Orphism in the Circle of Musagetes

Abstract

Orphism was highly popular both among the artists and scholars at the turn of the nineteenth century. Recent research on the history of scholarhip on orphism has demonstrated that in the case of historians and philologists this popularity owed much to the contemporaneous discussions concerning the relationship of the church and the state which rised questions bearing on the roots of Christianity. In our article we consider ideas of the participants of the Moscow editing house Musaget publishing a special mystical series ‘Orpheus’. Because of the fact that scholars studying classical philology were among them makes one looks for a correspondence between the scholarly and artistic treatment of orphism. The emphasis on the liberating nature of orphism, which one finds in the writings of Andrey Belyj, is characteristic for a general tendency to oppose the teaching of orphics and the state religion.