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Shifting Peripheries: The Case of Russian Symbolism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 August 2019
Abstract
The influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on Russian symbolism has not been adequately explored in the significant body of scholarship dedicated to it. To give but a few examples, Pre-Raphaelite motifs such as the enigmatic female figure, a jewel-toned palette, and elements drawn from a mythical European past widely appear in Russian symbolist poetry and painting. Drawing upon archival research, this article demonstrates that the symbolists did not simply borrow these motifs in passive imitation, but that they arose out of the symbolists' substantive engagement with modernity itself. Tracing the genealogy that links symbolism to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the article develops a transactional model of influence that encourages us to think of the development of Russian modernism with greater nuance. By destabilizing the notion of the Russian symbolists' marginal position in relation to western Europe, this investigation provides a theoretical challenge to the notion of Russia's peripheral modernity.
- Type
- Visions of Russian Modernism: Challenging Narratives of Imitation, Influence, and Periphery
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019
References
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82. One cannot help but remember the prologue to William Morris’s epic poem The Earthly Paradise (1868) that in a similar way bemoans the London that is no more: Forget six counties overhung with smoke / Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke / Forget the spreading of the hideous town / Think rather of the pack-horse on the down / And dream of London, small, and white, and clean / The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green; Morris, William, The Earthly Paradise: A Poem (London, 1890), 3Google Scholar.
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87. “Trouble is beating its wings” (Krylami b΄et beda), a line in the fifth stanza of “The Scythians,” is an allusion to a similar metaphor in the “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign,” Blok, Sobranie Sochinenii, 2:253.
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