Symbolist Poets Research Articles

მოქმედებს თუ არა გველის შხამი სოციალისტურ რეალიზმზე?

In 1927, philosopher Serge Danelia published an article of criticism “Vazha-Pshavela and Georgian Nation,” in which he discussed the poet Vazha-Pshavela’s conception and representation of nature. Among the topics discussed in this article, Danelia’s interpretation of the poem “Snake Eater” is of particular interest to us. To answer a question of why the snake poison did not work on the protagonist Mindia as soon as he ate snake meat, he offers the explaination that the meat was boiled and so the effect of poison was slowed down. This interpretation, of course, strikes us as excessively realistic. Where did this attitude come from? How much does Danelia’s account reflect the tendency of social realism of that time? Danelia thought that Vazha-Pshavela represented nature as an endless circle, as opposed to the historical process, which moves in the direction of progress. Further, for Vazha, nature is not to be measured by the good and evil of the events that occur in nature, but by its beauty. In Vazha’s understanding, this beauty is woven into the fabric of nature itself and exists independent of human judgment. This conception of a transcendentally beautiful, ahistorical nature, Danelia claims, belongs to an Eastern, paganistic worldview, which he poses as an anthithesis to the Western, Christian conception of “history.” This criticism can be explained by dialectical materialism. According to the scholar, Vazha’s representation of nature in “The Snake Eater” is fundamentally realist. The only reality that exists for the poet is indepentent nature. However, he criticizes, the poem also mixes a folktale into the realistic framework. Therefore, two different motifs, paganism and Christianity, are mixed in the work, which he regards as illogical; this destroys the any consistency in the poem’s plot line or framework. According to this argument, he rejected the poem and regarded it as a “weak” work. This is an inadequate and unsuccessful reading, even giving credit to the value of his dialectical materialist analysis of Vazha’s conception of nature. Danelia’s criticism shows a forced application of the conventions of realism to “The Snake Eater”  supposedly, as demanded by the period  and, from this point of view, ignores or denies the magical element in the poem. However, today the concept of materialism again attracts our attention under the name of “new mate­rialism.” While his evaluation of the poem is flawed, a part of Danelia’s ar­gu­ment, in which he criticised the critic K’it’a Abashidze’s understanding of Vazha-Pshavela as a symbolist poet, is convincing and invites more careful discussion.

Thinking Musically

Despite abundant scholarship on Theodor W. Adorno’s theoretical writings, his musical compositions have been largely overlooked. This article uses the example of his 1944 song cycle Vier Lieder nach Gedichten von Stefan George to argue that Adorno’s music stands in dialectical relation to his philosophy. The German symbolist poet Stefan George is given pride of place not only in Adorno’s compositions but also in his writings: he returned to George as a subject four times over the course of three decades. It is argued here that Adorno brought two seminal aspects of his work together musically decades before he rendered them in prose, placing George at their intersection: his theory of the relationship between music and language, and his theory of the lyric. Answering Adorno’s call for the listener to become a “compositional partner” in making sense of his music, I use his own methods of interpretation to examine how music serves as an alternative means of cognition to philosophical. I begin with an immanent analysis, examining the structure of each song and its relationship to the cycle as a whole without recourse to Adorno’s philosophy. I then outline his theoretical explanation of both music and lyric before reinterpreting the cycle in light of the dialectic between subject and object that he discusses. Finally, I propose that the sociological critique that Adorno did not fix in prose arises from the interplay between music and language within the 1944 cycle, giving voice to the social context from which it arose.

