Feminism in Russia - Passport magazine

History of Art
Russian
Symbolism
by Olga Slobodkina-von Broemssen
The word symbolism derives from the Greek “Symbolon”
and means a symbol, a sign. It is a direction in painting,
which appeared in the 1970-1980s and had its climax at the
end of the 19th-beginning of the 20th century in France,
Belgium, Germany, Norway and some other European countries,
including Russia, as well as in America. Russian symbolism
is considered to be one of the strongest schools in this
movement.
Originally symbolism was a literary movement. The most
outstanding representatives of the early symbolism were the
French poets Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul
Verlaine and others. Symbolism in Russian poetry as well as
later on in painting was inspired first of all not by the material
world, which is a far cry from perfection, but by the spiritual
world, full of lofty ideas and impulses.
Nevertheless the aesthetics of symbolism do not presuppose
an absolute juxtaposition of the world of ideas to the
world of things. The priority of symbolism is a desire to bridge
the gap between these different worlds, which exist both in
man himself and in the surrounding world. It was Russian
symbolism that achieved this goal most successfully. Russian
symbolism gave the world the priceless works of Mikhail Vrubel,
Valentin Serov, Nikolai Roerich, Konstantin Somov and
other well-known and outstanding painters whose works are
part of a golden artistic heritage.
Symbolics, of course, had appeared much earlier than symbolism
as a direction in the arts. It was born almost together
with mankind. The traits of symbolism are characteristic of
any picture devoted to a religious cult, which originally strove
to unite the world of spirit with the world of matter, for example
the depiction of the Gods of Ancient Egypt and Babylon
and the Christian Saints and Apostles.
Nevertheless the strict aesthetics of symbolism were
worked out by the French symbolists and the Russian sym-
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bolism of the Silver Age, as well as by the American symbolists,
which stood a bit apart from the European trend.
In painting, symbolism concentrates not on everyday life,
but on divine forces, which reveal themselves through the feelings
of the characters or the phenomena of nature. One of the
strongest Russian symbolist paintings is: “The Seated Demon”
by Mikhail Vrubel, which is actually an illustration of the eponymous
poem written in 1837 by the Mikhail Lermontov (1814-
1841). Both the poet and the artists had an ideal of a proud
disobedient creative character. The essence of this image is
twofold. On the one hand, the grandeur of the human spirit,
on the other hand the immeasurable pride, the overestimation
of the personal forces, which leads to loneliness. However,
Vrubel’s Demon has much more ennui and anxiety than pride
and grandeur. Vrubel himself had a really Divine colorist gift.
All his life he was making his colour palette more and more sophisticated
and found new combinations that the world had
not known before.
While European symbolism pays tribute to Christian and Biblical
subjects, Russian symbolism does so to a lesser degree, which
allows one to speak about it as a separate phenomenon, highly
individual and having its own unique aesthetics.
Valentin Serov (1865-1911) in his famous painting “The Rape
of Europe” (1910) did not try to depict the well-known ancient
myth so much as to portray the emblem of the whole of Greek
art “with its high decorative qualities bordering on pathos”, as
the artist himself wrote in one of his letters. In this work as well
as others, the artist plays with art history: the rhythmically diving
dolphins remind one of Greek frescoes of the 6th century, while
his bull himself is very similar to the images of bulls on the ancient
Greek amphora. The unexpectedly bright and meaningful
look of the Bull contrasts with the stiff face of Europe, which is
nothing but Cora’s mask with its enigmatic archaic smile, a kind
of a symbol and an eternal mystery not only of the whole Greek
art, but of the whole ancient world.