This volume contains the first trans¬

lations of all of Gumilev’s critical prose

on Russian poetry, as well as translations
of all of his longer theoretical articles on
verse.
Nikolai Gumilev (1886-1921) was
the main theoretician of the Russian
Acmeists, the brilliant group of modem
poets of which Mandelstam and Akhma¬
tova (Gumilev’s wife) are the best-known
members. Gumilev was a productive poet
himself, a founding member of the Guild
of Poets, and even though he has not
been published in the USSR since the ear¬
ly twenties, he remains one of the most
popular poets. After the Bolshevik revolu¬
tion, he was arrested by the Cheka and
shot to death on charges of anti-revolu¬
tionary activity.
Gumilev’s critical writings are one
of the most important parts of his legacy.
This collection contains all of his essays
and reviews of Russian poetry-written
during one of the most fascinating per¬
iods of the Silver Age. Taken as a whole
they represent a sustained diary, a con¬
temporary history of events in Russian
literature—good, bad, and indifferent-
written by an intelligent and fair-minded
commentator. Especially noteworthy are
reviews of the early books by a galaxy of
famous or soon-to-be famous poets—
Blok, Balmont, Bryusov, Ivanov, Khleb¬
nikov, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Akhma¬
tova, and others-and reviews of collec¬
tions which marked the advent of new
movements, such as the Futurists in a
Hatchery of Judges.
Many of the essays included here
were originally published in the journal
Apollo, and later collected in Gumilev’s
Letters on Russian Poetry (1923). The
translations are accompanied by detailed
notes explaining all allusions, names,
dates, and specifically Russian terms.
 Nikolai Gumilev
ON
RUSSIAN
POETRY

Edited & translated by David Lapeza

Ardis Ann Arbor

Copyright © 1977 by Ardis.
ISBN 0-88233-100-0.
Published by Ardis, 2901 Heatherway,
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104.
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2018 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/nikolaigumilevonOOOOgumi
 CONTENTS

Essays
“The Life of Verse” 11
“Acmeism and the Legacy of Symbolism 21
“The Reader” 25
“The Anatomy of a Poem” 31
“On Translations of Poetry” 34

Reviews
1. (I) [Bryusov] 39
2. (II) [Sologub] 40
3. (Ill) [Balmont] 41
4. (IV) [Verkhovsky] 43
5. (V) [Bely] 44
6. (VI) [Pyast] 45
7. (VII) [Borodaevsky] 46
8. (VIII) [Gorodetsky, Borodaevsky, Sadovskoy, Rukavishnikov] 47
9. (IX) [The Almanac Death, Sukhotin, Pyast, Krechetov] 49
10. (X) [The Journal Scales, The Journal Island] 54
11. (XI) [Fofanov, Cholba, Yantarev, Simanovsky, Rem, Sidorov] 56
12. (XII) [Teffi, Ratgauz, Podovodsky] 60
13. (XIII) [Poetry in Scales] 62
14. (XIV) [Annensky, Roslavlev, Kurlov, Rotshtein, Knyazev, Cherny] 65
15. (XV) [Sologub, Solovyov, Morzov, Brandt, Gedroits] 70
16. (XVI) [Bunin, Sidorov, Verkhovsky, Negin] 75
17. (XVII) [Druzhinin, Antonov, Vrangel, Gessen, Alyakrinsky, Fedorov,
Svyatopolk-Mirsky, Astori, Shtein, Dubnova, Severyanin, Kashintsev,
LadO'Svetogorsky, Klychkov, Gofman, Khlebnikov, Kamensky, Ellis,
Livshits, Tsvetaeva, Ehrenburg] 78
18. (XVIII) [Kulchinsky, Bolshakov, Narbut, Diesperov, Zilov] 86
19. (XIX) [Ivanov] 88
20. (XX) [Northern Flowers for 1911] 93
21. (XXI) [Baltrushaitis, Ehrenburg, Arelsky, Konstantinov, Tartakover,
Konge and Dolinov, Vasilevsky, Kotomkin-Savinsky, Zuboysky] 94
22. (XXII) [Blok, Klyuev, Balmont, Verlaine, Veselkova-Kilshtet, Shershene-
vich, Genigen] 97
23. (XXIII) [Bryusov, Zenkevich, Kuzmina-Karavaeva, Ivanov] 105
24. (XXIV) Tsevtaeva, Radimov, Kurdyumov, Burnakin, Cherny, Potem¬
kin] 109
25. (XXV) [Ivanov, Klyuev, Narbut, Tsekh Poetov, Bobrinsky, Wilde,
Deich] 111
26. (XXVI) [Blok, Kuzmin] 117
27. (XXVII) [Gorodetsky, Bestuzhev] 120
28. (XXVIII) [Gurevich, Tinyakov, Zhivotov] 123
29. (XXIX) [Ivanov, Gardner, Skaldin, Solovyov, Roslavlev, Lyubyar,
Kurdyumov, Shershenevich] 125
30. (XXX) [Hatchery of Judges II] 128
31. (XXXI) [Bryusov, Severyanin, Khlebnikov, Komarovsky, Golike and
Vilborg, Annensky, Sologub] 129
32. (XXXII) [Gorodetsky, Akhmatova, Radimov, Ivanov, Khodasevich,
Chuzeville] 140
33. (XXXIII) [Levberg, Berman, Dolinov, Korona, Chrolli, Puchkov, Churilin,
Saltykov, Gagarin, Prussak] 150
34. (XXXIV) [Adamovich, Ivanov, Lozinsky, Mandelstam] 158
35. (XXXV) [Struve] 166
36. (XXXVI) [Lyandau] 167
37. (XXXVII) [“Two Obituaries: Konstantin Mikhailovich Fofanov and
Victor Victorovich Gofman] 168
38. (XXXVIII) [“Count Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoi”] 169
39. (XXXIX) [“On Nekrasov”] 171
40. (XL) [“Leaders of the New School. Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov,
Fyodor Sologub] 172

