Idealism and Decadence in Russian Symbolist Poetry

Abstract

Statements of doctrine by Symbolists both in France and in Russia indicate that the literary movement was based on a form of philosophical idealism, often Neo-Platonism. But its theoreticians were silent about the decadent themes which appear in Symbolist poetry. Symbolists liked to represent themselves as attuned to the ineffable—or if mystics, to the divine—but their works reveal an inclination to philosophical pessimism and other forms of melancholia. Indeed, a tension between belief and cynicism can be noted in their works which resembles, and sometimes overlaps with, a juxtaposition of good and evil. Among the French, Charles Baudelaire called the opening section of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) “Spleen et Idáal.” Paul Verlaine dedicated his collections of verse alternately to Christian ideals of purity, as in Sagesse (1881), and to self-indulgent bohemianism, as in Parallélement (1889). Stáphane Mallarmá's satyr in “L'Apràs-midi d'un faune” (1876) is the emblematic representative of amorality brought to glimpse the world of Platonic Ideas. And Joris-Karl Huysmans's archdecadent hero, des Esseintes, exhausted himself in sensual delights before being brought near to a Catholic conversion.