Aleksandr Lavrov is an original whose opinions are firmly grounded on consideration of his predecessors and on impeccably sourced and cogently assimilated archival material. This book assembles republished articles and publications, many from sources now difficult to access, and a new series central to the history of the crisis of Russian Symbolism, featuring a first publication of Valerii Briusov's correspondence with the editors of “Apollon.”
This reviewer recalls Dmitrii Likhachev, back in the so-called period of stagnation, signaling out Lavrov and Sergei Averintsev as the most promising Academic candidate of their time, a recognition that, each in his own quiet and dedicated fashion, they amply justified. A name to conjure with among the cognoscenti, Lavrov has kept a low profile, working—above all from small print and manuscript—as a patient explorer of worlds temporarily buried under the lava of Revolution, repression, and state censorship. It would have been welcome, therefore, had this treasure chest of a book been provided with an introduction, or at least an authorial statement of intent and achievement.
This does not detract, however, from the value of the book as it stands: essential reading for all students of Russian Modernism, providing, as it does, fresh insights into the lives and works of Osip Mandel'stam, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, and the Proletarian poets, as well as the major Symbolist figures such as Viacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Belyi and Valerii Briusov, and of a number of lesser poets, litterateurs, and peripheral friends and colleagues who contributed to the atmosphere of the times and made possible the creative life-style of the Russian Symbolists, their zhiznetvorchestvo.
The book opens with three articles on Ivan Oreus, the poet Konevskoi, including an extensive study of his personality and poetry, which served as an introduction to a long overdue republication of the poetry itself. From the beginning, the reader is impressed by Lavrov's extensive knowledge of non-Russian and émigré predecessors in the field, as well as his use of the archival sources for Ivan Konevskoi, particularly of the account he kept of his own reading and the variants suggested by his editing of his own printed works. The correspondence amongst his contemporaries reflects the “bon humeur” that Aleksandr Benois singled out as a characteristic of the World of Art pioneers of early modernism, which made it possible for Piotr Pertsov and the Merezhkovskiis to be enthralled by the “power and sure aim” of the young poet's temperamental but “quite mad” polemic against Zinaida Gippius's critique “of love” in Novyi put' and Mir iskusstva (91n12).
Maurice Maeterlinck, one of the writers who “demolished materialism” for Konevskoi, is central to the last of these studies and also plays an important part in the following three articles devoted to Briusov's inamorata, “the fatal trio”: Liudmila Vilkina, Nina Petrovskaia, and Maria Vul'fart, a nice study in zhiznetvorchestsvo, the very factuality of which is at times intensely moving.
