Volzhenina E.V. Russian Symbolism and mass culture: “from Beato to poster”

Abstract: The blossoming of Symbolism coincided with the formative period of mass culture in Russia. This article examines a series of instances when the elitist cultural movement and mass culture mutually influenced each other. The reaction of the Symbolists to mass modernism and to the market’s penetration into literature was severely negative, because for the poets it was obvious that their ideas were thus subjected to depreciation, while the public within Symbolism was interested only in the top stratum. Moreover, one of the periods of particularly dynamic development of mass entertainment culture came at the time of the 1905–1907 revolution and the subsequent response to it. In the Symbolist disapproval of the infiltration of the principle of “monetary barbarism” (an expression of D. S. Merezhkovsky) into the cultural sphere, in the opinion of the article’s author, can be traced the Symbolists inheritance of Vl. S. Soloviev’s idea. Despite the conceptual rejection of the market and the Symbolists’ attempts to overcome through the creative process the grip of material factors over human life, in practice the Symbolists, firstly, were interested in some demonstrations of mass entertainment culture, and, secondly, had worked on themes appealing to the urban public and hence gained its popularity. The artistic production of Russian Symbolism generated cultural products of a new kind – models of creative behaviour, – the success of which allows to conclude that Symbolism in practice experienced a significant influence from the cultural industry with which it had actively fought in theory.

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