Authors

Discussion

This paper will discuss particular interest that Russian poets and writers of Serebrianyǐ vek showed in the image of Persia and its culture. I will focus specifically on Ivan Bunin, Nikolaǐ Gumilëv and Sergeǐ Esenin who, I argue, used the image of the Orient in their attempts to build their own national identity.

Scholars of this period focused on the European origins of Russian modernism (Barta and Goebel, 1991; Fink, 1999), highlighting the key role of such Western thinkers as Henri Bergson and Charles Baudelaire, as well as Paul Verlaine and Stephane Mallarme (Stone, 2007: 7), in the formation of this movement in Russia. There exists a solid view of Russian modernism as being created and shaped by the West. However, this paper will challenge this perspective by demonstrating the role of the Orient (and Persia specifically) in the formation of the movement under discussion. As Tolz (2011) outlines in her book, European scholars’ (German and Russian ones in particular) interest in the oriental world passed through various stages, ranging from admiration to complete rejection. 

By discussing how these trends were an integral part of the various modernist movements that characterized the early twentieth century in Russia, this paper will show that the choice of Persia as a representative of oriental countries in the Russian poetry of that time was far from coincidental. I will achieve this by analysing a selection of poems by Bunin, Gumilëv and Esenin. Furthermore, this paper will interpret the Persian-speaking space as going beyond Iran and including parts of Central Asia (what is now known as Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan), Afghanistan, parts of South Asia and the Caucasus (the latter two being part of the Persian-speaking space in the 19^th century). 

References

Barta, Peter I. and Ulrich Goebel (eds.). 1991. The European Foundation of Russian Modernism (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen). 

Fink, Hilary L. 1999. Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900-1930 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). 

Stone, Jonathan Craig. 2007. ‘Conceptualizing Symbolism: Institutions, Publications, Readers, and the Russian Propagation of an Idea’ (doctoral thesis, University of California). 

Tolz, Vera. 2011. Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press).