Recoding, Reaccentuation, Creative Association (Topos of the Incomplete Discoveries of Precursors in the Works of Russian Modernists)

Abstract

The article focuses on cultural transfer — i. e. the process of “reformatting,” which ideas, texts and authors inevitably undergo while getting into a foreign context. Based on the analysis of Russian modernist literature, which intensively assimilated the ideas of Western literature, the article shows how major cultural phenomena became a “productive basis” both for literary achievements of equal merit and for “popular,” imitative ones. The paper draws particular attention to the fact that even early writings of some of Western European authors gained more popularity in Russia than in their home countries. However, due to the intensity of literary and social life in Russia in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the readers’ receptivity to literary novelties also enhanced. Russian modernists turned to their European “teachers” in order to resolve new issues, but at the same time they reinterpreted them. The formation of Russian modernist aesthetics went hand in hand with a revision of aesthetic and ideological principles of European authors, and discussions about the ways of further development of Russian literature and the role, which the “transplantation” of the latest achievements of Western culture played in it, generated the basis for the first manifestations of the Russian version of modernist aesthetics.

Keywords

• russian modernism
• reception of western european culture
• translations
• literary reputations