Филологический класс (Apr 2022)
A Urals Knight of Symbolism: The Case of Sergey V. Vinogradov
Abstract
Modernism and modernist tendencies in the creative activity of local authors is one of the understudied areas in the Urals literature history at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Modernism is considered to be an insignificant literary movement in the Urals literature. However, detailed attention to his most active supporters among poets, writers, journalists and critics proves the opposite. This article is devoted to the creative heritage, artistic and aesthetic views and literary contacts of the famous Ural publicist, critic and ture of the early 20th century is determined. Special attention is paid to his understanding of symbolism in relation to the paradigm of the realism of the “populists” (narodniks), actively criticized in his articles. The author argues that Vinogradov’s symbolism did not have a philosophical and aesthetic foundation but stemmed from the same tasks of education and “sociality” that had become entrenched in regional literature. Particular attention is paid to Vinogradov’s relationship with his contemporaries, in particular with F. Sologub whose works became a guiding star for him. For the first time, the appendix to the article contains the full text of Vinogradov’s letter to Sologub dated October 27, 1916 (their personal acquaintance took place during Sologub’s tour of the Urals in 1916). This letter is a proof of the difficult conditions in which modernism developed in the Urals. At the same time it was often newspapers that, criticizing modernism, had assumed upon themselves the function of translating “public opinion”, while interests in it among the readers was strong and stable until the end of the Civil War. Vinogradov’s heritage, the number of publications of his articles and decadence feuilletons (or prose miniatures) in Ekaterinburg newspapers and magazines, their ideological, thematic, plot-driven and imagery homogeneity are proofs that modernism is an underestimated movement in the Urals literature. Vinogradov’s literary and critical work is one of the cases of a bold, self-sufficient, erudite statement by a writer, poet and symbolist critic who grew out of the left-democratic core of regional newspaper literature.
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