Bryusov's Pushkiniana in the Perspective of Modern Cultural Studies

In the work, in the light of modern cultural studies, the literary and poetic activity of Valery Bryusov, a bright Soviet critic and an outstanding symbolist poet of the Silver Age, is reinterpreted. The material for the analysis was Bryusov’s Pushkiniana and, in particular, the article “The Copper Horseman” (1909) and the poem of the Soviet period “Variations on the theme of the ‘Copper Horseman’“ (1923). It is traced how the critic Bryusov analyzed Pushkin’s “Petersburg story” in detail, how analytically precisely he formed the main trends of the research discourse. The appeal to the system of arrangement of Pushkin’s characters explicated Bryusov’s idea of the antithetical confrontation between the autocrat Peter and the “most insignificant of the most insignificant” poor official Eugene. However, an analysis of the works of modern Pushkinists allowed the authors of the article to show that Bryusov, the researcher, was mistaken in his hypothesis of the “little man”. It is shown that the prototype of poor Eugene in Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” was his closest friend, the lyceum student Wilhelm Kuchelbecker. But the involvement in the analysis of Bryusov’s poem “Variations on the theme of the Bronze Horseman” allowed us to show that the poet Bryusov, unlike the critic Bryusov, turned out to be visionarily more accurate, intuitively introducing into the lyrical text the name of “noble Eugene”, the lyceum student Wilhelm. As a result, the difference between the poet-Bryusov and the critic-Bryusov is clarified, it is shown that the restriction of the poet’s freedoms in the Soviet years activated his intuitive vision of literature and, as a result, history.

JOYCE’S SYMBOLISM

The paper presents an interpretation of Joyce’s work as symbolist. After outlining the history of the codification of Joyce’s works, V.M. Tolmatchoff proposed to return to the advantages of Joyce’s vision as a symbolist, proposed in general terms by E. Wilson in 1931. This symbolism, declared by Irish authors in the twentieth century and systematically realized by Joyce, genetically goes back not only to the practice of the French Symbolist poets, W.B. Yeats, as well as to the experience of the ‘death of God’ declared by Nietzsche (who shifted the understanding of symbolism from the reform of obsolete poetics to the “crisis of the European spirit” and the corresponding absolute purpose of the artist whose purely individual poetic vision forms new boundaries of the world, of things), but - more broadly - to the Romantic origins of non-classical culture. Joyce extends F. Schlegel’s dream of the boundlessness of poetry to the novel. In his performance it becomes a complex sum of personal biography, reading of symbolists (and authors drawn by them into their orbit), processing of the variants of symbolism available at the beginning of the twentieth century, synthetics of personal symbolism, in whose framework the contradictions between naturalism, symbolism as such, avant-gardisms, mass culture are removed and the central symbolist problematic of the transformation of the old world by the vitality of creativity is emphasized. In the framework of this interpretation of symbolism, the paper considers Ulysses: Joyce’s interpretation of the parody of sacred by profane, erotics, the problem of sex, luciferianism, Ibsen’s material and the relationship between the main characters, which allows us to see Ulysses as a symbolist novel on creativity.

On the Eastern style of thinking in A. Bely’s theory of symbolism

RELEVANCE. The study is devoted to understanding and identifying the significance of the eastern style of philosophy and aesthetics of Taoism in the work of the prominent representative of Russian symbolism Andrey Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev), who determined the development of the literary process (modernist and post-modernist movements) and art of the first third of the 20th century and influenced the further development Russian literature. The purpose of the study is to show the conceptual content of the aesthetic thought of the Russian philosopher and symbolist poet through the prism of Taoism and to clarify the presence of Eastern traditional wisdom (“Tao Te Ching”) in the construction of A. Bely’s theory of symbolism.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The research material was the collected works of A. Bely. The translation of the book “Tao Te Ching” written by the great Chinese thinker Lao Tzu, presented for the first time for the Russian-speaking reader, was used.” When solving research problems, a description method with the interpretive function of language was used, that is, a method of studying the interpretation of knowledge about the world. In our case, the interpretation of Taoism is focused on the interpretive activity of an individual creative personality, which always presupposes the subjective selectivity of the word.RESULT AND DISCUSSION. An analysis of the work of A. Bely showed that in reflecting the problems of the symbol, the philosophical principles of symbolism, in addition to two sources, they participate: on the one hand, the ideas of the Slavophiles, arising from the philosophy of V. Solovyov, on the other hand, the system of Western philosophy (the ideas of A. Schopenhauer and F. Nietzsche), a reflection of the creative borrowing of Eastern wisdom, ideas and functions of Chinese literature. The originality of the imaginative thinking of the Russian symbolist poet, who, in accordance with his spiritual nature, followed his bright creative path, is reflected in the development of the artistic method – symbolism.CONCLUSION. The idea of A. Bely’s symbolism is based on the compatibility of the concepts of various thinkers, including philosophizing in the Taoist style. A. Bely created a unified symbolic picture of the world - the unification of artistic, aesthetic, religious, mystical and everyday ideas and knowledge about the world into one whole. The connecting sign of this unification is the Symbol, which has a pronounced authorial character, has an infinity of boundaries of value, and not a semantic individual interpretation of the word and broadcasts the manifestation of systemic pluralism, revealing the essence of the world and being.

