A Silver Lining to the Russian Clouds: Remembering the Silver Age in the 1920s and 1930s

In his 1921 commemorative speech "The Fate of Blok," given at the Dom literatorov, Boris Eikhenbaum shared his reluctance to shed "sentimental tears" over the deceased Aleksandr Blok, "for now we live and die amidst the Iron Age, when there is no time for tears." The image of the Iron Age was again evoked by Eikhenbaum later in the speech, when he suggested that the death of Blok's creativity (followed by his physical death) was symptomatic of "the fate of Blok's generation" in general. According to Eikhenbaum, its last representatives, like Andrei Belyi, if not dead already, were left only to wither away "amidst the horrors of our Iron Age."¹ Nevertheless, with the passing of time, we can see that the Soviet Iron Age was more than merciful to Blok's cultural legacy.² Indeed, as I intend to show, the cultural and political climate of this Iron Age proved to be particularly beneficial for the preservation not only of the memory of Blok, but of that of an entire epoch that rightly or wrongly received the name of the Russian Silver Age. In fact, to a great extent, the Silver Age that we know today is the product of the October Revolution and of the 20 years that followed.

What do we know about the Silver Age? What we know today, most likely, is that it is by far the most attractive period in the history of Russian culture. Like the same period in West European culture, it was characterized by an extraordinary richness in talent, diversity of themes and approaches, and, above all, by a disregard for political or moral implications that constrained artists of the older, realist tradition. For years, the Silver Age has been one of the most intensely studied topics in Russian cultural studies, and for years scholars have been struggling with its precise definition. So far no general consensus has been reached either on the exact list of its legitimate representatives or even on its exact chronology. Even the name itself is contentious.³ Such confusion, however, is only to be expected. The Silver Age – like any mythological realm – resists clear-cut definitions. It is irrelevant whether its outline coincides exactly with Russian modernism or not. As far as the Silver Age is concerned, the operative word is "Russian" and not "modernism." For the greater part of this century, the Silver Age has been that "realm of memory" (lieu de mémoire) that encompassed only the best in Russian culture, in which Russianness – if such a thing exists – became crystallized in its most attractive form.⁴

To paraphrase Marina Tsvetaeva's famous statement about Pushkin: the first thing that I learned about the Silver Age was that it was ended. And I was not alone.⁵ What makes the legacy of the Silver Age so special in the eyes of its various beholders is its extraordinary temporal frame. In contrast to the Russian Golden Age (the first third of the 19th century), the Silver Age has more distinct, if still disputed, historical and political boundaries. It arose as an antidote to the period of political and social stagnation of the 1880s and was swept away by the turbulence of World War I, the subsequent revolutions in February and October 1917, and the years of the Russian Civil War that followed.

Despite a lasting and widespread assumption that the Bolshevik Revolution consigned the Silver Age heritage to oblivion, the voluminous material about this period suggests otherwise. Today anybody wanting to write about the Silver Age has to confront the profusion of memoirs, letters, various other testimonies and works of fiction, not to mention numerous scholarly articles that have been written about the period. Many of these works were produced in the 1920s and 1930s, that is, during the first 20 years after the end of the era. Thus, having read Andrei Belyi's memoirs about Blok in 1923, Belyi's friend and long-time correspondent, Ivanov-Razumnik, described them as "a unique (in the whole of...