both the power of the individual unconscious and forces operating at the level of the collective unconscious that shape national history. Russian Symbolism's view of history often tended towards the eschatological: national or social redemption is possible, but depends for its realization on an unavoidable outburst of violent instincts and cosmic bloodletting. Such outbursts reveal a repetitive vitality evident in the course of national history (Bar-Yosef 151-2).
Along the same lines, Kelly notes that the Russian Symbolist movement "that dominated Russian poetry between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 was predominantly Slavophile and apocalyptic in tone" (Kelly 45).
Hippius's 1901 poem "The Seamstress" is consistent with a line of thought that seeks correspondence between physical and spiritual realms but that also reaches toward vibrant Romanticist images, as for example when the daydreaming drudge dissociates from the tedium of piecework on fabric doubtless intended for a fine lady: "All things flow into each other. / But each has a mark of its own; / I fasten on objects, and wonder / What may lie hidden beyond" (Gippius 167). What is "beyond" is fundamentally ambiguous, although the element of religious meditation seems implicit: Does the poet mean beyond the walls of the sewing room or beyond the limits of life itself, circumscribed in the case of the seamstress by the piecework but also circumscribed for the whole of humanity by the limitations of mortality.
...