Псевдо-Хафиз В.С. Соловьева и влияние переводческой традиции Г.Ф. Даумера и А.А. Фета

The essay analyses the Russian translations of Ḥāfeẓ by V.S. Solov’ev in 1885 (24 poems in the first journal edition, reduced to 11 in all subsequent volume editions). The Russian philosopher’s interest in the Persian poet is part of European, and specifically German, Orientalism, which became popular since the publication of J.W. Goethe’s “West-Eastern Divan” (1819). This interest has a direct connection with the translations of Hafiz published by A.A. Fet in 1860. As has been shown, Fet translated Ḥāfeẓ not directly, but through the poetic imitations of him by the German poet G.F. Daumer (“Hafis. Eine Sammlung persischer Gedichte”, 1846; in particular, he used the second edition of these poems, published in 1856). Solov’ev’s lyrics have hitherto been thought to be translations of Hafezian imitations by the German poet F. Bodenstädt (1877). The essay shows how actually Solov’ev used the same imitations by Daumer as Fet, probably taking them from the same volume used by the older poet. This enables to relate the two Hafezian poetic cycles more directly and to draw some general considerations on the different intentions that drove the two poets in translating the Persian mystic: for both, Ḥāfeẓ was functional in conveying their own artistic form and philosophical meaning, although each of them had a different understanding of him. The analysis shows that Solov’ev was much closer to Ḥāfeẓ than Fet. In the Persian poet Fet saw a singer of beauty and regarded the aesthetic phenomenon as self-valuable; for Solov’ev, beauty was a conduit of the divine, as it was for Ḥāfeẓ. In his poems, the young beautiful cupbearers (replaced in Daumer by the beloved woman) are always the personification of God. It was these themes (the power of love; its dual nature, both mystical and earthly; the immanence of the divine in the world) that Solov’ev would develop in the following years and would be reflected in a series of articles key to understanding his worldview and which became the object of attention of Symbolist poets: “Beauty in Nature” (1889), “The General Meaning of Art” (1890), “The Meaning of Love” (1892), “The Life Drama of Plato” (1898), and others.

Репрезентация творчества А. Блока в видеопоэзии

The aim of the research is to identify the most important features in representation and reception of A. Blok’s poetic texts in the genre of video poetry presented at the international festival ‘Videostikhiya’. The paper examines the specifics of video poetry as a new sphere in art associated with the search for both modern forms of poetic creativity and ways of its interpretation and representation; analyzes video clips based on A. Blok’s poems. Scholars’ attention is focused on the complexity of audio visualization of the works by the symbolist poet, who perceived life in its transcendent essence. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that for the first time, the results of analysing modern works in the genre of video poetry based on Blok’s texts are presented; approaches to the study of the visual sphere of A. Blok’s poems are expanded. It is proved that the representation of A. Blok’s creative work in video poetry has its own specifics: the authors can modernize the Blok text, deepening the perception of the poem through metaphorical and symbolic video sequences, or recreate the context, immersing the viewer in the atmosphere of the Silver Age; intertextual inclusions also help each of the video artists to present in the media space a new reading of A. Blok’s poetic statement about the world and about people.

