On Ideological and Aesthetic Program of “Herald of Literature and Art” of Nikolay Adonts

Among the first literary-and-art magazines of the late XIX – early XX centuries, which had played a noticeable role in nurturing aesthetic tastes of educated Armenians, one should name “Բանբեր գրականության և արվեստի [Herald of Literature and Art]” (Saint-Petersburg, 1903-1904) under the editorship of the outstanding Armenian historian and philologist Nikolay Adonts (Nikoghayos Ter-Avetikyan, 1871-1942). The ideological and aesthetic program of “Herald” was of a pronounced decadent nature, and this was declared both in the editor’s introductory note, signed by Nikolay Adonts, and in his article “Literary Essays: Decadence and Symbolism”. The same position was also held by the anonymous commentator of the art album, concluding the magazine, where, along with the works of such masters of Western European and Russian visual art as Dante-Gabriel Rossetti, Eugene Carriere, Arnold Böklin, Franz Stuck, Hans Thoma, Friedrich Kaulbach, Leon Bakst and others, paintings by Armenian artists were reproduced as well. However, only the works of E. Carriere’s pupil Arminia Babayan and F. Kaulbach’s pupil Vardges Surenyants could stand the proximity to the Europeans. Vardges Surenyants participated in selecting illustrations for “Herald”, too, giving preference to the Munich school of Jugendstil, with the early examples of which he had become acquainted in his student years in the Bavarian capital. The same spirit of Munich Jugendstil marked the graphic design of the magazine. The ideological and aesthetic program of Nikolay Adonts’s “Herald” was close to a number of foreign and Russian art editions, such as “La Revue blanche” and ”Art et décoration” in France, ”Pan”, ”Jugend”, ”Ver Sacrum”, ”Insel” in Germany and Austria, ”The Yellow Book” in England and particularly – “Mir iskusstva [World of Art]”, coming out in Saint-Petersburg from 1898. It ceased to exist in 1904, the same year as Nikolay Adonts’s magazine.