Born in Kiev, Russia, Sikorsky was the youngest of five children. His father, a medical doctor and psychologist, inspired him to explore and learn. He developed a keen interest in mechanics and astronomy. While still a schoolboy he built several model aircraft and helicopters, as well as bombs. After completing formal education in Russia and France, Sikorsky attracted international recognition in 1913 at the age of twenty-four when he designed and flew the first multimotor airplane. In 1918, Sikorsky decided to flee his native country: “What were called the ideals and principles of the Marxist revolution were not acceptable to me.” He left Pet-rograd (St. Petersburg) by rail for Murmansk and from there boarded a steamer for England. Having lost all his savings, he arrived in England with only a few hundred English pounds. He settled in the United States in 1919, eventually founding the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation, the forerunner of the Sikorsky Division of United Technologies. In the early twenty-first century the corporation manufactures helicopters for sale around the world. Continually designing aircraft, Sikorsky received many other patents, including patents for helicopter control and stability systems. He grasped the humanitarian advantages of helicopters over airplanes. “If a man is in need of rescue,” he said, “an airplane can come in and throw flowers on him, and that’s just about all . . . but a direct-lift aircraft could come in and save his life.” In the 1930s, Sikorsky designed and manufactured a series of large passenger-carrying flying boats that pioneered the transoceanic commercial air routes in the Caribbean and Pacific. See also: AVIATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cochrane, Dorothy. (1989). The Aviation Careers of Igor Sikorsky. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hunt, William E. (1998). ’Heelicopter’: Pioneering with Igor Sikorsky: Based on a Personal Account. Shrewsbury, UK: Airlife Pub. Sikorsky, Igor Ivan. (1941). The Story of the Winged-S: With New Material on the Latest Development of the Helicopter; an Autobiography by Igor I. Sikorsky; with Many Illustrations from the Author’s Collection of Photographs. New York: Dodd, Mead amp; Co. Spenser, Jay P. (1998). Whirlybirds: A History of the U.S. Helicopter Pioneers. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
From the late nineteenth century until World War I, the Russian visual, literary, and performing arts achieved such creative brilliance that observers- not least the critic and poet Sergei Makovsky (1878-1962)-described the period as a “Silver Age.” Many individuals, institutions, and ideas contributed to this renaissance: Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) and the St. Petersburg World of Art; painters Lev Bakst (1866-1924), Viktor Borisov-Musatov (1870- 1905), and Mkhail Vrubel (1856-1910); writers Kon-stantin Balmont (1867-1942), Andrei Bely (pseudonym of Boris Bugayev, 1880-1934), Alexander Blok (1880-1921), Valery Bryusov (1873-1924),
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and Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949); the Ballets Russes; the new theaters with their repertoires of Ibsen and Maeterlinck; and the architecture of the style moderne-all shared the eschatological mood of the fin de si?cle heightened by the disasters of the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution.
There was a climactic and ominous sense in the culture of the Russian Silver Age, for its poetry spoke of femmes fatales and fleshly indulgence, and its painting depicted twilights and satanic beasts. Perhaps even more than the Western European Symbolists, the Russian poets, painters, and philosophers made every effort to escape the present by looking back to an Arcadian landscape of pristine myth and fable or by looking forwards to a utopian synthesis of art, religion, and organic life. For Russia’s children of the fin de si?cle, Symbolism became much more than a mere esthetic tendency; rather, it represented an entire worldview and a way of life that informed the intense visions of Bely, Blok, and Vrubel; the religious explorations of the priest, mathematician, and art historian Pavel Florensky (1882-1937); the decorative flourishes of Bakst and Alexandre Benois (1870-1960); and even the abstract systems of Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935). Bely’s novel Petersburg, Blok’s poem “The Stranger,” Vrubel’s images of torment and distress, and the galvanizing music of Alexander Skryabin (1872-1915) all express the nervous tension and febrile energy of the Russian Silver Age.
Its most original artist was Vrubel, whose fertile imagination produced disconcerting pictures such as Demon Downcast (1902, Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow; hereafter “TG”). While the definitions “Art Nouveau” and “Neo- Nationalism” come to mind in the context of his work, Vrubel approached the act of painting as a constant process of experimentation, returning to his major canvases again and again, erasing, repainting, altering. His releasing of the energy of the ornament and his intense elaboration of the surface even prompted future critics to consider his painting in the context of Cubism, for his broken brushwork strangely anticipated the visual dislocation of the late 1900s.
Even so, a characteristic of the Russian Symbolists was more recreative than experimental in nature, characterized by the aspiration to restore an esthetic unity to the disciplines through the rediscovery of a common philosophical and formal denominator. To this end, they often explored more than one medium simultaneously. In keeping with
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this interdisciplinarity, the principal artistic and intellectual society with which many of them were associated was called the “World of Art.” Hostile toward both the Academy and nineteenth century Realism, the World of Art owed its singular vision, practical organization, and public effect to Di-aghilev, who in 1898 launched the famous magazine of the same name (Mir iskusstva, 1898-1904), sponsored a cycle of important national and international exhibitions, and propagated Russian art and music successfully in the West. The World of Art artists and writers never issued a written manifesto, but their attention to artistic craft, cult of retrospective beauty, and assumed distance from the ills of sociopolitical reality indicated a firm belief in “art for art’s sake” and a sense of measured grace, which they identified with the haunting beauty of St. Petersburg.
The fame of several World of Art painters, particularly Bakst and Benois, rests primarily on their set and costume designs for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909-1929), which, with its emphasis on artistic synthesis, evocation of archaic or exotic cultures, and invention of a new choreographic, musical, and visual communication, can be regarded as an extension of the Symbolist platform. The ease with which the World of Art transferred pictorial ideas from studio to stage (for instance, productions such as Cl?opatre of 1909, designed by Bakst, Petrouchka of 1911, designed by Benois, and Le Sacre du Printemps of 1913, designed by Nicholas Roerich [1874- 1947]) was indicative of a general tendency toward “theatralization” evident in the culture of the Silver Age. Here was an exaggerated sensibility, but also a conviction that artistic movement was the common denominator of all “great” works of art. This could take the form of physical movement, such as dance, rhythm, and gesture, or of abstract equivalents, such as poetical meter and music, which, for all the Symbolists, was the highest form of expression, the most intense and yet the most minimal material.
A bastion of the Symbolist cause, the World of Art encompassed a multiplicity of artistic phenomena: the consumptive imagery of Aubrey Beardsley and the stylizations of the early Kandinsky; the Art Nouveau designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Elena Polenova (1850-98); and the Decadent verse of Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1866-1941). The World of Art fulfilled the practical function of propagating Russian art at home and abroad and of granting the Russian public access to the work of modern
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Improvisation V. by Vasily Kandinsky. The abstract works by Kandinsky can be traced to the symbolism of the Silver Age. © GEOFFREY CLEMENTS/CORBIS Western artists through exhibitions and publications.
The Russian Silver Age was not confined by strict geographical or social boundaries, for it also flowered-and perhaps more luxuriously-in Moscow and the provinces. Even Saratov, a small town to the south of Moscow, became a major center of Symbolist enquiry, thanks to the activities of the painter Borisov-Musatov, who, together with Vrubel, exerted a profound and permanent influence on the evolution of Russian Modernism. Impressed by Puvis de Chavannes and the Nabis during his residence in Paris, Borisov-Musatov incorporated their monumentalism and subdued palette into his elusive depictions of such wraithlike women as in Gobelin (1901, TG) and Reservoir (1902, TG). Evoking a gentler and more tranquil age, Borisov-Musatov shared the Symbolists’ desire to escape from
