Authors

Discussion

In the last two decades of the 19^th century and at the beginning of the 20^th century, Russian Symbolism as a literary movement was heavily influenced by its Western counterparts (mostly, French and German), and this influence has been thoroughly studied. But there is another angle of literary analysis (comparative in particular) that is equally substantive for modern research: it is the neo-Gothic discourse in the works of Russian Symbolists, including both Seniors and Juniors. Since the theme itself is immense, we have decided to focus on three authors only, whose fame and aesthetic/literary/philosophical significance is unquestionable: Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely and Leonid Andreev. Our main task is to make an attempt at a brief summary to show a clear similarity in an eschatological sense between Western (mostly, English and American) writers and Russian poets and writers from the Silver Age era (also known as Russian fin de siècle). Both Western and Russian authors regarded horror and amor fati (love of fate, or the inevitable dark destiny) as an inseparable part of any type of cultural cognition: its original interpretations can be found in the ideas of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner, Bergson’s intuitivism, contemporary scientific discoveries and world folklore.