Institutions of Russian modernism. Conceptualization, publication, and the reading of symbolists

Symbolism became the first and central direction of Russian modernism, having made a real revolution in the literature and artistic life of Russia of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. During the years of dominance of realistic prose with its installation on the reproduction of life truth, it was difficult to imagine something more opposite to such literature than symbolist poetry. How did this transition occur? Why was Valery Bryusov played a leading role in the process of becoming modernism in Russia and his projects? How was the new type of reader formed and what significance for the symbolist "brand" had the covers of books? These questions were in the focus of the attention of the American literary critic Jonathan Stone. Turning to the peripheral seemingly characters and phenomena (such as, for example, the poetry of Z. Fuchs - one of the literary masks of Bryusov), the author compares them with similar phenomena of Western European modernism and describes the complex process of institutionalization of Russian symbolism. Jonathan Stone, a historian of literature, teaches at the college of Franklin and Marshall, the author of works about Alexander Blok, Valeria Bryusov and Mikhail Bakhtin