Russian Silver Age esotericism

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Russian Silver Age esotericism is the body of occult, theosophical, and mystical interest that ran through Russian culture in the decades before the 1917 Revolution — roughly the 1890s to the early 1920s, the same span that produced the country’s last great flowering of poetry and religious thought. The term is a retrospective one. Contemporaries spoke of Symbolism, of the new religious consciousness, of Theosophy by its own name; the “Silver Age” itself is a later label for the period, and the esoteric strand within it was never a single organization but a climate, shared across salons, little magazines, and the studios of poets. To name it as one thing at all is already to look back through the catastrophe that ended it and to gather, under a single heading, currents that their carriers experienced as rivals.

What gave the climate its peculiar intensity was the ground it grew from. Two generations of the Russian intelligentsia had been schooled in positivism, materialism, and the revolutionary ethics that came with them; by the 1890s a younger cohort had turned against that inheritance with the zeal of converts, hunting for a wisdom the surface of the world was thought to conceal. They found candidates everywhere — in the German idealists, in medieval mysticism, in the Orthodox liturgy they had been raised to ignore, in the imported systems arriving from London, Paris, and Adyar. The decade of revolution and reaction from 1905 to 1907 sharpened the mood further: the loosening of censorship and the legalization of voluntary societies let occult publishing and occult clubs surface into the open, while the failure of the political hope left a vacuum that the apocalyptic and the visionary rushed to fill.

The institutions of the climate were small and permeable. Where a movement has a temple, this had drawing rooms. Vyacheslav Ivanov’s apartment in St. Petersburg, the round corner flat known as the Tower, held weekly Wednesday gatherings from 1905 where poets, philosophers, mystics, and revolutionaries argued through the night about symbol, Eros, and the new religious consciousness; the religious-philosophical societies that gathered in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev after the reforms of 1905 gave the encounter between churchmen and the literary intelligentsia a formal floor; and the publishing houses that clustered around Symbolism — Skorpion and its Moscow journal Vesy (The Scales), which ran from 1904 to 1909 under Valery Bryusov, the almanacs and little magazines that came and went — printed the verse, the manifestos, and the translations of Western esoteric texts that carried the matter from circle to circle. The esoteric strand had no center because it needed none: it moved by acquaintance, by the passing of a book, by the shared assumption among educated readers that the visible order was a script to be deciphered.

Converging currents

Several distinct strands met in that climate. The Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky — herself Russian-born, from Yekaterinoslav — circulated widely, returning to her homeland as an export of the cosmopolitan movement she had founded abroad. A Russian Theosophical Society was chartered in St. Petersburg on 30 September 1908, the first such society the post-1905 reforms made legally possible; Anna Kamensky led it as president, and its journal Vestnik Teosofii (The Theosophical Herald) ran from 1908 to 1918, carrying both translations and original Russian work to a readership well beyond its formal membership. The archived runs of that journal remain among the fullest records of the movement’s Russian phase (IAPSOP).

Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy — the “spiritual science” he led out of the Theosophical Society in the secession of 1912–13 — drew a devoted Russian following of its own, in many cases peeling away the movement’s most serious literary adherents. The poet Andrei Bely met Steiner in 1912 and gave years to him: from 1914 to 1916 Bely lived at Dornach, near Basel, among the international volunteers raising the first Goetheanum, Steiner’s vast double-domed timber-and-concrete temple, where he carved architraves and columns with a chisel as a discipline of the spirit. The building was inaugurated in 1920 and burned on New Year’s Eve 1922 — a loss that fell, for its Russian builders, in the same years as the loss of their country.

Spiritualism, with its séances and mediums, had its students among the fashionable and the bereaved; the Tarot and the Kabbalah had theirs among the more bookish occultists. And the mystical teaching that would later be carried west by George Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky took shape in these same years — Ouspensky, a Moscow mathematician already known for his speculations on higher dimensions, met Gurdjieff in 1915, and the discipline they called simply the Work, the Fourth Way, crystallized in Russia before the Revolution scattered its first circle.

