Silver Age (Russian Literature)

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Russian philology describes the first two decades of the 20th century as the Silver Age . This period was extraordinarily fruitful in Russian poetry, similar to the Golden Age in the previous century. Other terms are also used in the western world, nota bene Fin de siècle and Belle Epoque .

Alexander Blok's verses about the beautiful lady are considered the actual starting point, but some scholars already include works from the 1890s, beginning with Nikolai Minski's Manifesto In the Light of Conscience (1890), Dmitri Mereschkowski's treatise On the Reasons for the Decline of Contemporary Russian Literature ( 1893) and Valery Brjussow's Almanac Russian Symbolists (1894).

Although the Silver Age was dominated by the artistic movements of Russian Symbolism , Acmeism, and Futurism , there were countless other schools of poetry, such as Mystical Anarchism . There were also poets like Ivan Bunin or Marina Tsvetaeva who refused to join one of these groups. Alexander Blok became the leading poet and was practically universally recognized. The careers of Anna Akhmatova , Boris Pasternak and Ossip Mandelstam as poets , all of which would last for decades, began during this time.

The Silver Age ended with the Russian Civil War . Blok's death and Nikolai Gumilev's execution in 1921, as well as the appearance of the highly influential Pasternak collection, My Sister, Life (1922), marked the end of the era. Later emigrated poets looked back nostalgically on the Silver Age, led by Georgi Ivanov in Paris and Wladislaw Chodassewitsch in Berlin .

literature

  • Omry Ronen: The fallacy of the Silver Age in 20th century Russian literature . Harwood Academic Books, Amsterdam 1997, ISBN 90-5702-550-7 .
  • Galina Rylkova: The archeology of anxiety. The Russian Silver age and its legacy . University Press, Pittsburgh, Pa. 2007, ISBN 978-0-8229-5981-6 .