On the «Gift of Song»: Poetry and Music in Vladimir Gippius’s Aesthetics and Literary Criticism
Publication Title:
On the «Gift of Song»: Poetry and Music in Vladimir Gippius’s Aesthetics and Literary Criticism
Abstract:
The article presents the first analysis of the aesthetic views of Vladimir Vasilievich Gippius (1876–1941), a poet and literary critic at the origins of Russian decadence. The subject of the study is the “musical principle”, examined as a fundamental category of his aesthetics reflected in his historical, literary, and critical works. The study traces the evolution of Gippius's aesthetic views from the 1890s to the 1910s. Special attention is paid to the system of antitheses (“logos” and “melos”, “intuition” and “rationality”, “hearing” and “vision”) that underlie his interpretation of the creative work of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Aleksey Koltsov, Nikolai Nekrasov, Vyacheslav Ivanov. It is established that the “melodiousness” of the poetic word, contrasted with the prosaic, serves Gippius as a universal criterion for the authenticity of poetry, allowing him to distinguish live “singing” from rational “verse-making”. The author's transition to a religious-philosophical interpretation of music and singing as a way of cognition and communion with God is analyzed. It is concluded that in Gippius's aesthetics, the musical principle is endowed with an ontological status. In this system, visual perception can only provide a distorted representation of “phenomena”, whereas hearing allows penetration into the existential essence. The “gift of singing” acts as a mediator between the created world and the Divine, and true poetry is conceptualized as a form of “yearning for God” and involvement in the “singing will of the world”.
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Key words:
Russian Modernism; Decadence, aesthetics of Vladimir Gippius, Symbolism, melos, logos, metaphysics of sound, Nietzsche's suggestive poetics, theurgic aesthetics of Vyacheslav Ivanov
The DOI index:
10.17588/2076-9210.2026.3.082-095
Publication file:
