Primary Influences on the Symbolist Movement in Russian Literature Were the Irrationalistic

SYMBOLISM

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

The movement was inaugurated by Nikolai Minsky's article The Ancient Debate (1884) and Dmitry Merezhkovsky's book On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature (1892). Both writers promoted extreme individualism and deified the act of creation. Merezhkovsky was known for his poetry as well as a series of novels. His wife, Zinaida Gippius, also a major poet in the early days of the symbolist movement, opened a salon in St Petersburg, which came to be known as the "headquarters of Russian decadence."

The symbolist poets wished to liberate techniques of versification in order to allow greater room for "fluidity", and as such were aligned with the movement towards free verse, a direction evident in the poems of Gustave Kahn and Ezra Pound. Symbolist poems sought to evoke, rather than to describe; symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of the poet's soul. T.S. Eliot was one of these poets, although it has also been said that 'Imagism' was the movement both Pound and Eliot subscribed to (see Pound's Des Imagistes). Synesthesia was a prized experience; poets sought to identify and confound the separate senses of scent, sound, and colour.

The earlier Romantic movement of poetry used symbols, but these symbols were unique and privileged objects. The symbolists took this further, investing all things, even vowels and perfumes, with potential symbolic value. "The physical universe, then, is a kind of language that invites a privileged spectator to decipher it, although this does not yield a single message so much as a superior network of associations." Symbolist symbols are not allegories, intended to represent; they are instead intended to evoke particular states of mind. The nominal subject of Mallarmé's "Le cygne" ("The Swan") is of a swan trapped in a frozen lake. Significantly, in French, cygne is a homophone of signe, a sign. The overall effect is of overwhelming whiteness; and the presentation of the narrative elements of the description is quite oblique: