“A Healer and a Wandering Poet”: The Spells, Incantations and Prayers of Varvara Malakhieva-Mirovich

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-107
Author(s):  
Алексей Валерьевич Коровашко
Keyword(s):  
Silver Age ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
Regulatory Principle ◽  
Minimal Contact ◽  
Lyric Poet ◽  
Poetic Texts ◽  
Folk Poetry

В статье рассматривается та часть поэтического наследия Варвары Малахиевой-Мирович, которая представляет собой стихотворные тексты, претендующие, по замыслу автора, на полную функциональную тождественность с реальными восточнославянскими заговорами и заклинаниями. При этом устанавливается, что Варвара Малахиева-Мирович позиционировала себя не только как лирического поэта, сохраняющего верность художественным канонам Серебряного века, но и как прямого наследника «псковских кудесников», практиковавших когда-то различные виды магических практик и обладавших ярко выраженными сверхъестественными способностями. Схожая антиномичность является регулятивным принципом всего творчества Варвары Малахиевой-Мирович, нейтрализующего традиционные оппозиции низменного и возвышенного, устного и письменного, фольклорного и книжного, интуитивного и дискурсивного. Стихотворные заговоры Варвары Малахиевой-Мирович тяготеют к единому сюжету (движение протагониста к состоянию целительного сна), оперируют устойчивыми формулами народной магической поэзии, обнаруживают близость к жанру колыбельной песни и активно используют образную систему русского символизма. Вместе с тем в художественном сознании Варвары Малахиевой-Мирович стихотворные заговоры достаточно четко отделены от таких смежных жанровых форм, как молитвы и заклинания. Именно заклинания в творческом наследии Варвары Малахиевой-Мирович минимально соприкасаются с фольклором и максимально приближаются к символистским литературным опытам. Однако и в тех случаях, когда словесные магические эксперименты Варвары Малахиевой-Мирович мало напоминают воссоздание аутентичных заговорных текстов, они в полной мере сохраняют суггестивность и способность оказывать фасцинативное воздействие. This article examines the poetic legacy of Varvara Malachieva-Mirovich (1869-1954) and in particular the poetic texts that she intends as fully identical in terms of functionality with actual Eastern Slavic spells and incantations. At the same time, the study establishes that Malakhieva-Mirovich positioned herself not only as a lyric poet who remained faithful to the artistic canons of the Silver Age but also as direct heir to the “Pskov magicians” who once practiced various types of magic rituals and were said to possess definite supernatural abilities. A similar antinomy serves as the regulatory principle of Malachieva-Mirovich’s entire oeuvre, which nullifies traditional oppositions such as low and sublime, spoken and written, folkloric and bookish, intuitive and discursive. Malachieva-Mirovich’s poetic spells tend to a single plot (the protagonist’s movement to a state of healing sleep); operate with stable formulas of magic folk poetry; reveal an affinity to the genre of lullaby; and actively use the figurative system of Russian Symbolism. At the same time, in the poet’s artistic consciousness poetic spells are clearly distinguished from such related genre forms as prayers and incantations. Malachieva-Mirovich’s incantations have minimal contact with folklore and come as close as possible to Symbolist literary efforts. However, even in cases where the poet’s verbal magic experiments do not resemble authentic spells, they fully retain their suggestiveness and ability to exert a fascinating (enchanting) effect.

The Sun-Sounding Scythian

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-152
Author(s):  
Polina Dimova
Keyword(s):  
The Sun ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Early Songs

