Page:Modern Russian Poetry.djvu/22

xvi sectarian prophet. He lived in a coffin-shaped room, papered in black, where he sought Baudelaire's "paradis artificiels" by consuming opium and smoking hashish, and whence he issued, clad in black even to his eternal gloves, to preach suicide to his fellow-students. He became in the end a holy vagabond, wearing the coarse clothes of the Volga peasant, and leading a large mystic sect. Dobrolubov's evolution is to a certain extent typical of the development of the symbolist movement. This, beginning with a revolt against the tyranny of utilitarian morality, ended with the reassertion of the ineluctable ethos and a deepened mysticism.

Synchronously with the revolution of 1905 a group of younger men within the fold began to transvalue the symbolists' transvaluations, aided and abetted by the older symbolists themselves. Chief among the newcomers were Ivanov, Bely, Blok and Voloshin. They were impatient of the cult of beauty and looked askance at the gambols of the free individual. Their poetry is passionate metaphysics, groping toward religious ultimates. Spiritually deriving from Solovyov and Dostoyevsky, they are engaged with religion and, to a large extent, with the messianic rôle of the Russian people. In Ivanov and professedly in Chulkov, mysticism is wedded to a curious collectivism. Ivanov declares his verse to be the carven crystal cup for the sacred wine of communal religious consciousness. While in France symbolism contented itself with the part of a literary method, in Russia it tended to become a philosophy and even an ethics.

Problems of technique as such are no longer in the foreground. Symbolism is now considered the