Two Models of Modernist Symbolization of the City

Russian Silver Age culture appropriates Paris as a mythopoetic and cultural-symbolic locus, encompassing two mutually reversible hypostases: the cradle of Modernity, bearing the spirit of Revolution, Liberty, and creativity, grounded in the centuries-old Latin culture, and the international movement of Modernist artists of the contemporary era. The article presents two representative models for the symbolization of Paris as the New Rome / New Babylon and the “capital of Modernism”: D.S. Merezhkovsky’s narrative poem The End of the Century (Sketches of Contemporary Paris) and Vyacheslav I. Ivanov’s cycle Parisian Epigrams. Written in the same year—1891—both works were published within poetry collections (Symbols, 1892, by Merezhkovsky; Pilot Stars, 1903, by Ivanov) that reflect distinct stages in the history of Russian Symbolism and two fundamentally different poetic types within the modernist era. Through comparative analysis, the author concludes that the artistic apparatus of both writers reveals ambivalence: Merezhkovsky’s modernist content is situated within a text that is conservative in its poetics—if not explicitly anti-Modernist, then no more than protoModernist—whereas Ivanov, in his cycle, employs the tools of a sophisticated and mature Modernist poetics, reinterpreting elements of archaized writing to construct an extended anti-modern invective. The article further traces the lines of continuity in the development of the theme of Paris’s “Romanization” (references to Rome in the image of the city), including its connection to the theme of the “end of modernism,” within subsequent Russian poetry (I. Ehrenburg, A. Akhmatova)

Construct (python library) · Modernism (music) · Narrative · Period (music) · Poetry · Situated · Theme (computing) · Historical and Modern Theater Studies · Literature and Culture Studies · Vladimir Nabokov Literary Studies