The theme of the pastorale and the Russian Silver Age

This dissertation discusses the intuitions of the ancient forms of mimesis connected to the revival of the pastoral theme in the art and literature of the Russian Silver age. The context of this study is Walter Benjamin's ideas about the non-semiotic nature of ancient mimesis and about the possibility of non-semiotic languages. In particular, as Benjamin suggests, in contrast to the semiotic sign, the mimetic sign involves material objects - the human body and the objects of nature - as signifiers. Using Benjamin's notion of the mimetic this study analyzes key episodes in the history of pastoral leading up to Silver Age Russia. Specifically, it examines the mimetic aspects of the representation of pastoral theme in the Silver age artistic and literary legacy and compare them to the Greek and Roman classical pastoral: Virgil's "Bucolics," Longus's "Daphnis and Chloe ," and Pompeian wall painting and in the fin de siecle images of the pastoral nature and pastoral music and song in the modernist art and literature.The first half of the dissertation examines the origin of the pastoral tradition in the Greek and Roman classics. The first chapter focuses on the settings of the classical idyll, namely its idealized landscape locus amoenus. It discusses the urban and rural aesthetics of the pastoral space in Greek and Roman classics and examines the relationship between the individual and nature that underlie the genre. The second chapter proposes an interpretation of the relationship of people and animals in the pastoral as a reminiscence of the traumatic experience of ritual sacrifice. This chapter's argument is that the main pastoral theme of reconciliation of species and the unity of people and animals in the Golden age myth is a response to the experiences of ritual killing, the archaic rituals that preceded the appearance of the pastoral.The second half of the dissertation deals with the revival of the pastoral as a genre and as a mindset in Russian and Western modernity. The subject of the third chapter represents an overview of the history of the pastoral theme in late eighteenth to nineteenth century Russia and compares it with European pastoral tradition. It shows that the national image of pastoral space is based on the image of the aristocratic park, a space especially intended for socially prescribed bodily (and aesthetic) practices such as strolling and sight seeing. As a result of this specifically Russian development, the national adaptation of the pastoral theme became associated with estate life rather than with wild nature. The fourth chapter discusses various aspects of the pastoral's revival in the turn of the century Russia and compares it with the theme of the pastorale in the Western fin de siecle. It analyzes the modernist development of the pastoral theme in the light of what may be called the integrative symbolism of the pastoral, or, in other words, the genre's ability to convey the symbols of integration through a harmonious relationship with the environment. This chapter demonstrates that while western Style Moderne pastoral expresses the controlling authority over nature, Russian pastorals establish harmony and equality between the subject and the setting of the pastoral. This chapter also contains a survey of the philosophic background of the Russian Silver Age stemming from the western romanticist aesthetics, in the works of Schiller and Ruskin and an analysis of complicated relationships between the pastoral mind-set and the ideologies of the Russian symbolism including the so called life-creationism (zhinetvorchestvo).