Balmont and Japan

The book tells about the trip of K. D. Balmont, a “poet-traveler ", in the country of the rising sun in May 1916. A two -week stay in Japan deeply struck the poet’s imagination: he created several "Japanese" poems, wrote an essay and essays about what he saw and translated Japanese poets - classics and contemporaries. In Japan itself, Balmont"s visit caused a wave of interest in his poetry and Russian literature as a whole.
Authors of the book, well-known philologists Konstantin Azadovsky and Elena Dyakonova, describe the journey of Balmont on a wide background of Russian-Japanese cultural rapprochement in the late XIX-early twentieth century. Particular attention is paid to the so -called "Japanism" - one of the vivid artistic phenomena of European culture, which affected many Russian writers and artists of the Silver Age