The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology by Carl R. Proffer

The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology Reviews

• 
  Shawn

  I originally requested this through inter-library loan because it contained the only translation of
  Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal's "Thirty-Three Abominations", which was a short story from the decadent era I was interested in reading. While I did not have the time to read the entire book, there's a lot of great material here - essays from the era, a lot of poetry and prose, even a play - from a variety of authors and all translated into English. It would make a nice compliment with
  The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence: Perversity, Despair and Collapse.
  
  Some of the pieces here I had already read in the Dedalus volume (
  Valery Bryusov's "Now When I Have Awakened (The Notes Of a Psychopath)" and "The Republic Of The Southern Cross" - which I presented a podcast reading of
  here). "The Poison Garden" by
  Fyodor Sologub is basically a direct retelling of
  Nathaniel Hawthorne's
  Rappaccini's Daughter reset into modern times and recast through a decadent/symbolist lens - in truth, I like Sologub's version better as the student lodger entranced by the beautiful maiden in the garden next door (a very nice decadent detail - a overly orderly and precisely laid out garden of noxious plants) eventually comes to realize that she is suffused with poison herself, raised with it as part of her natural system so as to be used as an agent of vengeance against wealthy suitors by her scientist father, Professor Botanik (motivated by his family's history of slavehood and exploitation by the same wealthy classes). But the absoluteness of her beauty is so bewitching that the student still chooses death-in-love over never loving her at all. Decadence, it could be argued, is just the pose of Romanticism dealing with the realities, disappointments and new-found literary freedoms of Naturalism (unfaithful lovers, disease, greed, perversion, the inevitability of death) - the last dying gasps of Romanticism - and it derives its power, as here, by paying near-morbid attention to (or setting up fictional situations to exploit) the friction arising from contrasts (youth/age, beauty/danger, love/sex, rationality/mysticism, quotidian/progressive).
  
  "Adam" by
  Andrey Bely is more on the symbolist side of things and reminded me a bit of
  Nikolai Gogol's "Diary Of A Madman" as we follow Adam Antonovich Koreish, returning to recuperate at his father's farm in the country after being overwhelmed by city life. Adam is an untrustworthy narrator, a strange paranoid prone to enigmatic ramblings, who becomes increasingly detached from reality (for example, his narrative of his first night at the farm ends with him riding a large dog out of the room, only for the reader to discover that somewhere in there he fell asleep and went into a drunken dream) and casts himself and those around him into the symbolic and religious roles of his messiah complex, as he attempts to deal with his fleeing from the modern world "beyond the pale" and "over the border", which he feels has failed modern man and which failure will soon result in the "removing of symbols" and the end of the world. But, despite the repeated assurances that "he knew what he was doing" (a nice little writing device), Adam seems to become more and more paranoid and delusional, eventually fleeing back to the city after (possibly) burning down his father's farm. Interesting study of youth driven to save Russia from itself but driven mad by religious persecution mania.
  
  "Thirty-Three Abominations" is interesting as one of the first representations of Lesbianism (those Progressive readers who can only read past representations of oppressed groups that inexplicably are also completely modern and unsoiled by bias, should probably just skip this story) in Russian literature - in this case in the mode of the decadents - thus it focuses on the morbid and obsessive qualities of the relationship between Vera (an actress) and the narrator (a beautiful young teenage ingenue, training as an actress). Vera is overly dramatic and possessive, while the young narrator has an interesting, almost distanced and pragmatic view of events as Vera takes her under a wing and they begin a passionate affair. There's suicide (Vera's male ex-lover, who is also the narrator's fiance) and Vera's overwrought mood swings as the young actress agrees to be painted by "The Society Of 33 Artists" (Vera is worried that capturing her image in 33 portraits will damage the young actress in some aesthetic way) and it all ends in another death. It was interesting but also very vague and hard to follow at times.
  
  From the viewpoint of supernatural literature,
  Boris Sadovskoy's "Lamia" is noteworthy as a decadent take on the vampire theme where a young man is repeatedly visited, in his dreary chambers, by his dead love who wants only to feed on blood from his chest. The story is very straightforward - the word "vampire", or any related term, is never mentioned (outside of the title) and the melancholy, morbid descriptions of chambers and the young man's wandering through the snowy midnight streets are very effective. I dug this story.
  
  
  Zinaida Gippius (who had the memorable "Moon-Ants" featured in the Dedalus volume) is represented here by an essay and the story "He Has Descended", about a secret rural gathering of religious schismatics who practice both an ecstatic form of dervish dancing and (following the ecstasies and resultant prophesying) anonymous, near-orgiastic, group sex in the dark. This is not represented in a lewd or exploitative way - very straightforward in fact and non-descriptive - and the story focuses on one good woman there who believes her secret lover (although she is aware that it may have been many men) is her spiritual groom as assigned by heaven and is plagued by the desire to know who it is, and plagued by her need to know. This is not resolved. Probably of deeper interest and illuminating to those well-read in religious movements in Russia at the time (it made me think Bryusov's "The Last Martyrs" from the Dedalus volume, the tale of a free-love cult and revolution) but I found it interesting without any of that knowledge.
  
  
  Pavel Nilus' "Summer Heat" is a fun and healthily erotic story of a young man frolicking in the summer heat of the arbors with his three female cousins, as the atmosphere and temperature begin to awaken sexual feelings in them. Kind of charming, really.
  
  "Theater Of The Soul" (a one-act monodrama with prologue) by
  Nikolai Evreinov is a short play taking place inside the human soul (the theater set is of a huge rib-cage and heart that would have been built to pulse and vibrate) as the Rational and Emotional parts of the soul fight over concepts like love and faithfulness, all while the Unconscious soul sleeps. After guest appearances by idealized and degraded versions of the soul's dutiful wife and his young dancer-mistress, it ends dramatically in a fight, murder and suicide - and then a charmingly quirky exit for the just-awakened Unconscious. Cool! Like a 1912 Russian version of HERMAN'S HEAD.
  
  There is a lot of poetry here - some of which I read and some of which I skipped (the footnotes running through "A Poem Without A Hero" by
  Anna Akhmatova convinced me that I would have very little chance of following her tell-all sketch of the circle of artists and friends she was reflecting back on). "The Twelve" by
  Alexander Blok is offered here in two face-to-face translations (I preferred
  Arthur Clifford's over
  Natasha Templeton's) and is a nice contrast of layers on a wintry night in the city (street life, the military, young lovers, etc.) but I don't think my Russian history is savvy enough to decode the final imagery of Jesus Christ leading the red brigade onward through the snow, pursued by a starving dog. Blok's "Nightingale Garden" is a nice encapsulation of cyclic nature of seduction ("on the place where my cabin once stood, on the path that I furrowed, a worker began to descend with an ox, driving before him another burro") and his "For Annna Akhmatova" is very powerful ("'Beauty is frightening,' they will tell you..."). The untitled poem starting "From sunset she appeared" has a solid evocation of the decadent femme fatale (black eyes and tresses compared to snakes). And while, as I said, I didn't take on Akhmatova's "A Poem Without A Hero", I did enjoy many of her shorter pieces here, as well as others offered.
  
  A good investment (either in money - $12 on bookfinder, or time spent putting in an inter-library loan request) for those interested in the material.