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Poets and Poetry in an Antipoetic Age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
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Historians of Russian literature would nearly all agree that the 1860s, the most radical period of nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life, witnessed a sharp decline in the esteem in which poetry was held, that it began to recover its prestige only in the 1880s, and that it did not fully regain its previous position until the birth of the symbolist movement. At no other time in the history of Russian literature did poetry and “aesthetics” come under heavier assault.
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References
1. D. S. Mirsky labels them the“eclectic poets” on the grounds that they compromised with their ideals,“did not believe in the rights of the poetical imagination and sought to reconcile it with the modern spirit of science and positive knowledge” (A History of Russian Literature [New York, 1949], p. 219). As Mirsky tailored his characterization for Polonsky only, I prefer to use the term“aesthetic poets” or“aesthetic writers” to designate those poets or critics who insisted upon the importance of aesthetics, certainly in poetry, and usually in other spheres of life as well. For an extensive discussion of this period in Russian poetry, see Iampolsky, I,“Nekotorye voprosy russkoi poezii 1850-1860-kh godov,” Uchenye sapiski Leningradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, no. 200, Seriia filologicheskikh nauk, no. 25 (1955), pp. 23–69 Google Scholar.
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41. Tolstoy might have justified his antinihilism to himself with the following chain of reasoning: (1) hatred of tyranny is invariably linked with love for art (as he contended when speaking of his dramatic trilogy); (2) the main threat of (intellectual) tyranny at the time came from the radical left; (3) therefore antinihilism was a natural concomitant of love for art.
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