Abstract

Although Henri Bergson's short work, Laughter, was his first to be translated into Russian in 1900, it was not until the Moscow publication of Creative Evolution in 1909 that the French philosopher gained widespread popularity among Russian writers and thinkers. As put forth in Creative Revolution, Bergson's juxtaposition of mathematical, spatialized time with the duration of "real time" a dynamic flow that cannot be measured chronologically, appealed greatly to Russian modernists interested in breaking free of traditional concepts of time and space. ;In Chapter One I discuss the attraction to Bergson's philosophy on the part of several Russian religious thinkers, most importantly Nikolai Losskii and Semyon Frank. Despite some reservation concerning Bergson's reluctance to embrace a neo-Platonic outlook on the world, these thinkers still found Bergsonian intuition appealing as a non-cognitive means for the immediate contemplation of divine reality. ;The relationship between Russian Symbolism and Bergsonian philosophy is examined in Chapter Two, which focuses on the Russian Symbolist poets, Zinaida Hippius and Andrei Belyi. Although Bergson stated triumphantly in 1903 that " etaphysics is the science that claims to dispense with symbols," some Russian Symbolists nonetheless were attracted to Bergson's metaphysical intuition. ;Chapter Three deals with Bergson's possible influence on Osip Mandel'shtam, Velimir Khlebnikov and Kazimir Malevich, representatives of the three major post-Symbolist artistic movements in Russia--Acmeism, Futurism and Suprematism. In each case, be it Mandel'shtam's interest in the Hellenistic nature of the Russian language, Khlebnikov's passion for etymology, or Malevich's geometric brush strokes, some type of intellectual, material framework anchored their post-Symbolist attraction to Bergson's concept of artistic intuition. ;In Chapter Four I discuss the major Russian writer of the Absurd, Daniil Kharms, along with his early mentor, the "transrational" poet, Aleksandr Tufanov, in terms of how their appropriation of Bergsonian ideas contributed to the aesthetics of the Russian Absurd. ;Chapter Five focuses on the final discrediting of Bergson in Russia as dialectical materialism and socialist realism take center stage, sounding the death knell of Russian modernism.* ftn*Originally published in DAI Vol. 57, No. 5. Reprinted here with corrected text