Russian symbolism was an intellectual, literary and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It arose separately from West European symbolism, and emphasized defamiliarization and the mysticism of Sophiology.
Alexandre Benois, Illustration to Alexander Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman, 1904. The Russian capital was often pictured by symbolists as a depressing, nightmarish city.
Vsevolod Meyerhold in his production of Alexander Blok's Puppet Show (1906)
Mikhail Nesterov's painting The Vision of the Youth Bartholomew (1890) is often considered to mark the inauguration of the Russian Symbolists.
Alexandre Benois designed symbolist sets for Stravinsky's Petrushka in 1911.
Sophiology is a controversial school of thought in Russian Orthodoxy which holds that Divine Wisdom is to be identified with God's essence, and that the Divine Wisdom is in some way expressed in the world as 'creaturely' wisdom. This notion has often been understood or misunderstood as introducing a feminine "fourth hypostasis" into the Trinity.
Icon, Theotokos as Sophia, the Holy Wisdom, Kiev (1812)