Footnotes 175

Illustrations — frontispiece

Top — Gumilev with son and wife (Anna Akhmatova)

Bottom left — Gumilev
Bottom right — Gumilev at Guild of Poets
ON RUSSIAN POETRY
 THE LIFE OF VERSE

The peasant plows, the stonemason builds, the priest prays

and the judge judges. What does the poet do? Why doesn’t he ex¬
pound in easily memorized verses on the sprouting conditions of
various grasses, why does he refuse to compose a new “Dubinush-
ka” or sweeten the bitter medicine of religious theses? Why only
in moments of faint-heartedness will he admit that he aroused
good feelings with his lyre? Is there really no place for the poet in
society, no matter whether among the bourgeois, the social demo¬
crats or in the religious community? Let John the Damascene 1 be
silent!
This is what the champions of the thesis of “Art for life” say.
Hence—Francois Coppee, Sully Prudhomme, Nekrasov- and, in
many ways, Andrei Bely.
The defenders of “Art for art” retort: “Go away, what does
the peaceful poet have to do with you.... You offend his soul, like
coffins, even now you have whips, dungeons, axes for your stupid¬
ity, enough of you, mad slaves.... For us, princes of Song, sover¬
eigns of castles of dream, life is merely a means of flight: the hard¬
er a dancer strikes the earth with his feet the higher he soars.
Whether we chase our verses like goblets, or write obscure, nearly
drunken ditties, we are always, and above all, free, and scarcely
wish to be useful.”
Hence-Heredia, Verlaine, and in our country, Maikov.
This controversy will continue many centuries more without
leading to any results, and that is not surprising, for in any atti¬
tude toward anything, whether toward people, things or ideas, we
require first of all that it be chaste. By this I mean the right of
every phenomenon to be valuable in itself, not to require justifica¬
tion of its existence, and another, higher right to serve others.
Homer sharpened his hexameters, unconcerned with anything
except vowel and consonant sounds, caesurae and spondees, and
adapted his content to them. However, he would have considered
himself a bad craftsman if, hearing his songs, youths had not striv¬
en for martial glory, if the clouded gaze of maidens had not in¬
creased the beauty of peace.
There is an unchasteness of attitude in both the doctrine of

11
“Art for life,” and that of “Art for art.”
In the first case, art is reduced to the level of a prostitute or a
soldier. Its existence has value only to the extent that it serves
goals extraneous to it. It would not be surprising if the eyes of the
gentle muses were to grow dull, and they were to develop bad
manners.
In the second case, art becomes effete, grows agonizingly
moonlike; Mallarme’s words, put in the mouth of his Herodiade,^
are applicable to it:

I love the horror of being virgin and I want

to live amidst the terror my hair inspires....

