Writing and Reimagining the Silver Age

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The Silver Age and its aftermath – an intensely creative era succeeded by a regime which did not take kindly to the avant-garde – were times of shifts in culture and perspective: both place and time matter here as dislocation was both geographical and temporal.
Bely’s Petersburg, specifically the scene in Egypt at the end of the novel, provides a meditation on surviving but decaying objects, notably mummies. Egypt offers Russians a place from which to view their homeland with aesthetic distance. Writing involves both the “exhumation and mutilation of literary tradition and the attempt to achieve immortality and freedom from decay.” In the case of the Symbolists and avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century we note a more political application of those ideas. There is a pivot from pre- to post-revolutionary theater in this context; Evreinov’s 1920 recreation of the storming of the Winter Palace proves to be a crucial meeting of Symbolism and Soviet mythology. In the neglected literary movement “Paris Note,” the Russian White émigré culture begins to incorporate French literary traditions into new, specifically Russian diasporic works. Lidia Chervinskaya merits close examination, providing an example of work within intercultural spaces. Teffi’s “Istanbul in the Sun” sketches, written during her sojourn in Turkey, display an immediacy of experience while remaining highly attuned to the stages of exile. The émigré advances, as revealed through changes in tone and language, from initial resistance, even contempt, to openness and an embrace of the city of exile.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Catherine Le Gouis, Mt Holyoke College

Papers

• On the ‘On the Instruction of Duauf’: Mummification as Text in Andrei Belyj’s 'Petersburg' - Iain Viraj Cunningham, Indiana U Bloomington

• 'All of Russia is Acting!': The Role of Symbolist and Avant-Garde Theater in Early Soviet Myth-Making - Rebecca Cravens, Indiana U Bloomington

• The Paris Note as an Intercultural Dialogue: Russian White Émigré Poets Between Two Worlds - Tatiana Ulanova, U of Arizona

• How to Be an Exile: Place and Internality in Teffi’s ‘Istanbul in the Sun’ - Michele A. Berdy

Discussants

• Carol R. Ueland, Drew U

• Vincent Zubrow