The chapter examines the relationships between Prokofiev’s early music and the poets that inspired him. Guided by Konstantin Balmont’s poetic characterization of him in the early 1920s as a “sun-sounding Scythian,” it looks at two specific facets of Russian Symbolism and post-Symbolism that informed Prokofiev’s works: the sun cult and Scythianism. Prokofiev’s luminous Scythianism encompasses the paradox of the lyricism of his early songs and the perceived barbarism of his rejected ballet Ala and Lolli, from which the composer derived his Scythian Suite. By analyzing Prokofiev’s collaboration with Gorodetskii on Ala and Lolli and the composer’s settings of Balmont’s and Akhmatova’s poems, we can understand how the incarnations of the sun god in the Russian Silver Age informed both the sunrise music and the aesthetics of horror in the ballet and the suite. The chapter also reflects on Ala and Lolli as an unrealized ballet in the shadow of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Masks of the Poet, Myths of the People: The Performance of Individuality and Nationhood in Georgian and Russian Modernism

Slavic Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 567-590
Author(s):  
Harsha Ram
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Perceived Needs ◽  
The People ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
The One

Georgian and Russian modernisms engaged in a conversation that was by no means one-way and in which the chronological development and aesthetic premises of Russian symbolism became curiously inverted. Piecing together this forgotten dialogue allows us to recover a neglected crosscultural and properly Eurasian dimension of the Silver Age. Russians and Georgians alike invoked the mask as a theatrical form and myth as a narrative structure to articulate problems of individual, collective, and national identity. Mask and myth shared two distinct and somewhat incompatible genealogies, the one deriving from the Italian commedia dell'arte and the other from Friedrich Nietzsche's reading of Greek tragedy, both of which corresponded in turn to a typically Russian tension between the “decadent” and “mythopoetic” redactions of symbolism. These genealogies were critically adapted by the Georgians in an attempt to address the perceived needs of Georgian national culture. Aesthetic and philosophical problems concerning the semiotics of the name, the nature of the poetic persona, and the structure of myth came to be related to wider questions proper to an era of crisis and transition: modernity and historical belatedness, the dynamics of cultural importation, the gendered nature of nationhood, and the vexed relationship between popular culture and modernism as an elite cultural formation.

scholarly journals Literary and Digital Translation As a Form of Intercultural Communication in the Epoch of Social Transformations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alyona Aleksandrovna Ustinovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Literary Translation ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
Poetic Translation ◽  
Russian Soil ◽  
Poetic Texts ◽  
Aesthetic Characteristics

This article is devoted to the transformation of models of literary translation in the era of digitalization. The first translations in Russian practice tended to “retell” events, and the text was made “based on” the original rather than being a translation in the modern sense. Examples of such approaches to translation can be seen in the work of V.A. Zhukovsky, A.S. Pushkin and other authors of the early nineteenth century. At the same time, it was at the beginning of the 19th century that the first attempts were made to contrast the translation with their own, Russian literature: “the same subject in Russian” was replaced by a translated text close to the modern concept of translation. The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by mass translations of poetic texts and, in the vast majority of cases, the authors who translated them were also poets: V.Ya. Bryusov; N.S. Gumilev; A.A. Akhmatova; B.L. Pasternak; and others. The translation of the poem was understood as the transfer of the original poetic experience to Russian soil, and high demands were placed on the quality of the poetic text, often leading to significant semantic differences between the original text and the translated one. With the advent of machine translation and the expansion of digitalization, translation has become available to almost everyone. At the same time, there are areas in which literal translation almost does not interfere with the perception of the text (for example, in an official business style or when translating texts of instructions) and requires minimal stylistic editing. However, literary translation can radically lose its meaning, and in the case of a poetic translation, it can deprive the text of its aesthetic characteristics (rhythmic organization, rhyme), which poses new challenges for translators in the digitalization era. Translation gaps in the text of fiction should be considered not yet completely solved by the task of the modern digitalization society. Keywords: Translation, literary text, Silver Age, digital age

scholarly journals Bibliography of Georgy Chulkov’s literary and critical works of 1903 –1922

Literary Fact ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 413-435
Author(s):  
Olga Bogdanova
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Editorial Policy ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
The Social ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
National Significance ◽  
First Time