Purity is suppressed sensuality, and it is beautiful; the ab¬

sence of sensuality is frightening, like a new unheard-of form of
depravity.
No! cries the era of esthetic puritanism, of great demands on
the poet as creator, on idea or word as artistic material. The poet
must place upon himself the fetters of difficult forms (recall Hom¬
er’s hexameters, Dante’s terze rime and sonnets, the Old Scottish
stanzas of Byron’s poems) or ordinary forms, but in their develop¬
ment carried to the point of impossibility (Pushkin’s iambs), he
must, but only in praise of his God, whom he is obliged to have.
Otherwise he would be a simple gymnast.
Still, if I were to choose between the two above doctrines, I
would say that in the first there is greater respect for art and un¬
derstanding of its essence. There is a new aim imposed upon it, a
new application is indicated for the powers seething within it, even
if it is an unworthy base application—that is not important: isn’t
the cleaning of the Augean stables referred to on an equal basis
with the other great feats of Hercules? In ancient ballads it is told
that Roland was depressed when a dozen enemies rode out against
him. He could fight beautifully and worthily only against hun¬
dreds. However, one should not forget that even Roland could be
defeated....
Now I shall speak only of poetry, recalling Oscar Wilde’s
words, which horrified the weak and inspired courage in the strong:

For the material that the painter or sculptor uses is meager in com¬
parison with that of words. Words have not merely music as sweet as

12
 that of viol and lute, color as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for
us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less
sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze,
but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs, in¬
deed, alone.

And that verse is the highest form of speech, everyone knows

who, carefully sharpening a piece of prose, used force to restrain
the arising rhythm.

II

The origin of individual poems is mysteriously similar to the

origin of living organisms. The poet’s thought receives a shock
from the external world, sometimes in an unforgettably clear mo¬
ment, sometimes dimly, like conception in sleep, and for a long
time it is necessary to bear the foetus of the future creation, heed-
in the timid movements of the still weak new life. Everything af¬
fects the course of its development—a beam of the horned moon,
an unexpectedly heard melody, a book read, a flower’s smell. Eve¬
rything determines its future fate. The ancients respected the si¬
lent poet, as one respects a woman preparing to be a mother.
Finally, in the labor, like the labor of childbirth (Turgenev
speaks of this), the poem appears. It is lucky if, in the moment of
its appearance, the poet is not distracted by some considerations
extraneous to art, if, gentle as a dove, he strives to convey what
was born at full term, Finished, and tries, wise as a serpent, to in¬
clude all this in the most perfect form.
Such a poem can live for centuries, moving from temporary
oblivion to new glory, and even dead, will, like King Solomon,
long inspire in men a sacred trembling. Such is the Iliad....
But there are poems not born at full term, in which, around
the original impressions, others did not manage to accumulate, and
there are those in which, on the contrary, details obscure the basic
theme; they are cripples in the world of images, and the perfection
of their separate parts does not gladden, but rather saddens us, like
the beautiful eyes of hunchbacks. We are much obliged to hunch¬
backs, they tell us surprising things, but sometimes you dream
with such longing of the svelte youths of Sparta, that you no