«Цветы зла» Шарля Бодлера в переводах и под редакцией Николая Гумилева (неосуществленный проект издательства «Всемирная литература»)

Based on hitherto unpublished archival documents from the Gorky Archive at IWL RAS and TsGALI, the article analyses the work of Gumilyov as a compiler, translator, and editor of the book Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, prepared for publication in “World Literature” in 1918–1921. For researchers, the most significant activity of Gumilev of this period was his work on preparing for publication outstanding French poets, widely represented in the Catalog of the publishing house “World Literature” (1919). The example of the poem “Death of Lovers” demonstrates the particular attitude of Gumilyov as an Acmeist to Baudelaire’s poetics associated with his religious spiritualism. An analysis of the translation of this poem shows that Gumilyov “narrowed” Baudelaire, abandoning the mystical component of his poetry, which caused criticism from the symbolist poet Alexander Blok, whose opinion remained in the protocols of the publishing house. The article establishes the number of translations by Gumilyov: 18 instead of the previously known 16. The appendix provides a reconstruction of the composition of the book Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire, which Gumilyov was preparing for publication: of the six sections, one remained untranslated (“Wine”); of Baudelaire’s 151 poems, almost half were translated (73).

The cultural meaning of the concept of "will" in the poetry of K.D. Balmont

The purpose of the article is to reveal the cultural meanings that for the poet were associated with the concept of "will". To achieve this goal, we trace the evolution of the poet's work, in which the cultural meaning of the concept of "will" is revealed through a chain of interrelated and complementary meanings: the boundless desire of the symbolist poet, a rush into the distance and upward, gaining freedom, admiration for the free world and the discovery of the supreme Divine - creative principle in nature. It is shown that the concept of "will" embodies in Balmont's poetry the essence of God's world, turns to the foundations of the Russian cultural mentality, reveals the convergence of Divine and human, free and creative principles as the dominant cultural worldview of the poet of the Silver Age. It is necessary to reveal the many cultural meanings that for the poet were associated with the concept of "will". The methodology of the research is based on synchronic, structural-functional, biographical, historical and cultural methods. Thus, the concept of "will" in Balmont's poetry combines the aspiration to space, breadth and height – to infinity, freedom, the poet's kinship with the Divinely free and eternally changeable elements of God's world and the creative principle as comprehension of the soul of the world and his own "free-spirited" soul. The cultural meaning of the concept "will" embodies the essence of God's world and the poet's soul. The concept of "will" in its versatility is one of the key ones in Balmont's poetry and turns to the basics of the Russian mentality, as well as reveals the convergence of the Divine and human, free and creative principles as the dominant worldview of the poet of the Silver Age. The thirst for will and freedom is inseparable from the formation of the Balmont symbolist with his aspiration from external reality to internal realities and is also connected with the rush into the distance "thirst for will and space".

Reflections of Symbolist Poets in Turkish Literature With Time Theme or Symbol Composed Poems on Turkish Music

Reflections of Symbolist Poets in Turkish Literature With Time Theme or Symbol Composed Poems on Turkish Music

The Silver Age and Its Educational Foundation

In the article the author examines the role of classic gymnasium in the education of the leading fi gures of the Silver Age. The selection of most prominent fi gures (six representatives from each of the four groups, - symbolist poets, non-symbolist poets, prose writers and around-literary fi gures (patrons of art, publishers, essayists) shows that classic gymnasium was the dominating type of their education. A proportionally similar role belonged to the cadet schools (the smaller number of representatives can be explained by the smaller number of this type of educational institutions); such institution types as real gymnasiums and theological seminaries were much less represented. The most prominent educational institution of the classic type was L.I. Polivanov’s Moscow private gymnasium. From the above it can be concluded that in contemporary Russia, where respective educational institutions are lacking, the cultural heyday comparable to that of the Silver Age, is not possible

Romantic Characteristics of Harmony in the Chamber and Vocal Works of Viktor Kosenkо on the Poems of Symbolist Poets

