To understand the way in which the first rumour of decadence, the cultural malaise which prepared the ground for Symbolism, reached the wider Russian public in the early 1890s, we must set the origins of Russian Symbolism in the context of contemporary art and literature and see it for what it was: a vigorous offshoot from the gnarled and ailing tree of European culture.

By the second half of the nineteenth century Europe had become unprecedentedly powerful in science, industry and technology: a small continent which had thrown a net of diverse influences over the rest of the world, passing on its faith, imposing its laws, spreading its culture. Yet long before the cataclysms of the twentieth century, a sense of oppression, a growing unease, was felt. Dostoevsky said simply: ‘everything is undermined’. ‘Life has gone dry at the source’, was how his ‘Silver Age’ disciple Vasilii Rozanov put it. Max Nordau, one of the sturdiest European defenders of positivism and progress, called it ‘a slight moral seasickness’.

The cause? Of the many causes, perhaps the most basic was the crisis of faith. It is well to remember, when we consider Russia specifically, that this easternmost bastion of Europe had passed through the age of faith, missed the Renaissance, but was exposed, through its educated upper classes, to the full force of the Enlightenment.