Alongside the imported systems ran a current more nearly native: the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov and his heirs, with its vision of Sophia, the divine Wisdom, as a feminine principle mediating between God and the world. Solovyov (1853–1900) gave the period its founding myth and much of its imagery. In his late poem Three Meetings, written in 1898, he set down his account of three encounters with Sophia — as a boy in a Moscow church, in the reading room of the British Museum, and in the Egyptian desert outside Cairo, where, on the strength of an inner summons, he had traveled in 1875. Out of those visions he built a metaphysics of vseedinstvo, all-unity, in which the whole created order is gathered up and held in the divine Wisdom and moves toward Bogochelovechestvo, the union of the divine and the human. The systematic development of this Wisdom-theology belongs to its own current of Russian sophiology and the broader religious philosophy that grew from it; the Silver Age inherited Sophia less as a doctrine than as a presence — a luminous feminine figure who could be addressed in verse.

This native strand had a temper the imported systems lacked. It was Orthodox in its loyalties and Russian in its sense of mission, and it ran alongside the religious revival that the writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky and his circle called the new religious consciousness — a demand, against both the old church and the secular intelligentsia, for a Christianity remade to take in the flesh, the world, and history. Solovyov’s heirs carried his Wisdom-speculation into formal theology: Pavel Florensky, the priest-polymath whose The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914) wove Sophia through dogmatics, mathematics, and the imagery of the icon, and Sergei Bulgakov, who came to the priesthood from Marxist economics and built sophiology into its most ambitious system. These thinkers stood close enough to the occultists to share their vocabulary of correspondence, emanation, and feminine Wisdom, and far enough to despise the comparison; the line between a Sophia held within Orthodox dogma and a Sophia loosed into general esotericism was, for them, the whole of the matter.

The poets as conductors

The Symbolist poets were the conductors of much of this. Bely, Alexander Blok, and Vyacheslav Ivanov — the “younger” generation of Russian Symbolists, who came to the movement around the turn of the century — treated the poem as a theurgic act: language that did not merely describe the higher world but reached into it, that completed rather than represented. For Ivanov this was a formal program. He argued that genuine art ascends from the visible thing to the higher reality it figures and then descends again, bringing something of that reality back into the world, so that the symbol is not an ornament but an organ of knowledge — a gnosis worked through the image. Blok built much of his early work around the Beautiful Lady, a figure that drew openly on Solovyov’s Sophia and on the long expectation of an arriving feminine wisdom. Bely read his own art through both Solovyov’s Wisdom and Steiner’s spiritual science, and for a time tried to hold the two together. Across the period the line between poetry and prophecy thinned deliberately: the poet was reimagined as a theurge, a maker who works on reality, and the coming transfiguration of the world was something his words might help to bring about.

Scholarship has shown how thoroughly this esoteric reading saturated the period’s literature, while cautioning against flattening it. Maria Carlson’s history of Russian Theosophy and the essays Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal gathered on the occult in Russian and Soviet culture both insist that a poet’s debt to Theosophy or Anthroposophy was rarely a creed and almost never a simple one. Bely’s relation to Steiner was passionate and then bitter; Blok absorbed Solovyov’s imagery while keeping his distance from the doctrine; Ivanov drew on the whole Western esoteric inheritance without subordinating his poetics to any school. The religious philosophers, for their part, kept their distance from the occultists even where their vocabularies touched, and were quick to mark the line between Orthodox Wisdom-speculation and what they regarded as the syncretism of the Theosophists. To read a borrowed term as a confession of faith is to mistake the texture of the milieu, which traded in atmospheres and resonances at least as much as in convictions.

