poroi pod bremenem vziatoi na sebia Idei—v ètom byl tsentr ego poèzii.”…On the kinder side, see the note on Otsup and a selection of his poems in: Znamia 12 (1990): 173–176. 10. L.I.Strakhovskii (1898–1963), who used to publish his verse under the pen name “Chatskii” (a curious coincidence, considering that Ivanov-Razumnik published his attack upon the “silver age” under the pen name “Ippolit Udush’ev,” likewise borrowed from Griboedov’s comedy), taught Russian in America during the later part of his life. He was the author of Craftsmen of the Word. Three Poets of Modern Russia: Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandel’shtam. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1949, remembered today only because Akhmatova (1989b: 3, 5–8; 1989c: 211–212) expressed her extreme indignation that “the oldest and the best” university of the United States could stoop to publish such a concoction. Strakhovskii’s level as a critic can be quite adequately illustrated by the following passage from his essay “Fet i Akhmatova,” Novyi zhur nal 49 (1957): 261–264: “… it is unthinkable that the acmeists, those “heirs” of symbolism, would not know Tiutchev and Fet. Yet, in their poetry it is impossible to trace the influence of either. It is for this reason that the similarity between Akhmatova’s poem “The Muse” out of her last book “Iva” [“The Willow”] (1940) and Fet’s poem “To the Muse” out of Vechernie ogni (“The Evening Lights”), 1888, is so

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striking. Of course, this is not a plagiarism, but an obvious response, a subconscious echo” and so on, and so forth. Vladimir Nabokov’s humorous and not unsympathetic evocation of “the late Dr. Leonid Strakhovskii” is very revealing: “I knew him, he did not really resemble my Pnin. We met at literary parties in Berlin half a century ago. He wrote verse. He wore a monocle. He had no sense of humor. He dwelt in dramatic detail on his military and civil adventures. Most of his yarns had a knack of fading out at the crit adventures. Most of his yarns had a knack of fading out at the critical point…” (1973: 294–295). 11. On Vladimir Piast, see: N.A.Pavlovich (1964:477–478); Z.G.Mints (1981:175–228). 12. There are two short biographies of R.V.Ivanov-Razumnik by A.V. Lavrov (1981:366–391; 1991:303–308). See also the publications of V. Belous (Ivanov-Razumnik 1991:252–277; 1993:47–50) and, most recently, Lavrov 1992 and Lavrov 1993. 13. Piast had in mind the following passage in Part II of The WildAss’s Skin (“Everyman’s Library,” New York: Dutton, p. 127): “‘I have all the necessary materials for some very curious historical memoirs in my hands, and I cannot find anyone to whom I can ascribe them. It worries me, for I shall have to be quick about it. Memoirs are falling out of fashion.’ ‘What are the memoirs—contemporaneous, ancient, or memoirs of the court, or what?’ ‘They relate to the Necklace affair.’ ‘Now isn’t that a coincidence?’ said Rastignac, turning to me and laughing. He looked again to the literary speculator, and said, indicating me— ‘This is M.de Valentin, one of my friends, whom I must introduce to you as one of our future literary celebrities. He had formerly an aunt, a marquise, much in favour once at court, and for about two years he has been writing a Royalist history of the Revolution.’”

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Piast probably mentioned specifically the “Vsemirnaia literatura” translation of Balzac’s novel, edited by Marietta Shaginian (Petersburg, Moscow, 1923), because of the reference to spurious memoirs on p. 8 of the introduction (I am indebted to Roman Timenchik for providing me with this quotation): The age which Balzac was forced to formulate was the age of shop-keeping. Anything that could be put out for sale was put out for sale, starting with the memoirs of the past and ending with the voices of the future (the votes of the deputies in the parliament). Two passions consumed society: recollecting and collecting. In every newspaper issue you could see mem oirs being advertised; every single episode of the revolution or restoration, every single historical great or little man was utilized for manufacturing memoirs. To recollect became so profitable that some began to remember what they have never lived through. The ample demand gave rise to falsification. Fake memoirs began to appear.

In a subsequent edition of Shagrenevaia kozha in the series “The History of Nineteenth-Century Young Man” initiated by Gor’kii (Moscow: Zhurnal’no-gazetnoe ob” edinenie, 1932, p. 27), Piast’s acquaintance A.K.Vinogradov closely paraphrased this passage in his introduction, in a manner still more relevant to the presumed historical implication of Piast’s remark: Balzac formulated the age. In the early eighteen-thirties appeared the memoirs of the Girondist [J.R] Brissot. Someone started the rumor that they were a forgery. A long litigation began, which delayed the stages of publication of these memoirs. Considering the enormous quantity of forgeries during the epoch of the Restoration, when every line of feudal origin [kazhdaia feodal’naia stroka] could be sold at a price, France became inundated with various falsifications.