13
longer pity their weak brothers and sisters, condemned by a stern
law. This is what Apollo wants, a rather frightening, cruel, but ter¬
ribly beautiful god.
What is necessary for a poem to live, and not in ajar of alco¬
hol, like some curious freak, not the half-life of the invalid in a
wheelchair, but a full and powerful life—for it to arouse love and
hatred, to make the world reckon with the fact of its existence?
What requirements must it satisfy?
I would answer in short: all.
Really, it must have: thought and feeling—without the first,
the most lyrical poem will be dead, and without the second, even
an epic ballad will appear a dull contrivance (Pushkin in his lyrics
and Schiller in his ballads knew this), —the softness of outline of a
young body, where nothing stands out, nothing is wasted, and the
definition of a statue in sunlight; simplicity—only for it is the fu¬
ture open, and—refinement, as a living recognition of the continu¬
ity of all joys and sorrows of past ages; and above all that—style
and gesture.
In style God emerges from his creation, the poet gives himself
away, this secret self, unknown even to him, and allows us to guess
the color of his eyes, the shape of his hands. And that is so impor¬
tant. For we love Dante Alighieri, the boy in love with Beatrice’s
pale face, the frenzied Ghibelline and the Veronese exile, no less
than his Divine Comedy.... By gesture in a poem I mean such an
arrangement of words, choice of vowel and consonant sounds, ac¬
celeration and deceleration of rhythm that the reader of the poem
strikes the pose of its hero, copies his facial expressions and move¬
ments and, thanks to the suggestion of his own body, experiences
what the poet himself did, so that the spoken idea becomes no
longer a lie, but the truth. Poets’ complaints about the fact that
the public, intoxicated with the music of verse, does not sympa¬
thize with their sufferings, are based on misunderstanding. The joy,
the sorrow, the despair the reader feels are only his own. To
arouse sympathy, one must speak of oneself in a clumsy manner,
as Nadson did.6
I return to the preceding: to be worthy of its name, a poem,
having the qualities enumerated, must preserve complete harmony
among them and, what is most important, be called to life not “by
irritation of a captive thought,” but by internal necessity, which
gives it a living soul—a temperament. Besides that, it must be

14
irreproachable even in their irregularity. Because, only conscious
departures from the generally accepted norms give a poem individ¬
uality, though they love to disguise themselves as unconscious
ones. Thus, Charles Asselineau^ tells of an “uncontrolled sonnet,”
where the author, consciously breaking the rules, pretends that he
does it in a burst of poetic inspiration or a fit of passion. Ronsard,
Maynard, Malherbe^ wrote such sonnets. These irregularities play
the role of birthmarks, through them it is easiest of all to recall to
mind the appearance of the whole.
In short, a poem must be a copy of the beautiful human
body, that highest level of perfection imaginable: not without rea¬
son did men create even the Lord God in their own image and like¬
ness. Such a poem is valuable in itself, it has the right to exist at
all costs. Thus to save one man, expeditions are prepared in which
dozens of other men perish. But, yet, once he is saved, he must, as
everyone else, justify to himself his own existence.

Ill

Really, the world of images is closely connected with the

world of men, but not as people usually believe. Not being an anal¬
ogy of life, art does not have an existence completely like ours,
cannot convey to us a perceptible link with other realities. Poems
written even by true visionaries in moments of trance have mean¬
ing only insofar as they are good. To think otherwise is to repeat
the famous mistake of the sparrows that wanted to peck painted
fruit.
But beautiful poems, like living beings, enter the circle of our
life; they now instruct, now appeal, now bless; among them are
guardian angels, wise leaders, tempter demons and dear friends.
Under their influence men love, hate and die. In many respects
they are the highest judges, like the totems of the North American
Indians. For example—Turgenev’s “Quiet Backwater,” where the
poem “The Upas-tree,” by its strength and remoteness, precipi¬
tates the denouement of a solitary love, painful in the Russian fa¬
shion or—Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, when “The Poor Knight” re¬
sounds like an incantation on the lips of Aglaya, mad with a thirst
to love the hero;^ or-Sologub’s “Night Dances” with their poet,
captivating willful princesses with the marvelous music of Ler-

15
montovian stanzas. ^ ^
In contemporary Russian poetry, as an example of such “liv¬
ing” poems, I will point out just a few, attempting only to illus¬
trate the above, and setting aside much that is important and char¬
acteristic. Here, for example, is a poem by Valery Bryusov, “In the
Crypt”:

You are laid out in the tomb in myrtle crown.

I kiss the moon’s reflection on your face.

