“Extinguished Torches” of the Generation of the 1880s

This article deals with the collective myth of the generation of Russian intellectuals in the 1880s. This generation inherits the myth from Enlightenment and Romanticism about the hero Prometheus, the Christian martyr created in the “civil poetry” and journalism of the 1840s–1860s. The hero resists the surrounding “darkness” of social passivity and a repressive regime. The socially passive outsider becomes his antipode. The 1880s generation embodies a similar collision, with an active heroic nucleus standing out (the Narodnaya Volya radicals, “torches”) and the periphery that sympathises with them (passive, reflective, “children of the night” from Merezhkovsky’s allegory). The self-immolator Grachevsky became a symbolic figure for the former, and the poet Nadson for the latter. Nadson’s influence extends far beyond his era, forming a system of clichés for expressing the depressive moods of the Russian intelligentsia. These two dimensions of a generation in the literature of the 1880s are represented, respectively, by metaphors of the “fiery myth” and an unprecedented variety of the “night myth” in the lyrical poetry of the poets of “civil sorrow” and later romantics. Both myths are united by the situation of collective trauma, premature death, and the role of the intellectual as a martyr. In poetry, the allegory of the “extinguished torch” in the lyrical poetry of Nadson, Fofanov, and Merezhkovsky mediates between these worldviews. Russian poetry returns to the symbolism of fire in the early twentieth century, during the revolution of 1905–1907, and in the post-revolutionary era of the 1920s.