ABSTRACT
The Russian Symbolist movement, predominant at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, praised metaphor as a central device in its stylistics, strongly impacted by a Baudelairean vision of the world as full of innumerable correspondances across nature’s colors, sounds and smells. Symbolist artists, just like their Western European counterparts, drew attention to “music and nuance, paradox and oxymoron, dream and symbol” (Pyman 11). They perceived material reality through the senses and considered it to be full of tangible representations of phantasms that pointed to higher realities. In its attempt to escape the apocalyptic fin de siècle moods, Symbolism engendered a world in which “an Arcadian landscape of pristine myth and fable” seamlessly blended with “a utopian synthesis of art, religion and organic life” (Bowlt 67). The symbolist universe, where ghosts and people could seep through each other’s realms, “inextricably linked material realia to its superior double of ideal realiora1 via a fluid transmutation” (Kostetskaya 413).