Through latticed windows the circle of the moon is seen.

In the clear sky, as above us, the secret of silence.

Behind you at your pillow a wreath of damp roses,

On your eyes, like pearls, drops of former tears.

A moon beam, caressing the roses, silvers the pearls,

Moonlight circles round the ancient marble slabs.

What do you see, what remember in your unwaking sleep?

Dark shadows bend ever lower towards me.

I came to you into the tomb through the black garden.

By the doors lemurs maliciously watch over me.

I know, I know I won’t be long alone with you!

The moonlight completes its measured circle path.

You are motionless, you are beautiful, in myrtle crown.

I kiss the light of heaven on your face!

Here, in this poem, the Bryusovian passion, allowing him to

treat even the supreme terror of death, of disappearance, thought¬
lessly, and the Bryusovian tenderness, a tenderness almost maiden¬
ly, which is delighted by everything, tormented by everything, the
moonbeams, the pearls, the roses—these two most characteristic
qualities of his work help him to create an image, a copy perhaps,
of the momentary meeting of lovers irrevocably separated and for¬
ever poisoned by this separation.
In the poem “The Heliads”^ (Transparence, p. 124)^ Vya¬
cheslav Ivanov, the poet, through his sunniness and purely mascu¬
line power, so different from the lunar femininity of Bryusov, offers

16
an image of Phaethon. He transforms the bright ancient tale into
eternally young truth. There have always been men condemned to
perish by the very nature of their daring. But they did not always
know that defeat could be more fruitful than victory.

He was beautiful, proud youth,

Son of the Sun, young Sun-god,
When he siezed with firm hand
The fateful pledge of grandeur—

When from the blushing Horae,

He carried off the reins of his realm—
And the steeds struggled against the gates,
Smelling the flaming expanse!

And, freed, flew up, neighed,

Deserting the scarlet prison,
And ran with the clatter of brazen hoofs,
Obedient to the light yoke ... etc.

The “proud youth” does not appear in the poem itself, but
we see him in the words and songs of the three maiden Heliads, in
love with him, pushing him toward his doom and mourning him
“on the green Eridanus.” And agonizingly enviable is the fate of
that one, of whom maidens sing such songs!
Innokenty Annensky is also powerful, but with a power that
is not so much Manly as Human. With him feeling does not give
birth to thought, as usually happens in poets, rather the thought
itself grows so strong that it becomes feeling, alive even to the
point of pain. He loves only “today” and only “here,” and this
love leads him not only to the pursuit of decoration, but of deco¬
rativeness. His verses suffer from this, they inflict incurable
wounds upon the soul and one must fight against them with the
incantations of time and space.

What grave, dark delirium!

How turbid, moony these summits!
To touch violins so many years
And not recognize their strings in the light!

Who needs us? Who lit

17
 Two yellow, two melancholy faces?
And suddenly felt the bow
That someone took and someone merged them.

Oh, how long ago! Through this darkness

Say one thing: —are you she, she?
And the strings fawned upon him,
Ringing, but, fawning, trembled.

Isn’t it so? Never more

Shall we part—all right?
And the violin answered, “Yes,”
But the violin’s heart ached.

The bow understood everything, it fell silent,

But in the violin the echo was sustained,
And it was torture for them,
What seemed music to men.

But the man did not put out

The light until morning ... and the strings sang,
Only morning found them exhausted
On the black velvet of their bed.

To whom has this not happened? Who has not had to bow
over their dream, feeling that the possibility of realizing it has
been irrevocably lost? And he who, having read this poem, for¬
gets the eternal, virginal freshness of the world, believes that there
is only torment, even if it seems like music, he is lost, he is poi¬
soned. But are we not captivated by the thought of death from
such a melodious arrow?
Next, passing over Blok’s “Lady”—there is so much written
about her—I will say something about Kuzmin’s Chimes of Love
The author simultaneously wrote music to them, and this gave
them the mark of a certain special exaltation and elegance, acces¬
sible only to pure sounds. The verse flows, like a stream of thick,
fragrant and sweet honey, you believe that it alone is the natural
form of human speech, and a conversation or prose passage after¬
wards would seem somehow dreadful, like a whisper in the Tyut-
chevian night, like an evil spell. This poem is composed of a series
of lyrical passages, hymns to love and about love. Its words can be
repeated every day, as you repeat a prayer, inhale the scent of per-

18
fume, look at flowers. I include one passage from it, which com¬
pletely captivates our conception of tomorrow, makes it a cornu¬
copia:

Love sets out nets

Of strongest silks;
Lovers, like children,
Look for chains.

