Movements
Symbolism
Symbolism is the first and most influential movement of Modernism, which arose in French poetry of the 1880s and proclaimed the symbol as the principal means of artistic cognition: behind visible phenomena the Symbolists sought to catch a hidden, higher spiritual reality — the inexpressible, the mysterious. Their poetics tends toward musicality of verse, suggestion, hint, and the polysemy of the image. Its founders are Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé; in drama, Maurice Maeterlinck. In Ukrainian literature Symbolism was developed by Mykola Voronyi, Oleksandr Oles, and the poets of the 'Moloda Muza' and 'Ukrainska Khata', and most vividly by the early Pavlo Tychyna, whose collection Sunny Clarinets (1918) became the summit of Ukrainian Symbolism, uniting musicality, cosmic imagery, and national feeling in the phenomenon that critics named 'clarinetism'.
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Meaning, origins and distinction — side by side.
Distinction
Two currents of early modernism, opposite in orientation. Symbolism turns away from the material world toward the otherworldly and mysterious: the word-symbol hints at the ineffable, the music of the verse weighs more than direct sense, and a cult of beauty, longing and mystical presentiment prevails. Futurism, by contrast, rebels against the past and aestheticism, extols the city, the machine, speed and the future, shatters syntax and language, and shocks. Symbolism leads upward, to the eternal and ideal; Futurism rushes forward, to technology and the noise of the present.