Bibliography of literary and critical works (books, articles, reviews, conversations, notes, “letters”, etc.) by Georgy Ivanovich Chulkov (1879 –1939), compiled and published on these pages for the first time, gives an idea of the range of creative interests and the evolution of aesthetic views of one of the major literary and cultural figures of Russian Symbolism in the first two decades of the 20th century. Poet, translator, novelist, playwright, literary critic and journalist, publisher, and since the 1920s also a literary critic, who created serious scientific works about A.S. Pushkin, F.I. Tyutchev, F.M. Dostoevsky and other writers, and memoirist, author of valuable memoirs about the literary life of the Silver Age “Years of travel” (1930), Chulkov was also a sensitive theater and art critic, who collaborated with V.F. Komissarzhevskaya, V.E. Meyerhold, M.V. Dobuzhinsky, E.E. Lansere, Z.A. Serebryakova and others. Having linked his creative fate with such iconic magazines of the Silver Age as “Novyi put'”, “Voprosy zhizni”, “Zolotoe runo”, and then “Narodopravstvo”, whose editorial policy he influenced and in some cases determined, Chulkov often and regularly acted as a literary critic, ideologist of literary trends of “mystical anarchism” and “mystical realism”, a fighter for the social and national significance of contemporary literature. Chulkov's literary criticism is not only an important part of his creative legacy, but also an irreplaceable feature of the complex and diverse literary movement of the first two decades of the 20th century

scholarly journals Short Excursus into the History of the Russian Symbolism Origin

2015 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
pp. 151-217
Author(s):  
T.P. Vorova ◽  
N.V. Pidmogylna ◽  
O.I. Romanova
Keyword(s):  
Russian Literature ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Cultural Wealth ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Stimulation Of

Being well-known nowadays as the Silver Age of Russian literature, Russian symbolism is an extraordinary phenomenon of spiritual life at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20thcenturies. This essay aims to study the appearance and development of Russian symbolism as a result of revaluation of cultural wealth in philosophy / art and stimulation of the appropriate rise of the certain aesthetic systems which were embodied in the literary works of that period. The current study introduces a new approach to the origin of this trend and represents the new tendencies in Russian symbolist novels which were beyond the artistic movements of that epoch. The sources of symbolist literature are traced in the principles of esoteric theory and its basic postulates. The results of the investigation and received conclusions are confirmed with the direct textual references from the novels of the writer who proves to be a forerunner of literature with bright mystical orientation.

scholarly journals "BETWEEN V.BRUSOV AND G.ADAMOVICH: D.OLERON'S TRANSLATION OF “LES TROPHÉES” BY J.HEREDIA (THE LITERARY POLEMICS OF THE SILVER AGE)"

2018 ◽  
pp. 506-517
Author(s):  
ELENA TAKHO-GODI
Keyword(s):  
Silver Age ◽  
Russian Symbolism

"The article is devoted to such a little-known figure of Russian symbolism as Dmitrij Oleron-Glushkov (1884-1918) – a revolutionist, a poet and a translator. His interest to the “la poésie du Parnasse” to some extent continues the traditions established by V.Brusov and therefore should be considered in the context of the literary polemics of the Silver Age."

scholarly journals Symbolist Publicism as an Outlook Model of the Silver Age

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-38
Author(s):  
Mykola Rashkevych
Keyword(s):  
General Purpose ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Independent Form ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Semantic Resources

Abstract In the article the methodological and applied criteria of symbolist publicism as an independent form of analytical journalism are defined. The subject of the research is the argumentative basis and semantic resources of public statements of philosophers and writers, i.e. the representatives of Russian symbolism. The relevance of the topic is due to the crisis of modern publicism, which becomes similar to a product and leads to mental and moral enslavement. The general purpose of the study is the legitimization of the term «symbolist publicism». Genre-stylistic peculiarities of symbolist text-making, as well the outlook landmarks of symbolic representatives of the Silver Age, were studied by E. Kassierer, M. Voskresenskaya, A. Mazurchuk, O. Matyushkin, O. Ponomarev, L. Kravets, and others.