The vocal and chamber work of the outstanding Ukrainian composer of the 20th century Viktor Kosenko is a reflection of the lyrical musical and poetic features of his artistic world. For the author, this is a field of constant search for new means of musical expression and at the same time a solid base for mastering the traditions of past and present creative achievements. That is why romances occupy an important place in the composer's work.
 Romantic lyrics dominated his work until the end of the 1920s, but still Viktor Kosenko's romances have not lost their relevance. The music complements the experience of the modern listener with numerous allusions to the romantic era. It sometimes resemblessty listic fusion sof elements of the music allanguage of composers of the past – S. Rachmaninov, P. Tchaikovsky, O. Scriabin, impresses with a palette of harmonious colors of late romanticism, impressionism, which shows the directions of the composer's musical and aesthetic preferences, especially in harmony. It is this important aspect that remains the least studied in musicology, therefore the study of harmonic phenomena in Vіktor Kosenko's chamber and vocal lyrics has all the signs of relevance.

The Modernity of T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land from the Perspective of Image

T.S. Eliot is an excellent symbolist poet whose poems are regarded as epoch-making landmark works in the history of modern Western literature. The long lyric poem "The Waste Land" is Eliot's representative work. It has a variety of styles, draws from a wide variety of sources, and combines some characteristics of symbolism, imagism, and metaphysics. The poet has created many rich images of "Waste Land", most of which are difficult to understand and have complex and profound symbolic meanings. Thus, the poetry reflects the absurdity of reality, reflects on the plight of human civilization, and pursues the road to the redemption of the "Waste Land". This paper first reviews the existing research results on Eliot in the world, briefly describes the theoretical basis of the project, and classifies the image in The Waste Land. Then, the typical artistic techniques in the process of image use are analyzed in detail. After all these, by researching the typical images, the article not merely reveals their symbolic meaning but explores the reflection and criticism of modernity in poetry. Finally, the article traces the source of the modernity criticism presented by the images from social and religious perspectives. The research results are summarized and evaluated in the last section of the article.

The Facets of Intercultural Dialogue: Russian Symbolists in Translation Counterpoint with French Modernists

The subject of the study is the translation strategies of Russian symbolist poets formulated in a creative intercultural dialogue with foreign symbolist poets. The object of the research is the strategy of paraphrastic free translation, common in the Russian translation heritage of the early twentieth century. The author examines in detail such aspects of the topic as the dynamic interaction of the original text with the translation text, as well as various translation decisions taken by the authors of the Silver Age, due to the use of which they radically changed the goal setting and implication of the translated text. Special attention is paid to the comparison of the original and translated text and the moments of discrepancy between the translation and the original. The main conclusions of the study are the formulated characteristics of the early Symbolist translation, until the moment of active participation in the process of Valery Bryusov, and then - the publishing house "World Literature". A special contribution of the author to the study of the topic is the study of the purpose of the original and translated text and the identification of counterpoints in this regard of the intercultural dialogue between the author of the translation and the author of the original. The novelty of the research lies in the formulation of dialog strategies of Russian poets-translators - representatives of symbolism, their practice of dynamic interaction with equal, in their opinion, representatives of foreign language culture, and the creation of a creative translation based on the original text.

