their troubled time, and one of
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
1395
his central motifs, the “Eternal Feminine,” aligned him with poets such as Bely and Blok.
Borisov-Musatov also established a short-lived but crucial school of painters, for he was the direct instigator of the “Blue Rose,” a movement which can be considered the real beginning of the avant-garde in Russian art. Apologists of Bely’s esthetics and Blok’s poetry, the Blue Rose artists, especially their leader, Pavel Kuznetsov (1878-1968), used a particular repertoire of symbols (blue-green foliage, fountains, and vestal maidens) in order to evoke the global orchestra that they heeded beyond the world of appearances. Concerned with the oblique and the intangible, they dematerialized nature and thereby heralded the radical concept of the picture as a self-sufficient, abstract unit. The Symbolist journals, Vesy (Scales,1904-1909 [last issues appeared only in 1910]), Iskusstvo (Art, 1905) and Zolotoe runo (Golden Fleece, 1906-1909 [last issues appeared only in 1910]), did much to promote their ideas and imagery.
Reference to the Symbolist heritage helps to explain a number of subsequent developments in Russian art, especially the abstract investigations of Kandinsky and Malevich, for in many respects they expanded ideas supported by the Russian intelligentsia of the Silver Age. As Kandinsky explained in his major tract On the Spiritual in Art, the intuitive and the occult, not science, were the path to true illumination. Like the Symbolists, Kandinsky also felt that music could undermine the cult of objects and that the inner sound could be apprehended at moments of supersensitory or deviant perception. Similarly, Kandinsky was fascinated with the synthetic aspect of the esthetic experience and aspired to reintegrate the individual arts into a Gesamtkunstwerk. Reasons for this approach differed from person to person, although Benois, Diaghilev, and V. Ivanov agreed that Wagner was to be admired for the way in which he had combined narrative, musical, and visual forces in the operatic drama so as to produce an expressive whole. For Kandinsky, Wagner was a source of visual inspiration and, similarly, Skryabin’s efforts to draw distinct parallels between the seven colors of the spectrum and the seven notes of the diatonic scale prompted him to investigate the possibility of a total art.
Even as he was writing On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky also pointed the way toward new esthetic criteria, for he emphasized the value of the primitive, the ethnographic, and the popular, es1396 tablishing a fragile alliance with a new generation of Moscow artists such as Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) and Mikhail Larionov (1881- 1964). Praising the color and simplicity of Gauguin and Matisse, on the one hand, and the vitality of indigenous art forms, on the other, the “new barbarians” rejected Symbolist mystery in favor of the concrete and the material. Their first major exhibition, “The Jack of Diamonds” of 1910-1911, signaled the tarnishing of the Silver Age, for it showed the vulgar and the ugly, promoting graffiti, children’s drawings, and store signboards as genuine works of art instead of the impalpable visions of the astral plane and religious ecstasy.
The destiny of the Russian Silver Age was both full and empty. On the one hand, the Symbolists left a positive construction, because some of their ideas and artifacts prefigured the linguistic and visual experiments of the avant-garde in the 1910s and 1920s, including the geometric reductions of Malevich known as Suprematism. Even the notion of a single and cohesive style joining architecture and the applied arts, promoted by the Construc- tivists in the wake of the October Revolution, can be viewed as outgrowths of the Symbolists’ concern with the total, organic work of art. On the other hand, if the Russian Symbolist poets and painters glimpsed beyond the veil, they rarely completed the voyage to the other shore. As they journeyed, they erred in bold transgressions and called for synthesis and synaesthesia as they sought a spiritual equilibrium for their uneasy era. Ultimately, if their fine antennae did pick up the celestial signals, the sound was so powerful that it caused a “d?r?glement de tous les sens”-and not just metaphorically, but in the literal meaning of that phrase. See also: DIAGILEV, SERGEI PAVLOVICH; FUTURISM; GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; KANDINSKY, VASILY VASILIEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bowlt, John E. (1982). The Silver Age: Russian Art of the Early Twentieth Century and the “World of Art” Group. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners. Brumfield, William C. (1991). The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture. Berkeley: University of California Press . Elliott, David, ed. The Twilight of the Tsars: Russian Art at the Turn of the Century. Catalog of exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, March 7-May 19, 1991. Engelstein, Laura. (1992). The Keys to Happiness. Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-si?cle Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kandinsky, Vasily. (1946). On the Spiritual in Art. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Proffer, Carl and Proffer, Ellendea, eds. (1975). The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Pyman, Avril. (1994). A History of Russian Symbolism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Richardson, William. (1986). “Zolotoe runo” and Russian Modernism. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis . Rosenfeld, Alla, ed. (1999). Defining Russian Graphic Arts 1898-1934: From Diaghilev to Stalin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Salmond, Wendy, ed. The New Style: Russian Perceptions of Art Nouveau. Special issue of the journal Experiment 7 (2001).
JOHN E. BOWLT
(1316-1353), prince of Moscow and grand prince of Vladimir.
Like his father Ivan I Danilovich “Moneybag,” Simeon Ivanovich (“the Proud”) collaborated with the Tatar overlords and secured a preferential status. After Ivan I died in 1340, Simeon and rival claimants visited the Golden Horde in Saray to solicit the patent for the grand princely throne. Khan Uzbek gave it to Simeon, who became the khan’s obedient vassal and was thus able to wield at least limited jurisdiction over rival princes. He also obtained the khan’s backing for his campaigns against Grand Prince Olgerd of Lithuania who, in the 1340s, increased his incursions into western Russia. Simeon waged war on Novgorod and forced it to recognize him as its prince and to pay Tatar tribute to him. With the help of Metropolitan Feog-nost he asserted greater control over the town than his father had done. During Simeon’s reign the principality of Suzdal-Nizhny Novgorod replaced Tver in the rivalry for supremacy with Moscow. Although the Tatars helped Simeon fight foreign enemies, after 1342 Khan Jani-Beg refused to help him become stronger than his rivals in northeast Russia. Specifically, he prevented Simeon from increasing the size of his domain and his power as grand prince.
Simeon’s agreement with his brothers in the late 1340s alludes, for the first time, to the appanage system of Moscow. The document describes the relationship between the grand prince and his brothers and recognizes the domains that Ivan I alENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY located to his sons as hereditary appanages. On April 26, 1353, Simeon died from the plague. See also: APPANAGE ERA; GRAND PRINCE; MOSCOW; MUSCOVY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fennell, John L. I. (1968). The Emergence of Moscow, 1304-1359. London: Secker and Warburg. Martin, Janet. (1995). Medieval Russia, 980-1584. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
(1915-1979), Russian writer and Writers’ Union official who specialized in describing the Great Patriotic War.
Konstantin Mkhailovich Simonov was born in Petrograd, the son of a military schoolteacher. He entered a factory school and began working in various factories while he began writing poetry. He published his first poems in 1934 and enrolled in the Gorky Literary Institute. After graduation in 1938, he worked as a journalist and served as a correspondent for Red Star (Krasnaya zvezda) during the war.
During the war, he began to write plays and fiction about his experiences and became quite popular during the 1940s and 1950s. The novel Days and Nights described the battle of Stalingrad in a realistic, natural manner. His other work was noted for its adherence to dictates of Socialist Realism. He won numerous awards, including six Stalin prizes, a Lenin prize, and the Hero of Socialist Labor medal.
