Also about the "Silver Age" of Russian culture
There are always some good terms in the language, such as "Golden Age" and "Silver Age", and every nation's literary history seems to have been named in such a period, and the prosperity or preciousness referred to by such names is by no means limited to the literary category.
Nowadays, a period of Russian literature and culture that is called "Silver Age" has suddenly become a hot topic and a popular publishing topic for us, and articles on this topic in the press have been continuously unveiled, and the series of books with the title of "Silver Age" alone have been followed by four sets (six kinds of writers' edition of "Silver Age Series", five kinds of Xuelin edition of "Silver Age Russian Literature Series", seven kinds of Yunnan People's Edition of "Russian Silver Age Culture Series", and four kinds of literary and joint editions of "Russian Silver Age Boutique Library"), which is really lively.
"Starry Sky in the Silver Age" Liu Wenfei
Such a lively scene is promoted by a variety of factors. From the perspective of the object of reading, Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century was indeed colorful and fruitful. In the "Silver Age", the rare phenomenon of "the birth of geniuses in groups" as Pasternak called it appeared again in Russia. What makes people unimaginable is that in that short period of more than 20 years, in the social background of revolution and war, Russia, a nation that is not very strong in Europe in terms of cultural tradition or economic strength, has contributed a large number of masters and masterpieces to the 20th century and to the world, and has set a precedent for many cultural disciplines in the 20th century, such as religious existentialism in philosophy, formalism in literary theory, Akmeism in poetry, and Kandinsky in fine arts. Stravinsky in music, and so on. It is indeed a rich mine of culture, and we have recently launched several series of books at the same time, but there are very few "crashes" of the same writers or works, which can also make us strongly aware of the depth of the cultural accumulation of that period. However, for ideological reasons, the culture of this period not only failed to develop sustainably after the October Revolution, but was deliberately cold, even deliberately forgotten, and has not been fully read and studied. It can be said that in today's Russia, the "Silver Age" is also a new reading hotspot. On the other hand, from our subjective point of view, Chinese readers have always had a strong "reading expectation" of Russian literature and culture, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the traditional "Soviet literature" seems to have suddenly "depreciated", while the new Russian Federation has never been able to provide enough new reading texts with conquering power. Therefore, it is very natural for us to look forward to and choose to look forward to the gorgeous but strange "Silver Age". Of course, what prompts us to pay attention to the culture of the "Silver Age" may also be some latent desire to sort out the cultural heritage of the 20th century at the end of the 20th century, a certain hope that the "end of the century complex" may be soothed and resonated in the culture of the "Silver Age", and the deliberate efforts in academic circles to paint a complete picture of 20th-century Russian literature, and so on. Objective, subjective causes, inevitable, accidental factors, together create the current "silver age cultural fever".
The discussion of mainland scholars on the "Silver Age" is also very enthusiastic, and there are many opinions on the origin of the title "Silver Age" alone. At first, it was said that the Russian scholar Makovsky first defined the trend of Russian modernist poetry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the "Silver Age" in a Russian poetry monograph published in Munich in the 1960s; later, it was found in the discussion of Russian scholars that Makowski himself claimed that it was the Russian philosopher Berdyaev who first proposed this name; recently, it has been excavated from relevant Russian sources that the russian poet Ochup was the first to use this concept. In 1933 he published an article entitled "The Silver Age" in the Russian diaspora magazine "Numbers" in Paris. In fact, it does not matter who first proposed the name "Silver Age", because after all, this term is not a concept originally created by the author like Shklovsky's "defamiliarization" or Kundera's "kitsch", but is given a specific meaning, but a word that everyone can use and has always been used, like words such as "literature", its connotation and direction are very certain. We don't know who first coined the term "literature," but that doesn't stop us from holding a roughly identical understanding of literature as a whole.
There are also divergent views on whether to use the concept of the "Silver Age". There are still some scholars (mainly some older or older scholars) who are very disgusted with the reference to the "Silver Age", believing that it does not constitute an "era", and they are very nostalgic for the clear but cumbersome concept of Soviet scholars: "Russian literature from the late 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century". It seems that the concept of the "Silver Age" is to elevate the literature of this period, to put it on an equal footing with the glorious Russian critical realist literature before it and the flourishing Soviet socialist realist literature that followed. In fact, comparing the research results of the main researchers in this field of the Soviet Union (such as Sokolov and so on) with today's works on the "Silver Age" and finding that they are not much different in the scope and object of their research; moreover, the general tendency of the "Silver Age" culture is very obvious with the difference between its previous and subsequent cultures, and its unique connotation and extension cannot be ignored because of its short duration. Therefore, the argument that the "Silver Age" did not constitute an era is clearly untenable. Take another look at the actual situation: in Slavic academia in Europe and the United States, the concept of the "Silver Age" was introduced as early as the 1960s, and there have always been courses on this topic in universities. In Russia, the concept has been widely accepted and used, and even those who have used the concept of "Russian literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries" have turned to the more concise and smooth "Silver Age"; and in our case, the term "Silver Age", if not deeply rooted, has at least become familiar to insiders. Therefore, it seems that it is no longer meaningful to talk about whether to use the term "Silver Age" now.
