Symphonism as a dialectic in the poetry of the Russian modern

R. Wagner and F. Nietzsche presented the symphony as a highest form of music that achieves a balance of Dionysian and Apollonian principles. Symphonism is based on the principle of continuity of thematic development. Russian modernism transferred symphonism to the field of verbal artistic creativity. A. Bely philosophically identified music as pure movement and contrasted it with an immobile reality. In the “Snowstorm Cup” the poet applied the symphonic principle of development, replacing melodic themes and motifs with verbal ones. V. Biyusov in the poem “The Rite of Night” carried out a formal stylization of the sonata-symphonic cycle with its thematic contrast and four-part composition. E. Guro based the poem “Concert” on the symphonic development, while thematically focusing on the “Snowstorm Cup”. B. Pasternak in the essay “Ordering drama” not only used the techniques of musical composition, but also laid the basis of thematism on the philosophical concepts of A. Bely, reality and movement. During their development, two more themes appeared: life and the composer Shestikrylov. The resulting four-component system has a dialectical nature: it is a “tetractyde”, described by A. Losev in the 1920s during the reconstruction of ancient dialectics. The four principles of the tetractyde - one, the other, becoming and fact - correspond to the four themes of the “Order of Drama”. Stylizations of the musical-symphonic cycle were often carried out in post-symbolism. I. Severyanin likened the composition of such a cycle to the construction of his collection “The Boiling Cup”. V. Sirin - Nabokov reproduced the structure of the sonata-symphonic cycle in the composition of the book “The Return of the Chorb”. Symphonism and dialectics in their unity became the foundation of philosophy and art of the post-symbolist period of Russian modernism.