Symbolism. Nathalia Brodskaya

Zola, himself, was saved by a marvellous writer’s instinct – the Impressionist-Symbolic novel will build strong its work of subjective distortion from this axiom: that art should seek in the objective only one simple, extremely brief starting part.

      Witold Pruszkowski, Falling Star, 1884.

      Oil on canvas.

      The National Museum, Warsaw.

      I. Symbolism in Literature

      Carlos Schwabe, Sadness, 1893.

      Oil on canvas, 155 × 104 cm.

      Musée d’Art et d’histoire, Geneva.

      Crucial transformations in the concept of man and of the world caused the emergence of new tendencies in literature, the field that always reacts the quickest to the changes in social surroundings. Precisely, literature has always possessed the prerogative of ideology formation in a society. Painting has always been connected with literature the most closely since the Renaissance. Literature has created the background for the appearance of new trends in fine arts.

      At the close of a century, the interest in literature increases extraordinarily. Its scope widens, the writers of many countries are drawn to it. By 1886 France had learned of the latest achievements of Russian literature – Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Scandinavian countries had opened a new world for the French in the works by Ibsen, Hauptmann, Strindberg. In the eighties, in Paris, the fascinating adventure novels of the Englishman Stevenson, Treasure Island and The Master of Ballantrae, were printed; after them, readers acquainted themselves with his The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which allowed them to peer into the sphere of man’s unbelievable possibilities, and into the mysteries of his subconscious. One after another, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s works were published, and Bergson’s philosophy astounded contemporaries. At the threshhold of the new century works by Freud and Jung appeared. Belles-lettres embraced the unusually wide world in the geographical aspect as well, novels by Loti, Kipling, Conrad beckoning the reader to far away, unexplored lands, and now it did not seem impossible. At the close of the century The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and, lastly, The War of the Worlds by the Englishman H. G. Wells were published in France; Wells thought that man’s fantasy was unable to invent that which could not be accomplished in life. His works seemed to sum up the century, foretelling inconceivable cataclysms.

      It can be said of fin de siècle French literature that it was at the forefront of realism. The “natural school”, the most consonant with the paintings of Impressionism, had not yet yielded its position by the end of the century. The fame of Flaubert, who died in 1880, was growing; the novels of Maupassant, the Goncourts, Daudet, and, of course, Emile Zola, who remained one of the important figures in the public life of France, continued to be published. Zola gathered writers in his house in Medan, and published an anthology of their works. His noble speech in Dreyfus’s defence drew loyalist society’s hate upon himself. However, literary realism had already passed its apogee and was gradually becoming the property of the classics. The society’s indignation was now addressed to a new generation in literature. In the seventies, simultaneously with “naturalists”, such names as Rimbaud, Verlaine, Leconte de Lisle and Huysmans were appearing more and more often in the press. In 1876 L’Après-Midi d’un faune by Stéphane Mallarmé was published, having become the cause for the creation of one of the most remarkable compositions by Debussy – Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un faune – in 1894. Music, together with literature, affirmed the new in art – that which scared a society hardly used to naturalism. In 1884 Huysmans’ novel Vice Versa was published. The author broke up with his friends from Medan, extolled Mallarmé and the artists close to Symbolism – Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon.

      John White Alexander, Isabel and the Pot of Basil, 1897.

      Oil on canvas, 192.1 × 91.8 cm.

      Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

      Edward Burne-Jones, The Wheel of Fortune, 1883.

      Oil on canvas, 200 × 100 cm.

      Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

      Edvard Munch, Jealousy, 1895.

      Oil on canvas, 67 × 100.5 cm.

      Rasmus Meyer collections, Bergen.

      On 18 September 1886, the significant year of the Impressionists’ last exhibition, in the appendix to the newspaper Figaro, “The Manifesto of Symbolism” appeared, written by the poet Jean Moréas: immediately after that the term “Symbolism” came into usage. Moréas consolidated the new conception of literature, formed by that time. In 1855, when there was yet no Symbolism in literature, in the anthology The Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire published the poem “Correspondances” that sounded as the rallying-cry of the new literary school. “Baudelaire was its precursor,” Moréas wrote, “Stéphane Mallarmé infused it with the taste for the mystery of the unsaid, Paul Verlaine broke the cruel fetters of versification.” (The Poetry of French Symbolism, Moscow: Moscow University Press, 1993, p.430). From 1884, the acknowledged head of the new trend, Stéphane Mallarmé, gathered its adherents, inviting artists, critics, musicians and theatrical figures to his “Tuesdays”. The theatre Creation and Free Theatre of the producer Antoine acquainted Paris with Ibsen’s drama, staging plays by Symbolists and closely-related authors. In unison with Symbolism, there sounded the music of Richard Wagner, the German composer and philosopher, the new wave of interest in whom rose after his death in 1883. Paris experienced its first infatuation for Wagner in the beginning of the 1860s, when Charles Baudelaire, among others, appealed in support of the composer’s. Attention was riveted on Wagner again after the attempt to stage his opera Lohengrin in 1887, in L’Eden-Theatre, had provoked violent protests. His music astounded with exaltation, now with flashes of ecstasy, now with gloomy, mourning intonations.

      Paul Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1888.

      Oil on canvas, 72.2 × 91 cm.

      National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

      Wagner’s strength consisted also in myth-creation that corresponded with the Symbolists’ doctrine. In the middle of the eighties, in collaboration with Mallarmé, there appeared Revue Wagnerienne, around which the poets, artists and musicians of the Symbolism circle united. In 1891, the artist from the Nabis group, Félix Vallotton, made a remarkable portrait of Wagner using the technique of xylography. In 1889, two years earlier, there had been published the first issue of the journal La Revue blanche, to which its publishers, the Natanson brothers, attracted the writers of Symbolism and quite a number of artists close to the movement.

      It was not just the populace in general but also adherents of former schools of art, now become classical, who reacted painfully to Symbolism. In the originality of its creators, they saw unnaturalness, a whim, the aspiration to put the self outside of society. Symbolism frightened them especially because it was not current in literature or art, but a philosophical concept, another attitude to reality, a new outlook. It was generated as a result of that grandiose revolution in science which so shook and frightened its contemporaries. It seemed that everything in life found a rational explanation and no mysteries remained in nature. Symbolism opposed society’s ideas of science, aspiring to return to art the priority of the spiritual over the material. Its adherents addressed not scientific logic, but intuition, the subconscious, imagination – the forces inspiring the struggle against the absolute power of matter and laws established by Physics.

      Wassily Kandinsky,