However, in the current knowledge and understanding of the concept of the "Silver Age", there are two tendencies that deserve attention: one is to broaden the connotation of the "Silver Age", and the other is to ideologize the nature of the "Silver Age".
The "Silver Age" of Russian culture usually refers to the culture of the period after Russian critical realist literature and before Soviet culture, which stretched at the junction of two centuries and spanned more than 20 years. There are still different views on the staging of the "Silver Age", but its general starting and ending points are still more consistently defined, that is, after Tolstoy and before the October Revolution. Of course, you can say that at the same time as Tolstoy's later works, the creations of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Andreev and others have already shown some characteristics that are different from traditional critical realist literature; of course, you can also say that the October Revolution did not completely stop the cultural inertia of the "Silver Age". Any era is inextricably linked to its predecessors and successors, and the division of any period is therefore relative. In contrast, the division of the "Silver Age" has a stronger basis, because the Russian symbolist poetry movement, which began it, had an aesthetic style and artistic taste that was very different from that of traditional Russian literature, and the "Silver Age" culture, which focused on individual values and artistic innovation, was bound to come to a rapid end soon after the October political revolution advocating collective and centralized power. In the face of such a relatively clear periodization of literary history, some of our scholars still want to do some kind of "expansion" work, stretching and widening the "Silver Age" as much as possible. Some want to increase the scale of the "Silver Age", believing that its upper limit is Dostoevsky and the lower limit is the beginning of the Stalin period; others want to add the content of the "Silver Age", believing that it should include not only the critical realist literature and the new proletarian literature that were nearing the end of the time, but also the socialist doctrine of Plekhanov and others and Lenin's theory of state and revolution. Of the published "series" of "Silver Age", the vast majority of works were written in the late 1920s or 1930s, undoubtedly the works of the "Soviet period", and the other novel in the "series" belongs to the late critical realism period, and there may be only one "Silver Age" work in the true sense. We believe that the "Silver Age culture" should be given a relatively stable and relatively clear definition, otherwise, without its inherent prescriptive concept of the "Silver Age", it will face the danger of external generalization, and even lose the necessity and rationality of its existence.
Another tendency is to add a lot of ideological meaning to the understanding of the "Silver Age". Some of the above-mentioned people are disgusted with the concept of the "Silver Age", including the reasons for this. They argue that some writers of the "Silver Age" later mostly did not accept the October Revolution, went into exile after the revolution, and remained in opposition to later Soviet literature, and therefore should not be widely publicized. Curiously, some scholars who advocate the culture of the "Silver Age" also hold the same mode of thinking, believing that the significance of the "Silver Age" culture lies in the distance between revolution and reality and the confrontation between post-revolution and autocracy. Here, among those who underestimate or overestimate the "Silver Age", there is a phenomenon of "anachronism", that is, ignoring that the "Silver Age" appeared before the October Revolution, and it is difficult to make a proper evaluation of it by relying entirely on its connection to the later era or its fate in the later era. Thus, we hear accusations that the "Silver Age" culture was a "decadent" culture, and we hear statements about the writers of that period who "had a backward world outlook" and "divorced from the people." As a result, we often read about the "tragic" fates of certain writers and their feelings about these fates in the text about the "Silver Age". Consciously or unconsciously, people are equating the literature of the "Silver Age" with the "literature of exile abroad", "unofficial literature" and even "dissident literature" of the Soviet period. For example, when people talk about "Silver Age" literature recently, they often mention the Flower City version of the "Exile Series" including shostakovich and Yevtushenko's works, and some people also classify Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky as "Silver Age" writers. All this reinforces the opposition between the culture of the "Silver Age" and the culture of the Soviets, and wants to distinguish between the high and the low in this opposition. Culture and despotism, the fate of intellectuals under totalitarian rule, is only one content of the "Silver Age" culture, not all of it, but only a content that was later added. Moreover, there can be many understandings of culture and despotism. For example, when talking about what happened to Mandelstam, it seems that Akhmatova once said that the fate of Mandelstam will not necessarily be much better if the social system is changed. A recently published biography of Solzhenitsyn writes that Solzhenitsyn's exile to the United States was equally incompatible with American society under the "money dictatorship," and the author of the biography called Solzhenitsyn "eternal dissident." It is inappropriate, at least incomplete, to dwell on the conflict between culture and despotism and to see this as the "focus" of the "Silver Age" culture. In short, adding too much ideological color to the culture of the "Silver Age" not only prevents us from objectively and calmly judging its value and significance, but also discourages us from developing the good habit of historically accepting cultural heritage.