Yesterday, you know not love,

Today you’re all aflame.
Yesterday you reject me,
Today vow to me.

Tomorrow the beloved will love

And the unbeloved yesterday,
He’ll come to you who was not
Other evenings.

Fall in love, who will fall in love

When the time comes,
And what will be, will be,
What fate prepared for us.

We, like little children,

Look for chains,
And blindly fall into the nets
Of strongest silks.

Thus art, born of life, approaches it again, but not as trifling

laborer, not as peevish grumbler, but as equal to equal.

IV

A few days ago the journal The Scales, the main bulwark of
Russian Symbolism, ceased its existence. Here are several charac¬
teristic sentences from the final manifesto of the editorial staff,
printed in No. 12:

The Scales has been the floodgate, which was essential until such
time as the two ideological levels of the age merged, and it becomes
useless when this is achieved, finally, by its own actions. Together with

19
 the victory of the ideas of Symbolism in the form in which The Scales
professed and had to profess them, the journal itself becomes unnec¬
essary. The aim is achieved and eo ipso the means is aimless! There will
be other aims!
We do not wish to say by this that the Symbolist movement has
died, that Symbolism has ceased to play the role of the watch-word of
our age.... But tomorrow the same word will become another watch¬
word, will burn with a different flame, and it already burns in a dif¬
ferent way above us.

It is impossible not to agree with all of this, especially if the

matter concerns poetry. Russian Symbolism, represented most
completely in The Scales, irrespective of the fact that it is an in¬
evitable stage in the history of the human spirit, had also an assign¬
ment as champion of cultural values, which, from Pisarev to Gorky,
have been treated very unceremoniously. It has carried out this as¬
signment brilliantly and inspired the barbarians of the Russian
press, if not with respect for great names and ideas, then at least
with fear of them. But the question of whether it should exist as a
literary school now has too little hope of being completely re¬
solved, because Symbolism was created not by the mighty will of a
single person, as Pamasse by the will of Leconte de Lisle, and was
not the result of social upheaval, like Romanticism, but was the re¬
sult of the maturation of the human spirit, which declared the
world our own conception. So that it will appear obsolete only
when mankind renounces this thesis—and renounces it not only on
paper, but with its entire being. When this will happen, I leave for
the philosophers to judge. Now we cannot but be Symbolists. This
is not an appeal, nor a wish, it merely a fact to which I can attest.

Apollo, 1910, No. 7, pp. 5-14.

20
 ACMEISM AND THE LEGACY OF SYMBOLISM

It is clear to the attentive reader that Symbolism has com¬

pleted its circle of development and is now declining. There is the
fact that Symbolist works hardly ever appear anymore, and if any
do appear, then ones that are extremely weak, even from the point
of view of Symbolism, and that, more and more frequently voices
are raised in favor of a reconsideration of values and reputations
indisputable not so long ago, and that the Futurists, the Ego-Fu¬
turists, and other hyenas that always follow the lion have ap¬
peared. 1 To replace Symbolism there is a new movement, which,
whatever it is called—Acmeism (from the word aKH-q—the highest
degree of something, the flower, the time of flowering), or Adam-
ism (a manfully firm, clear view of life), —demands, in any case,
greater balance of powers and a more exact knowledge of the re¬
lationships between subject and object than there was in Symbol¬
ism. However, for this trend to establish itself fully and be a
worthy successor to what preceded it, it must accept the latter’s
legacy and answer all the questions it posed. The glory of one’s
forebears carries obligations, and Symbolism was a worthy father.
French Symbolism, the ancestor of all Symbolism as a
school, moved purely literary questions into the foreground—free
verse, a more original and vacillating style, metaphor elevated
above all else, and the notorious “theory of correspondences.”
This last betrays its non-Romance and consequently non-national,
alien basis. The Romance spirit is too beloved of the element of
light, which separates objects, draws careful, clear lines; but this
Symbolist merging of all images and objects, the changeability of
their appearance, could have arisen only in the misty gloom of
Germanic forests. A mystic would say that Symbolism in France
is a direct result of Sedan.2 But at the same time it revealed in
French literature an aristocratic craving for the unusual and the
difficult to attain and thus saved it from the vulgar naturalism that
threatened it.
We Russians cannot but take French Symbolism into ac¬
count, if only because the new trend 1 spoke of above gives a de¬
cided preference to the Romance over the Germanic spirit. Just as
the French sought a new, freer verse, the Acmeists strive to break
the chains of meter by skipping syllables and by freer transposi¬
tion of stress than ever before; and there are already poems written

