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Quote by Dmitry Merezhkovsky

“Now the final dogmatic veil has been eternally torn away, the final mystical spirit is being extinguished. And here stand today's people, defenseless-face to face with the indescribable gloom, on the dividing line of light and darkness, and now no one can protect his heart any longer from the terrifying cold drifting up out of the abyss. Wherever we might go, wherever we might hide behind the barrier of scientific criticism, we feel with all our being the nearness of a mystery, the nearness of the ocean. There are no limits! We are free and lonely... No enslaved mysticism of a previous age can be compared with this terror. Never before have people felt in their hearts such a need to believe, and in their minds comprehended their inability to believe. In this diseased and irresolvable dissonance, in this tragic contradiction, as well as in the unheard-of intellectual freedom, in the courage of negation, is contained the most characteristic feature of the mystical need of the nineteenth century. Our time must define in two contrasting features this time of the most extreme materialism and at the same time of the most passionate idealistic outbursts of the spirit. We are witnessing a mighty and all-important struggle between two views of life, between two diametrically opposed worldviews. The final demands of religious feeling are experiencing a confrontation with the final conclusions of the experimental sciences. The intellectual struggle which filled the nineteenth century could not but be reflected in contemporary literature. ("On The Reasons For The Decline And On The New Tendencies In Contemporary Literature")”

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Dmitry Merezhkovsky

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“From the fourteenth to the nineteenth century we have merely been expending the incalculable treasures discovered then and using up the great supply of energies gathered up to that time. Hence, modern history is the antithesis of the Middle Ages; man no longer wants to keep silent about himself: he hastens to express to others every slightest feeling and every new thought he may have through the medium of colors or sounds and, without fail, by means of the printing press. One might say that just as man studiously effaced himself up to the fourteenth century, so he becomes garrulous once he crosses into that century and all the succeeding ones. Not only what is wise, not only what is noble, but also what is ridiculous, stupid, and hideous in himself he couches in poetry and prose, sets to music, and would very much like, but he is unable, to express in marble and to fix within architectural lines. It is remarkable that architecture - that kind of impersonal art, that form of creation in which the creator is merged with his epoch and people, in which he does not rise above them, nor set apart his own I on their background - declines, as soon as we enter modern history, and not once during this period does it rise to the sublime or the beautiful. ("On Symbolists And Decadents")”

ArchitectureDecadenceDecadentsSymbolist
Author:Vasily Rozanov
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“In essence the entire generation at the end of the nineteenth century bears in its soul that same reaction against the suffocatingly dead positivism which lay on hearts like a stone. It is quite possible that they will perish, that they will not succeed in accomplishing anything. But others will come and will carry on, all the same, their work, because this work is vital... Symbols must naturally and effortlessly emerge out of the depth of reality. But if the author unnaturally invents them in order to express some idea or other, they will be transformed into dead allegories which arouse nothing other than repulsion like all that is dead. ("On The Reasons For The Decline And On The New Tendencies In Contemporary Literature")”

DecadenceDecadentsSymbolist
Author:Dmitry Merezhkovsky
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“Before us is mighty, so to speak, transformative and preparatory work. From a period which is creative, immediate and elemental, we must proceed to a period which is critical, conscious and cultural. These are the two worlds between which exists the entire abyss. The contemporary generation has the misfortune of being born between these two worlds, before this abyss. Herein is explained its frailty, diseased anxiety, hungry search for new ideals and a certain fateful impotency in all of its efforts. The best youth and vigor of talent is not expended on vital creativity but on an internal destructiveness and struggle with the past, on the passage across the abyss to that land, to that shore, to the frontiers of a free and divine idealism. How many people are perishing in this passage or are losing their strength irrevocably!... ("On The Reasons For The Decline And On The New Tendencies In Contemporary Literature")”

DecadenceDecadentSymbolistImpressionist
Book:Silver Age of Russian Culture
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“It was during this final Parisian period of Rodenbach's life that his literary absorption in Bruges really rose and flowered. Bruges-La-Morte was the Paris literary sensation of 1892, and he followed it with La Vocation in 1895, and Le Carilloneur (translated as The Bells of Bruges) in 1897. This kind of immersion at a distance is hardly unknown - think of Joyce, minutely anatomizing Dublin in Ulysses while living in Trieste - but it is also quintessentially Symbolist in its concern with the richness and plenitude of absence: 'The essence of art that is in any way noble is the DREAM,' wrote Rodenbach, 'and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished, unattainable.' (Introduction)”

SymbolismSymbolist
Book:Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories
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“She died because we are satisfied with mediocrity and consider needless deaths and suffering as necessities for our way of life,’ Sol replied coldly. ‘Do we mourn that our ineptitude claims a soul? No, we attribute the loss to actions of forces beyond our ken. We venerate the miraculous survival of a child instead of asking why our society is built on pointless deaths.”

Society QuotesThe Black LibraryNecromunda
Book:Fire Made Flesh
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