scholarly journals “The Heterotopia of Estate” in the Novel by Z. N. Gippius “Roman-Tsarevich” (1913)

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 294-314
Author(s):  
Olga A. Bogdanova
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
Western European ◽  
Different Parts ◽  
The Revolution

<p>The article studies the space-semiotic organization of one of the central symbolist novels of the Silver age, associated with the &ldquo;estate topos&rdquo; in Russian literature. Most of the action in the &ldquo;Roman-Prince&rdquo; by Z.&nbsp;N.&nbsp;Gippius takes place in the 1910s on the territory of country estates in different parts of Russia, as well as in the Western European castle near the Pyrenees, where Russian revolutionaries live. The duality of the Russian revolution manifested as late as in Decembrist movement (the &ldquo;autocratic&rdquo; dictatorship of P.&nbsp;I.&nbsp;Pestel and the Christian democratism of S.&nbsp;I.&nbsp;Muravyov-Apostol) echoed in Gippius&rsquo;s novel in the form of the opposition between Roman Smentsev and Mikhail Rzhevsky, along with his supporters Florenty and Litta. Gippius&rsquo;s discovery consists in the fact that she found in the field of &ldquo;estate topos&rdquo; a meaning that goes back to the activities of the Decembrists-noble revolutionaries of the first quarter of the 19th&nbsp;century, often large landowners. The &ldquo;Estate topos&rdquo; appears in the &ldquo;Roman-Prince&rdquo; as the topos of the Russian religious revolution in a number of local variations. The ideological and artistic circulation between its three loci unites the Western European castle, reminiscent of the educationist roots of the Russian &ldquo;estate culture&rdquo; with its ideal of a free personality, a noble estate of the Golden age, which brings Russia&rsquo;s first apostles of religious revolution, and eclectic intelligent-landowner estate of the Silver age, the inhabitants of shich are under the evil power of the Antichrist of the revolution, genetically ascending to Stavrogin of the novel &ldquo;Demons&rdquo; by F.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;Dostoevsky. At the same time, they maintain the ability to break the fatal circle outlined by Smentsev thanks to the heterotopic connection with the other two estate projections presented in the novel. So, the scientific novelty of the article is that: here, in the material of the Gippius&rsquo;s novel is identified and discussed an important modification of the &ldquo;estate topos&rdquo; in the literature of Russian symbolism&nbsp;&mdash; a landowner&rsquo;s rural estate as a topos of the religious revolution, and for understanding of its structure a new category&nbsp;&mdash; &ldquo;heterotopia of the estate&rdquo;&nbsp;&mdash; is used.</p>

Symbolism in Flux: The Conceptual Metaphor of "World Liquescence" Across Media, Genres and Realities

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Kostetskaya
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Conceptual Metaphor ◽  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
Conceptual Metaphor Theory ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Visual Discourses

“Symbolism in Flux: the Metaphor of World Liquescence across Media, Genre and Realities” examines cultural implications of conceptual metaphor, in this case the metaphor of liquescence of the human emotional domain. The central question discussed in my paper is how poetics of water is metaphorically present in visual discourses of boundary transgression and blending, both static and dynamic, namely painting and film of the Russian Symbolist period. In my analysis of the painterly and cinematic texts selected, I apply concepts from cognitive linguistics, specifically Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory that see the roots of the human proclivity for metaphor in somatic embodied experiences. They provide tools and terms useful for theorizing discourses that implement the “water principle” as their modus operandi in approaching various metaphysical issues. They are particularly instrumental within the specific historical-cultural context of Russian Symbolism with its close attention to stirrings of the soul which in many cases are expressed via the “water metaphor.” I look at representations of the conceptual blend fusing human and water ontologies in these “Silver Age” texts: two paintings by V. Borisov-Musatov and two scenes from a film by E. Bauer. The innovative aspect of my work is found in my applying it to interacting art forms, which supports the central stance of Conceptual Metaphor Theory: that metaphor is not just a figure of language, but first and foremost, a figure of thought.

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