A climate of disputed hopes

What the figures of the period believed varied sharply, and they disputed each other openly. The disagreements were not incidental; they were the substance of the climate. Some held that Russia carried a special spiritual mission — that the East-facing, Orthodox, peasant nation was appointed to bring forth a synthesis the West could not, and that a coming age would heal the breach between matter and spirit. Solovyov’s Godmanhood, Ivanov’s hopes for a renewed communal art, the messianism that surfaces across the Symbolist generation: these were so many versions of the same expectation, that a transfiguration was near. Others read the identical signs as apocalyptic dread. Blok’s later verse turns the expectation inside out, hearing in the approaching age not a wedding but a storm; the sense of an ending pressed on the whole period and grew heavier as the war and the revolutions came. Whether the divine Wisdom was descending or the world was being torn from its hinges, whether matter was to be redeemed or dissolved, whether Russia’s mission was glory or judgment — these were live and bitter questions, and the milieu adjudicated none of them.

The occultisms themselves competed. Theosophists and Anthroposophists divided over Steiner’s break with Adyar and over his insistence on a Christ at the center of cosmic evolution; both were regarded with suspicion by the Orthodox-rooted religious philosophers, who saw in the imported systems a denial of the personal God and a flattening of the gulf between Creator and creature; the spiritualists were dismissed by the more intellectual occultists as dabblers; and the secular intelligentsia, never wholly silenced, treated the entire current as a fashionable retreat from politics into mist. The Silver Age was not a consensus but a quarrel conducted in a shared vocabulary — of correspondence, of higher worlds, of the symbol, of the feminine Wisdom — by people who agreed on little except that the surface of things was not the whole of things.

Scholarship and sources

The serious study of the field is recent, and two works anchor it. Maria Carlson’s “No Religion Higher than Truth”: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922 (Princeton University Press, 1993) is the first scholarly history of Russian Theosophy by a historian outside the movement; it traces the founding of the Russian society, the Theosophical-Anthroposophical schism on Russian soil, the polemics between the occultists and their critics, the movement’s place in the intelligentsia’s debates, and its collapse after 1917, and it is the standard caution against reading every esoteric borrowing as belief (De Gruyter Brill). The companion volume is Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal’s edited collection The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Cornell University Press, 1997), whose contributors carry the subject from the Kabbalah, Theosophy, and Anthroposophy of the prerevolutionary years through the occult survivals of the early Soviet and even the Stalin periods, and whose introduction sets Russian occultism in its pan-European frame (Cornell University Press). On the native current, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt’s account of Solovyov’s Egyptian visions reconstructs how the founding image of the divine Sophia entered Russian religious philosophy (Kornblatt 2010). For the primary material, the early works of Steiner and Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine stand behind much of what the Russian readers were absorbing; the émigré editions of Édouard Schuré, whose Great Initiates was widely read in Russian translation, carried the same matter in a more literary key.

The Revolution closes the milieu

The end was administrative as much as it was spiritual. The Bolshevik seizure of power turned a quarrel among intellectuals into a question of survival. The great expulsion of 1922 — the “philosophers’ ships” that carried Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and dozens of other thinkers out of the country — emptied Russia of the religious philosophers in a single stroke; what they had built in St. Petersburg and Moscow they rebuilt, where they could, in Berlin, Prague, and the émigré institute in Paris. The occult societies were suppressed by the new state, which regarded Theosophy and the rest as the ideology of a class it meant to destroy; Vestnik Teosofii ceased in 1918, the Russian Theosophical Society dissolved, and the few practitioners who stayed went underground or to the camps. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff carried the Work westward, the one to England, the other to a house outside Paris. Bely returned from the West to a homeland that no longer had a place for the spirit he had served, and wrote, in the Soviet years, memoirs of a world that was already historical. The salons did not migrate; they ended. What had been a living climate of magazines, studios, and disputed hopes survived, after the Revolution, only in scattered fragments — émigré print runs, the verse itself, and the recollections of the people it had thrown across Europe — a milieu that could thereafter be entered only through what it had left behind.

→ In the library: Steiner — early works (to 1910) · Blavatsky — The Secret Doctrine (1888)

→ Related: Russian Religious Philosophy Sophiology · Theosophy · Edouard Schure · Gnosis · Russian Sophiology · Theosophy Anthroposophy · Rudolf Steiner · Helena Blavatsky · Sergei Bulgakov · P D Ouspensky · Fourth Way Gurdjieff Work · Spiritualism · Kabbalah · Theurgy · Esotericism