So what are the main aspects of Russian "Silver Age" culture? We believe that, first of all, is the unprecedented spirit of artistic innovation embodied by the artists of that era. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian religious existentialists began to think about the problem of existence in the modern sense, and since they began, propositions such as "the meaning of existence" and "ultimate care" have become the main contents of modernist philosophy in the 20th century; Russian formalists began to discuss the "internal laws" of literature at the beginning of the 20th century, and literary research began its "scientific" process. Futurism was the three main currents of Russian modernist poetry at the beginning of the 20th century, with different styles and different propositions, but in the experimental poetry of poetic innovation, with the synthesis of elements of various types of art in poetry as the main content, they showed a common pursuit; from Kandinsky onwards, the "three elements" of painting were denied, and it was possible to form lines with points and surfaces with points; from Stravinsky onwards, the single order of music was completely reconstructed, and the "twelve-tone system" was completely reconstructed. Greatly enriches the expressiveness of the music. Nowadays, people realize that the 20th century was a century of cultural and artistic modernism, and that the "modernization" of almost every art discipline in the world originated in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, which cannot but lament the great innovative spirit of the Russian cultural people in the "Silver Age". The "Silver Age" will be enshrined in the history of human culture as an "age of creation."
Secondly, while making unprecedented artistic innovations, the people of this era also retained a deep affection for cultural traditions, and only the "leftist art" represented by Russian Futurist poetry had a negative attitude towards cultural heritage, while most of the cultural people of that era undoubtedly cherished culture. The poet Mandelstam once said in response to the question "What is Akmism?": "It is the nostalgia for the culture of the world." This answer is representative and symbolic. In that era, as far as the myths of ancient Greece and Rome, as far as German philosophy and French symbolism theory, were all concerned by Russian intellectuals. There is a concept of "Third Rome" in the Russian Orthodox Church, which holds that the essence of Christianity was transferred to Byzantium after the decline of Rome, and then to Moscow after Byzantium was ruled by Islamic forces, so that Moscow in the 17th and 18th centuries was the center of Western Christendom. Although this theory did not win the Orthodox Church a real dominance in the world, the sense of responsibility reflected in this theory in the face of Western civilization as a whole has always been more fully reflected in Russian intellectuals, especially those in the "Silver Age". Therefore, they dare to think of themselves as defenders of world culture, so that they can make warm reflections on the living conditions and historical destiny of mankind in the relatively remote northern Xinjiang.
Finally, in connection with the nostalgia for culture, the cultural people of the "Silver Age" generally showed a kind of spiritual sincerity. The beginning of the 20th century was a turbulent era, with revolutions and wars; it was also a chaotic era, and the desires that pervade the world today were also inflated at that time. However, in that time and space, the Russian intellectuals embodied the childlike feelings of what Brodsky called "children of civilization." In the years of war and chaos, they were able to sit intently in their study and write intently; in the era of inflated desire and revaluation, they always maintained a firm belief in the value of art and their own value; at the turn of the century full of confusion and doubt, they were hastily and seriously sorting out the cultural heritage of the past century, and at the same time established a basic framework for the direction of the culture of the new century. Their way of life may not have been able to reverse the social climate of the time, but they maintained the prosperity and continuation of their culture; their speculations and discoveries may not be the truth that has been true throughout the centuries, but the fruits of their spiritual labor have obviously not "gone with the wind" in a hundred years or less. Today, when utilitarian principles have deeply invaded the lives of the literati, the state of mind and conviction of the Russian cultural people at the beginning of the 20th century is particularly touching and envious.
When talking lively about the "Silver Age" culture, we also need to remain calm. In reading, there are often the most fashionable and the best stereotypes for the latest things; in research, the gaps filled are often more respected, and some researchers will always consciously or unconsciously "solipsistically respect" their favorite and familiar objects. At present, with the exception of a few who have a negative view of the "Silver Age" culture out of ideological stance, most researchers seem to be advocating the "Silver Age" without hesitation. Relatively speaking, there are fewer sober views about the "Silver Age". For example, compared with the Russian cultural tradition with a great sense of civic responsibility, humanitarianism and morality, the culture of the "Silver Age" seems to be too concerned with the self and the heart, too aristocratic; for example, while focusing on the world cultural heritage, the "Silver Age" culture has relatively little inheritance and consolidation of the cultural traditions of the Russian nation, and so on. Only after noticing and thinking about these issues can we have a fuller and deeper understanding of the culture of the Russian "Silver Age".