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14. An earlier instance of a “metallurgical” periodization applied by Piast to the critical perception of nineteenth-century poetry before the onset of modernism is found in his article on Igor’ Severianin “Vospominaniia ob odnom pretendente,” Zhizn’ iskusstva 311/312, 7 December 1919. I am most grateful to my dear colleague Roman Timenchik for sending me the relevant excerpt: “It used to be like that. Nobody doubted that poetry had come to an end. The golden age of the Russian Parnassus was said to be over, the time of Pushkin and Lermontov (Lermontov was habitually attached to Pushkin, whereas the names of Del’vig and Baratynskii were in those days barely heard); the silver age, too, has passed, the age of Fet, Maikov, Tiutchev (sic! Lermontov was believed to be much older than Tiutchev), and Polonskii, and Aleksei Tolstoi (epicures and connoisseurs would also add Mei); the iron age of Nekrasov likewise rattled off with Nadson’s last, tinny sighs about “the tired suffering brother”; the salon poets of clay, Apukhtin, Golenishchev-Kutuzov, in conjunction with the youthful Serene Highness (K.R.) were considered to be but diminutive suppliers of sweet heart-throbs to the bored regimental wives and health-resort ladies. ‘There is now,’ people used to say then, ‘one more poet, the last poet, his name is Fofanov; in our time, he is the first and, perhaps, soon as you compare him with Pushkin.’” 15. Novoe Vremia 1903, 22 Aug. (# 9865). I am very grateful to my friend Alexander L.Ospovat for supplying me with this valuable reference. 16. See: Literaturnoe obozrenie 1991/2:96. 17. These poems of E.Ia.Dan’ko (1897–1942), the outstanding porcelain artist and the author of a memorable children’s book about porcelain Kitaiskii sekret—“The Secret of China” (1925 and several subsequent editions), were published recently, together with her valuable memoirs of Sologub, written upon request of Ivanov-Razumnik: E.Ia.Dan’ko. “Vospominaniia o Fedore Sologube. Stikhotvoreniia.” Vstupitel’naia stat’ia, publikatsiia i kommentarii M.M.Pavlovoi. In: Litsa: Biograficheskii al’manakh 1. Ed. A.V. Lavrov. Moscow, St. Petersburg: Feniks: Atheneum, 1992, 190–261. 18. V.Markov (1967:166) pointed out that nothing was known about this author. M.I.Shapir, one of the foremost authorities on the history of futurism and of twentieth-century Russian poetics, in a personal letter to me, has confirmed that there does not seem

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to be any information available on Gleb Marev. An. Tarasenkov, in his bibliography Russkie poety XX veka (Moscow, 1966), p. 226, lists one title by Marev: Pervaia Arzologiia. Posleslov. “Chèmpionata poètov.” Petrograd: [Tipografiia I.Fleitmana.] 1916. 16 pp. 270 copies printed. 19. It will be recalled that Otsup (1933:177; 1961:139) considered Baratynskii a representative of the silver age in the golden age of Pushkin, probably because of the special worship of Baratynskii among the poets of the “Parisian note,” as well as because of his mood of resignation, which Otsup identified with the “silver poets.” For serious literary critics, of course, Baratynskii was a true representative of the golden age, and this was how S.N.Durylin (1991: 242; an entry in the notebook of April 1926) evoked his memory: —Look,—Olia [Pigareva, Tiutchev’s greatgranddaughter] tells me,—this apricot tree no longer has any bark of its own, it is so old. In the place of bark it is smeared with clay. It is one hundred years old. One hundred years! This means that this apricot, the bark still fresh on its trunk, blossomed in the days of Baratynskii, blossomed during the Pushkin period of Russian literature, during its golden [Durylin’s emphasis] age (and what age is it now? goldbrick? [a teper’ kakoi? amerikanskogo zolota?]), blossomed under the Engelgardts, in the days of Alexander I and Zhukovskii… Hamlet the poet [Baratynskii], who exchanged the sorrow of verse for the joy of planting a forest, used to come to this greenhouse on such spring days, with the lingering snow and the fields still empty… 20. On the meaning of the word bezvremen’e in general and, specifically, in the vocabulary of Russian symbolism, see: Ronen 1983: 237–240. 21. Roman Jakobson’s judgment as an expression of a quite definite historical sensibility can be usefully compared with the opinion of N.I.Khardzhiev, the celebrated scholar and the last survivor of the Russian avant-garde, as reported in a very recent interview, which was brought to my attention by Roman Timenchik: “Certain

