ABSTRACT
The term ‘Silver Age’ has been much used in recent years, alongside or in preference to the overlapping concept of ‘Modernism’, to characterize the period of exceptional literary activity which reached its peak in Russia in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. Neither name, in the Russian context, is very clearly defined; both have the advantage of potential breadth of reference. ‘Modernism’, it could be said, inherently connotes artistic innovation, and implies the continuity between pre-revolutionary trends and the avant-garde experimentation sustained through the first decade or so of Soviet power. Reference to a ‘Silver Age’ would seem instead to accentuate a perpetuation or restitution of previous tradition – primarily, of course, of the putative ‘Golden Age’ of Pushkin and his pleiad. The phrase has overtones of nostalgia patently inapplicable to artistic developments in Bolshevik Russia, and readily evokes an exquisite, crepuscular epoch, eclipsed by the Revolution of 1917. Though Omry Ronen has argued vigorously that the metallurgical metaphor, with its connotations of Latin poetry, is an ill-conceived fallacy, the term has been adopted here as a convenient shorthand, already too familiar to fall into disuse.