Preface: Francis Jammes’s “Fourteen Prayers,” Part 1

PrefaceFrancis Jammes’s “Fourteen Prayers,” Part 1 Raymond N. MacKenzie, Editor Key Words Reverend Dr. Ian Ker, St. John Henry Newman Francis Jammes (1868–1938), French Catholic poet and novelist, is not as widely read in the English-speaking world as he deserves to be, though some new translations have been published lately, as has a volume collecting some modern appreciations of Jammes.1 I’m going to add to the list with translations of a set of poems he titled “Fourteen Prayers.” In this issue, I’ll present the first seven, and the remainder in our next issue. I’ll include the French originals on facing pages. Jammes (pronounced zhahm) was born in the very small town of Tournay, located in the Haut-Pyrenées region of southwestern France; it is about a half hour’s drive from Lourdes. He spent most of his life in the region, moving west to the town of Orthez when he was twenty; and he is buried not far from there, in Hasparren. But though he loved this corner of the world, he did get out and experience life more broadly. The family moved to Bordeaux for a time when he was a teenager, and from there he went on to Paris and a series of literary friendships, notably with Paul Claudel; on a trip to North Africa, he met André Gide, who became a close friend and confidant for a while. In Paris he lived with his mother—and as we’ll see, the bond with his [End Page 5] mother was of great importance to him. He worked as a clerk during the day, read every night with his mother, and began to write and publish poetry. His early poems struck his readers as offering something fresh, a healthy antidote to the prevailing modes of poetry toward the end of the century, the kind of style literary historians today call Symbolism. In Symbolism, the emphasis is on evocation rather than description, on impression and nuance rather than direct statement; Symbolism’s most famous poets for readers today are Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, both of whom can seem decidedly obscure. The young man from Basque country, however, was writing decidedly clear, direct, accessible yet rich and powerful poems that struck a chord with many readers, especially Gide. Born and raised a Catholic, Jammes’s faith shifted in his twenties to a more generalized spirituality, but the poems, especially from 1897 on, were more often than not concerned with God, looking forward to what would soon (in 1904, with the help of Paul Claudel) be a return to the Church. But to return: 1897 saw the publication of his first great collection, De l’Angélus de l’aube à l’angélus du soir (from the morning to the evening Angelus). It opens with a prose epigraph announcing his view of the poet as a servant of God. The epigraph begins, “My God, you have called me from among men. Here I am.” The collection had a powerful impact on young poets both in France and in Italy who were seeking an alternative to the increasingly obscure and difficult style that the Symbolist poets were adopting.2 There was even talk of a new school of “naturisme,” a renewal of a poetry in closer contact with real life than the rarefied work of the Symbolists. Jammes wrote a serio-comic manifesto for his own personal, one-man school of poetics, which he called Jammisme. The manifesto mixes his actual beliefs with self-deprecating humor. Article I is an excellent example of both: I think that Truth is the praise of God; that we must celebrate it in our poems for them to be pure; that there exists but one school. . . .3 [End Page 6] That school consists of imitating nature, whether “nature” means a bird, a flower, or a pretty girl “with charming legs and graceful breasts.” The last phrase, which may seem a little offensive to some today, is intended as mildly comical, as if warding off the accusation of pomposity. The whole manifesto ends on a similar comic note: But since all is vanity, and even...

К разрешению одного текстологического казуса (неизвестное письмо А. А. Блока к Д. Н. Фридбергу)

The article traces the textual history of A. A. Blok’s poetic sketch «Rejoicing and Spinning…», which was previously erroneously treated as a completed work. The fi nal argument in resolving the issue is the previously unknown letter from A. A. Blok to D. N. Friedberg, discovered in the V. N. Orlov Foundation at RGALI, which is being introduced into the academic circulation for the first time. The circumstances of the two Symbolist poets’ cooperation in V. A. Ternavtsev’s educational and enlightenment project, the publication of textbooks for the primary classes of the «folk schools», are revealed. The analysis of the microtext — the notes and marginalia adjacent to the sketch — is instrumental for tracing the influence of V. Bryusov’s folklore stylizations on Blok’s early experiments with the form of «childish» or «naive» poetry.

О пушкинском мифе Ф. К. Сологуба

The article shows that the mythologemes of Pushkin Myth manifest themselves in Sologub through the proper names of the Symbolist poet, those assonated with or corresponding to the names of the historical or mythical characters of the Golden Age of Russian culture. V. A. Sollogub’s attitude to A. S. Pushkin might have predetermined the stance of F. Sologub in his essay The Poets’ Demons that contains certain allusions to the Memoirs of the famous prose writer of the 19th century. The fact that the Symbolist poet (Fyodor Kuzmich) bears the same name as the legendary starets might account for the emergence of certain elements of Sologub’s fictional universe that are polemically directed against Pushkin.