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people attempt now to call the beginning of the century the silver age of Russian poetry. This definition belongs to the symbolist poet Piast, who applied it to the poets of the second half of the nineteenth century: Fofanov and others. This had been a decline of poetry, in the aftermath of the 1860s. There were, of course, some remarkable phenomena, such as Sluchevskii, but the periods of Pushkin, and of Nekrasov and the raznochintsy in poetry had been more powerful. So Piast thought up an appellation: silver, after all, is not gold. Then Sergei Makovskii joined in, when he published his memoirs in exile. And because he was a second-rate poet himself, he projected this upon twentieth-century poetry, which had been the genuine golden age of Russian poetry, beginning with the symbolists, the acmeists, futurists, and oberiuts (who came to being against quite improbable odds), an unprecedented, unheard-of flowering of Russian poetry, such as had not occurred even in Pushkin’s times” (Ira Vrubel’Golubkina, “N.I.Khardzhiev: Budushchee uzhe nastalo,” Zerkalo 131, December 1995 [Tel Aviv], 18–19).

110

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Index

Adamovich, G., 39, 41, 49, 57, 78, 100 Aeschylus, 81 Agnivtsev, 100 Aikhenval’d, Iu., 77 Akhmatova, xii, 3, 16, 16–32, 35– 39, 41, 47, 50, 54–55, 70–71, 76, 78, 86–87; nn. 6, 10 Alexander I, 12, 27, 30, 89; n. 19 Alexander of Macedon, 81 Alexandra Feodorovna, 28–29 Amari, see: Tsetlin, M. Annenkov, Iu., 76 Annenskii, xi, 50, 53–54, 93, 96– 99 Apukhtin, n. 14 Aseev, 81 Augustus, 2, 100 Azadovskii, K.M., 1

Belous, V.G., 69; n. 12 Belyi, xiv, 24, 25, 49, 59, 69, 72, 73, 76, 81–82, 86 Berberova, 69; nn. 1, 9 Berdiaev, 4, 4–16, 42 Billington, J.H., n. 4 Blake, 5 Blok, xiii, xiv–xvi, 24–25, 35–36, 41, 47–49, 51–53; 57, 59, 69– 72, 77–74, 82–83, 86–88, 93– 97 Boccaccio, 46–47 Bowlt, xx, J., 1, 4 Brett-Smith, H.F., 3 Brissot, J. R, n.13 Briusov, 72, 76, 78 Brodsky, xi Bunin, 55, 62, 75 Byron, xii, 19, 26–27 Carlyle, x Catullus, 33 “Chatskii,” see: Strakhovskii, L.I. Chekhov, 43, 73 Chernov, V. n. 4 Chernyshevskii, xv “Cherubina de Gabriak,” 100 Chukovskii, K., 41, 70–71; n. 9

Babel’, 49 Bakhtin, M., 35 Bal’mont, n. 5 Balzac, 5, 60–61; n. 13 Baran, H., xx Baratynskii, 26, 34, 49–50, 61, 66, 87; nn. 14, 19 Belinskii, V, xv, 14, 48 119

120 OMRY RONEN

Chulkov, G., xviii Coleridge, 26 Corneille, 14, 46 Czapski, J., 55 Dan’ko, E., 79; n. 17 Dante, 46–47, 51 Del’vig, 88; n. 14 Diagilev, n. 1 Dickens, 76 Dorfman, L., xx Dostoevskii, 9, 12, 42, 46–48, 61, 73, 94–96; n. 4 Duff, J.W., 2 Durylin, S.N., n. 19 Eco, U., xvi Èikhenbaum, B.M., 77; n. 6 Eliot, T.S., 18–19 Elsworth, J.D., 2 Èngelgardts (family), n. 19 Èrenburg, 76, 82 Esenin, xiv, 49, 79 Ètkind, E.G., 1, 6 Euripides, 81 Evans-Romaine, K., xx Evreinov, N., n. 4 Fedotov, G. P, 21, 44–47; n. 8 Fet, 30–35, 44, 57, 61, 64–65, 79; nn. 10, 14 Florenskii, 9 Fofanov, 62; nn. 14, 21 Fontenrose, J., xi, xviii Forsh, 41, 69–70 France, 76 Gasparov, B.M., 2, 7, 11, 17, 40, 57, 99 Gasparov, M.L., xx, 2 Gautier, 47

