War, Revolution, Agony of the Silver Age

Abstract

The question of whether the culture of the Silver Age died a natural death or was destroyed by the Bolsheviks with the help of the Proletkult and the avant-garde, is still a case of debate. In fact, the question is not so complicated, if we recall how the poets of the Silver Age reacted to the First World War. A feeling of helplessness prevailed among them: the old cultural landmarks were already collapsing due to the fact that elements of aesthetic nostalgia were very strong in them. Futurism also gave rise to culture shock, both Western, with its cult of “liberating” war, and domestic, marked by radical pacifi sm. We must not forget that the Silver Age of Russian culture, for all its inconsistency, was oriented towards the ethos of the Western Enlightenment, which suffered an expressive collapse with the outbreak of the First World War. On the other hand, the elite foundations of the Silver Age were undermined by mass culture, not to mention the ochlocracy that reigned in 1917. As for the Proletcult, in its aesthetic foundations it was too weak to crush the “obsolete” culture. The Bolsheviks, if we recall the position of L. Trotsky, were also in no hurry to deal with the “bourgeois” cultural heritage. In general, the Silver Age was painfully fading away along with the convulsions of the entire Enlightenment.