V Nikuda (“To Nоwhere”): From Poeticism to the Element of Everyday Language

The article deals with the results of a study of the history of the emergence and functioning of the Russian idiom в никуда “to nowhere”, which is a substantiated pronominal adverb of place никуда (“nowhere” or “anywhere” in different contexts) with the preposition of direction в (“to”). The idiom в никуда “to nowhere” is part of the expressive means of various styles of the modern Russian language, including colloquial speech and journalism, and the expressiveness of this idiom is due to the unusual, “irregularity” of its construction, which, in principle, is not typical for Russian speech. The analysis of the National Corpus of the Russian Language (NRC) showed that the idiom в никуда “to nowhere” is as stable as poeticism. In modern Russian, it is much more frequent in the poetic subcorpus of the NRC than in other subcorpora. The unit under study can be found in the works of poets of all directions, including such well-known ones as Brodskiy, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Slutskiy, Heinrich Sapgir, Boris Ryzhiy, etc. Further, for the first time among the texts of the corpus, the described unit is found in the work of the symbolist poet Ivan Rukavishnikov, written no later than 1910. At the same time, in the first decades of its existence, unlike today, the unit в никуда “to nowhere” is found exclusively in poetic contexts and only from the late 1930s penetrates into everyday and journalistic discourses. The study was carried out using such methods as corpus analysis, the method of calculating the overall frequency of a lexeme, which in this case was applied to an idiom, and the source study method. The material was NRC data and Google.books collections. The history of the idiom в никуда “to nowhere” demonstrates the mechanism of the penetration of poeticisms into the national language.

ТРЭВЕЛ-ЖУРНАЛИСТИКА К.Д. БАЛЬМОНТА НА СТРАНИЦАХ ЖУРНАЛА "ВЕСЫ" (ОЧЕРК "В СТРАНАХ СОЛНЦА")

The article analyzes the travel journalism of K.D. Balmont. In 1905, the famous symbolist poet turned to travel journalism for the first time. The essay “In the Countries of the Sun” described his journey to Mexico, primarily Mexican antiquities. The essay was published in the magazine “Libra” (“Vesy”), which expressed the literary position of the symbolists. However, despite Balmont’s belonging to the symbolists, they practically ignored the essay and considered it a symptom of Balmont’s creative crisis.

L. N. TOLSTOJ I F. M. DOSTOJEVSKI KAO PRETEČE RUSKE RELIGIJSKE FILOZOFIJE

This paper examines the main theses of L. N. Tolstoy and F. M. Dostoevsky, expressed in works, drafts and letters, and became the cornerstone in the formation of Russian religious philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries. Despite the fact that in the works of Lev Tolstoy and F. M. Dostoevsky it is impossible to find a dissected and detailed philosophical or theological system, their contribution to the development of Russian religious philosophy cannot be over- estimated, as evidenced by the works of S. N. Bulgakov, D. S. Merezhkovsky, P. A. Florensky, V. V. Rozanov, Vyach. Ivanova, L. I. Shestov, A. L. Volynsky, S. A. Askoldov, V. V. Zenkovsky, N. O. Lossky, etc. The comprehension of two great writers of the 19th century is a reaction of the turn-of-the- century era to cultural, social and historical circumstances that led to new needs and ques- tions, and also forced a reassessment of the value system. In this context, the article shows that the concept of „goodness”, to which Leo Tolstoy repeatedly returned, has again become relevant among Russian religious philosophers. Religious philosophy itself in the image of Tolstoy found its almost tactile confirmation, if we take into account the clearly protruding bonds between the writer’s life and his work. On the other hand, Dostoevsky’s work found a greater response due to his commitment to a more orthodox understanding of Christianity with a clearly expressed neo-mythologization. The study examines the most important artistic principle of Dostoevsky called „realism in the highest sense”, which played an important role in the development of symbolist poetics.