George III, 26–27 Gershtein, È., 30, 36 Gippius, Vasilii, 6 Gippius, Vladimir, 6, 79 Gippius, Zinaida, 59 Gizetti, A., 69 Goedel, x Goethe, x Gogol’, 6, 11, 28, 42, 47, 73 Goldoni, 34 Golenishchev-Kutuzov, A., n. 14 Gollerbakh, È., n. 9 Goncharov, 65 Gor’kii, 59, 75–76; n. 13 Griboedov, 58, 75; n. 10 Grigor’ev, A., 61, 64 Grigor’ev, B., 76 Gumilev, xv, 16, 28–30, 41, 44, 47–48, 59, 69–72, 76, 78, 83, 86; n. 10 Gurevich, A. Ia., 57 Guro, xv, 81 Hammurabi, 54 Hasty, O.P., xx Herzen, xiii Hesiod, xi, 2, 55–57, 66–67 Hughes, R., 2 Hugo, 5, 47 Ianovskii, V.S., 55; n. 9 Iazykov, 51, 61 Ignatova, E., 1 Irving, Washington, 25 Ivanov, Georgii, 59–60, 71 Ivanov, Viacheslav I., xi, 9, 19, 53, 65–67, 72, 78, 89–93 Ivanov, Viach. Vs., xi, xvii, xviii, xx Ivanov, Vsevolod, 76

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Ivanov-Razumnik, R V, xii–xvii, xviii, xix, 48, 58, 69–84, 100; nn. 10, 12, 17 Jakobson, R, x, xix, 25, 61, 99– 100; n. 21 John, the Evangelist, n. 4 K. R, n. 14 Kallash, V, 28 Kaplun, S., 71 Kats, B., n. 3 Kazin, 79 Kel’son, 71 Kerenskii, 28 Khardzhiev, N., n. 21 Khlebnikov, xv, 81 Khodasevich, 32–34, 41, 57, 60, 65, 86 Kliuev, xiv, 78, 86 Knipovich, E., 69 Komarovskii, 4 Krivich (Annenskii), V, 96 Kuprin, 75 Kuzmin, 33–34, 78 Lamberton, R., 19, 57 Lavrov, A.V., xii, xiii, xiv, 60, 67, 82; nn. 1, 12, 17 Lemon, L.T., xxi Lenin, xiv, 28; n. 4 Leontiev, Ia. V, xvii, xix Lermontov, 30, 42, 49, 51, 62, 87, 100; n. 14 Leskov, 73–75 Livshits, B., 59 Livshits, V.A., xvii, xix Lokhvitskaia, 62 Luknitskaia, V., 59, 71 Luknitskii, R, 59, 71 Lycurgus, 54

Maiakovskii, 28, 49, 78, 81, 86 Maikov, A, 61, 64; n. 14 Makovskii, S., 3, 4–5, 7, 11, 14 16, 41–42, 53, 64, 69, 83, 99; nn. 1, 21 Mandel’shtam, xi, xv, xvi, 16, 27– 28, 32–35, 39–41, 43–44, 49, 57, 59, 76–78, 86, 92–93, 99; n. 10 “Marev, Gleb,” 84–85; n. 18 Markov, V.F., 84; n. 18 Maslennikov, O., 67, 99–100 Mei, 61, 64; n. 14 Merezhkovskii, xviii, 6, 13 Mints, Z.G., n. 14 Mirsky, see: Sviatopolk-Mirskii, D. Molière, 14, 46 Moréas, 47 Musset, 34 Nabokov, 41, 87; nn. 9, 10 Nadson, 43–44; n. 14 Naiman, A.G., 35 Nekrasov, N., xv, 30, 42, 44, 61, 64; nn. 14, 21 Nekrasov, V, epigraph Newton, x Nicholas I, 28, 89 Nicholas II, 28, 29 Nietzsche, 89 Nikitin, 64 Nivat, G., 1, 6 Novalis, 26, 88, 93 Ospovat, A.L., xx, n. 15 Otsup, N.A., 4–4, 40–53, 55–57, 64–65, 69, 71, 83, 99; nn. 9, 19 Ovid, xi, 2, 33, 53–54, 57, 90, 96–98

