Original title В безбрежности Publication date 1895 Originally published 1895 Genre Russian symbolism Preceded by Under the Northern Sky | Language Russian Followed by Silence Country Russian Empire | |
Media type print (Hardback & Paperback) Similar Let Us Be Like the Sun, The Knight in the Panther's, Polnoe Sobranie Stihotvorenij |
In Boundlessness (Russian: В безбрежности, V bezbrezhnosti) is a second major poetry collection by Konstantin Balmont, first published in 1895 in Moscow. Following Under the Northern Sky, it features 95 poems, some of which bear first signs of the author's experiments with the Russian language's musical and rhythmical structures he would later become famous for.
The book came with an epigraph from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: "Kiss the earth and love tirelessly and insatiably; love everyone and everything, keep seeking delight and ecstasy." Balmont read Crime and Punishment at sixteen, and The Brothers Karamazov a year later. "It gave me more than any other book I've ever read," he later wrote of this novel.
The initial reviews by mainstream critics were lukewarm, but the Symbolist faction of the Russian artistic community embraced the book as an innovative work. In retrospect it is regarded as an important artistic statement that in many ways shaped the face of Russian literary modernism.