The end of the old century and the beginning of a new, controversial era of decline and prosperity is the time that gives rise to geniuses. Prominent poets of the Silver Age: Osip Mandelstam, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Maximilian Voloshin, Vladislav Khodasevich, Andrei Bely, Innokenty Annensky, Igor Severyanin, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Nikolai Gumilev and many others, often during their lifetimes, were irreconcilably feuding among themselves on the ground. inconsistencies of opinions on the prospects for the development of Russian philosophical thought, religion and their influence on art. However, over time, all these names merged for us into a single symbol of a beautiful and turbulent era. Their work began to be designated by a single concept - “poets of the Silver Age”. Not every contemporary of ours will understand what is the fundamental difference between the concepts of philosophy of art of that time, and why they received such a resounding common name.
The concept of the “Silver Age” associatively refers us to the poetry of the Golden Age - the first third of the 19th century, when Alexander Pushkin and his classmates in the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum created. These rebels and upstarts (in the eyes of respectable citizens) turned out to be geniuses who transformed the cultural and political face of Russia. The heirs of this grand revolution were the Russian poets of the Silver Age. But if the creators of the Pushkin era gave rise to a new form of Russian literature, created a harmonious modern language, then at the end of the 19th century people of art encroached on the inner content of the word, began to experiment with meaning and sound, trying to penetrate the hidden secrets of the language, its psychological essence, the secrets of emotional influence .
Intense struggle, a sense of decline and hope for a revival, a challenge to outdated traditions, the search for new ways of artistic expression, interest in taboo topics, occultism, religion, mysticism - all these were tried to reflect in their work the poets of the silver age. A new awakening of Russia, a premonition of a catastrophe, a passionate desire to live and a sense of hopelessness gave rise to unprecedented forms of poetic art. The destructive large-scale war, in which chemical weapons were involved, called into question the main value - the sanctity of human life, thereby undermining all moral principles.
The European democratic revolutions, a series of revolutionary events within Russia, partly provoked, partly were themselves formed by new cultural and philosophical movements. Modernism in art became a reflection of the spiritual world of people of that era, and poets of the Silver Age expressed in amazing poems the self-awareness of a person who was afraid to be crushed by the technogenic hydra of progress. Dadaism was born - one of the most popular currents of that time. E. Golyshev, V. Kandinsky - followers of Hugo Bal, who went on stage in a suit from a piece of aluminum pipe and read rhythmic and meaningless sets of letter combinations, firmly believed that modern times did not require the use of old words - technological progress destroyed the harmony of meaning and sound, henceforth, each pronounced sound will affect the emotions of a person and this is enough. So there were poems in the style of "yes, yes."
The categorical denial of former values and the inescapable emotional pain compelled new poets to seek solace in the world of fantasies and symbols. Symbolists of the Silver Age (O. Mandelstam, A. Blok, A. Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva) believed in the power of the word and denied the influence of progress on literature. With their poems they affirmed the idea that only by plunging into your inner world and finding symbols expressing the eternal ideas of God, Soul, Love and Death there, a person can be reborn to a new life.
The silver age of Russian poetry cannot be considered a chronological period in which only one new literary movement was formed. This is the era of a powerful intellectual upsurge, which has given rise to many concepts of the development of art: acmeism, futurism, imagism, Dada, new peasant poetry, etc. All of them significantly influenced the formation of new art, changing ideas about a person’s place in the world, about Progress, about God and about the Soul .