122 OMRY RONEN

Paperno, L, 2 Parnis, A., 59 Pasternak, xii, xiv, 49, 59, 79, 82, 99 Pavlova, Karolina, 72 Pavlova, M.M., n. 17 Pavlovich, N.A., n. 11 Peacock, T.L., 3, 26, 33 Perovskaia, S., 44 Petrarca, 46–47 Petrovskii, M., n. 3 Pianykh, M., 1, 6 Piast (Pestovskii), V, xvi, xviii, 50, 55–65, 83–84, 99; nn. 1, 11, 13, 14, 21 Pigareva, O., n. 19 Plehve, 48 Pleshcheev, 64 Poe, xvi, 5 Pollak, N., xx Polonskii, 30, 61, 64; n. 14 Powell (Sapienza), P, xx, 32 Proffer, C., 1 Pucci, P, xi, xix Pushkin, xi, xvii, 3, 5, 11–12, 17, 25–30, 32, 34–36, 42, 46–48, 51, 61–62, 65–66, 70, 84, 88– 89, 100; nn. 14, 19, 21 Rabelais, 47 Racine, 14, 46 Rasputin, 28 Reis, M.J., xxi Remizov, 73 Romanov, Konstantin, see: K.R. Rosenflanz, K., xx Rostopchina, 34 Rozanov, 65 Saltykov-Shchedrin, 61

Sandys, J.E., 2 Schiller, 87, 93, 96 Semenovskii, D., 93 Sergeev-Tsenskii, 75 Serman, I.Z., 1, 6 Severianin, n. 14 Shaginian, n. 13 Shakespeare, 29–30, 93–94 Shapir, M. L, n. 18 Shcherbina, 61, 64 Shelley, 3, 26–27, 88, 93, 96; n. 5 Shklovskii, V, xxi Shmelev, 75 Shvarts, E., n. 9 Sirin, see: Nabokov Slinina, È.V, 30 Sluchevskii, 64–65; n. 21 Sologub, 69; n. 17 Solon, 54 Solov’ev, V, 9, 44, 64–65, 88 Sophocles, 81 Southey, 26 Spengler, 81–82 Spitzer, L., ix–xi, xix Stalin, 28, n. 3 Stavrou, T.G., 3 Strada, V., 1, 6 Strakhovskii, L. L, 42, 53, 64; n. 10 Strindberg, xvi Struve, G., 3–4, 4, 14–16, 40–2, 58, 69, 71, 99–100 Sviatopolk-Mirskii, D., 3, 14, 43– 44, 48, 61–65, 99 Sumarokov, 34 Syromiatnikov, B. L, xvii–xviii Taneeva, see: Vyrubova, A.A. Tarasenkov, A., nn. 2, 18

THE FALLACY OF THE SILVER AGE 123

Terapiano, Iu., nn. 1, 9 Thackeray, 16 Theocritus, 32, 88 Timenchik, R., 17, 27, 30, 40; nn. 1, 3, 13, 14, 21 Tiutchev, 42, 44, 49, 51, 61, 79; nn. 10, 14, 19 Toddes, E., 26 Tolstoi, A.K., 30, 61, 64; n. 14 Tolstoi, L., 12, 42–43, 46–47, 72 Toman, J., x, xix, xx Tomashevskii, B., 69–70 Toporov, V.N., 24, 35 Treadgold, D.W., 100 Tronskii (Trotskii), I.M., 2 Trotsky, n. 4 Tsetlin, M., 54 Tsvetaeva, 16, 19–20, 35, 41, 49, 53, 59 Turgenev, 42, 48, 61, 65, 73 Twain, 39 “Udush’ev, Ippolit,” see: Ivanov Razumnik, R.V. Ustinov, A., xx Vanstiphout, H.L. J., xi, xix Vatsuro, V. È., 28, 30 Veidle, V, 17–19, 40, 42–43, 53, 65, 69, 83 Veksler, A., 69 Vengerov, S., 20–21, 31, 43 Verkhovskii, Iu., 69 Vernant, J.P., xi, xix Viazemskii, 34 Vigny, 5, 47 Vilenkin, V., n. 6 Villon, 47 Vinogradov, A.K., n. 13 Vinogradov, V.V., 35 Virgil, 33, 51

Voloshin, 100 Voltaire, 14 Vrubel’, 94–96 Vrubel’-Golubkina, I., n. 21 Vyrubova, A.A., 28–29 Weidlé, see: Veidle, V. West, M., xvii, xix Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U., 2 Wordsworth, 26 Zaitsev, 75 Zakovich, B., n. 9 Zamiatin, 58, 69–70, 73 Zheliabov, 44 Zhemchuzhnikov, A., 64 Zhirmunskii, V., 16–17, 47, 77 Zhukovskii, n. 19 Zorgenfrei, V., 77