21
in a newly devised syllabic system of versification. The giddiness
of Symbolist metaphors trained them in bold turns of thought; the
instability of vocabulary, to which they became accustomed,
prompted them to search in the living national speech for a new
one with a more stable content; and a lucid irony, which has not
undermined the roots of our faith—an irony which could not but
appear if only from time to time in the Romance writers—has now
replaced that hopeless German seriousness which our Symbolists
so cherished. Finally, while we value the Symbolists highly for
having pointed out to us the significance of the symbol in art, we
cannot agree to sacrifice to it other methods of poetic influence
and we seek the complete coordination of all of them. This is our
answer to the question of the comparative “beautiful difficulty”
of the two movements: it is harder to be an Acmeist than a Sym¬
bolist, just as it is harder to build a cathedral than a tower. And
one of the principles of the new trend is always to take the line of
greatest resistance.
German Symbolism, in the persons of its ancestors, Nietzsche
and Ibsen, put forth the question of the role of man in the uni¬
verse, the role of the invidivual in society, and settled it by finding
some sort of objective goal or dogma which he was meant to
serve. This showed that German Symbolism did not sense each
phenomenon’s intrinsic worth, which requires no justification
from without. For us, the hierarchy of phenomena in the world is
merely the specific weight of each of them, though the weight of
the most insignificant is still immeasurably greater than the ab¬
sence of weight, non-existence, and for that reason, in the face of
non-existence, all phenomena are brothers.
We could not bring ourselves to force an atom to bow to
God, if this were not in its nature. But feeling ourselves to be phe¬
nomena among phenomena, we become part of the world rhythm,
accept all the forces acting upon us and ourselves become forces
in our turn. Our duty, our feedom, our joy and our tragedy is to
guess each hour what the next hour may be for us, for our cause,
for the whole world, and to hurry its coming. And for our highest
reward, never suspending attention for a moment, we dream of
the image of the last hour, which will never arrive. But to rebel in
the name of other conditions of existence, here, where there is
death, is as strange as for a prisoner to break down a wall when in
front of him there is an open door. Here, ethics becomes esthetics,

22
expanding into the latter’s sphere. Here, individualism in its high¬
est effort creates community. Here, God becomes the Living God,
because man felt himself worthy of such a God. Here, death is a
curtain, separating us, the actors, from the audience, and in the in¬
spiration of play we disdain the cowardly peeping of “What will
happen next?” As Adamists, we are somewhat like forest animals
and in any case will not surrender what is animal in us in exchange
for neurasthenia. But now it is time for Russian Symbolism to
speak.
Russian Symbolism directed its main energies into the realm
of the unknown. By turns it fraternized with mysticism, then the¬
osophy, then occultism. Some of its strivings in this direction
nearly approached the creation of myth. And it has the right to
ask the movement coming to take its place whether it can boast
only of its animal virtues, and what attitude it takes toward the
unknowable. The first thing that Acmeism can answer to such in¬
quiry is to point out that the unknowable, by the very meaning of
the word, cannot be known. The second, that all endeavors in that
direction are unchaste. The whole beauty, the whole sacred mean¬
ing of the stars lies in the fact that they are infinitely far from
earth and that no advance in aviation will bring them closer. He
who conceives of the evolution of personality always within the
conditions of time and space reveals a poverty of imagination.
How can we remember our previous existences (if that is not a pat¬
ently literary device), the time we were in the abyss, with myriads
of other possibilities of being, of which we know nothing, except
that they exist? For each of them is negated by our being and each
in its turn negates it. The feeling of not knowing ourselves, child¬
ishly wise and sweet to the point of pain—that is what the un¬
known gives us. Francois Villon, asking where the most beautiful
women of antiquity are now, himself answers with the mournful
exclamation:

...Mais o'u sont les neiges d’antan!

And this allows us to feel the unearthly more strongly than whole
tomes of discourse on which side of the moon houses the souls of
the dead.... The principle of Acmeism is always to remember the
unknowable, but not to insult one’s idea of it with more or less
likely conjectures. This does not mean that it denies itself the right

23
to portray the soul in those moments when it trembles, approach¬
ing another; but then it ought to shudder only. Of course, know¬
ledge of God, the beautiful lady Theology, will remain on her
throne, and the Acmeists wish neither to lower her to the level of
literature, nor raise literature to her diamond coldness. As for an¬
gels, demons, elemental and other spirits, they are part of the art¬
ists’s material and need not have a specific gravity greater than
other images he chooses.
Any movement will experience a passionate love for certain
writers and epochs. The loved ones’ graves tie people together
more closely than anything. In circles familiar to Acmeism, the
names most frequently spoken are those of Shakespeare, Rabelais,
Villon and Theophile Gautier.^ The choice of these names is not
arbitrary. Each of them is a cornerstone of the edifice of Acme¬
ism, a lofty exercise of one or another of its elements. Shakespeare
showed us man’s inner world; Rabelais—the body and its joys;
Villon told us of a life which has not the slightest doubt in itself,
although it knows everything—God, sin, death and immortality;
Theophile Gautier found in art worthy garments of irreproachable
forms for this life. To unite in oneself these four moments—that is
the dream which now unifies the people who so boldly call them¬
selves Acmeists.

Apollo, No. 1, 1913, pp. 42-5.

24
 THE READER

Poetry for man is one of the methods of expressing his per¬

sonality and manifests itself by means of the word, the sole instru¬
ment that satisfies its requirements. Everything that is said about
the poetic nature of some landscape or natural phenomenon merely
indicates its suitability as poetic material, or hints at a very distant
analogy in an animistic spirit between the poet and nature. The
same applies to actions or feelings of man that are not embodied
in the word. They may be beautiful, like impressions given by
poetry, but they will not become it, because poetry scarcely in¬
cludes everything beautiful that is accessible to man. No means of
poetic phonetics will convey the true voice of a violin or flute, no
stylistic devices will embody the brightness of the sun or the blow¬
ing of the wind.
Poetry and religion are two sides of the same coin. Both re¬
quire spiritual labor from man. But not in the name of a practical
goal, as ethics and esthetics do, rather in the name of a higher goal,
unknown even to themselves. Ethics adapts man to life in society,
esthetics strives to increase his aptitude for pleasure. Direction of
man’s rebirth as a higher type belongs to religion and poetry. Re¬
ligion appeals to the collective. For its aims, whether the construc¬
tion of a heavenly Jerusalem, universal praise of Allah, or the puri¬
fication of matter in Nirvana; concerted efforts are essential,
rather like the labor of polyps forming a coral reef. Poetry always
appeals to the individual. Even where the poet speaks with the
crowd, he speaks separately with each member of the crowd.
Poetry requires of the individual the same thing religion does of
the collective. First, recognition of its uniqueness and omnipo¬
tence, second, perfection of one’s nature. The poet who has under¬
stood “the grasses’ obscure scent,” wants the reader to feel the
same thing. He must act, so that “the astral book is clear” to
everyone and “the sea wave speaks with him.” For this reason, in
moments of creation the poet should be master of some sensation
unrealized before him, and valuable. This gives rise in him to a
feeling of catastrophy, it seems to him that he speaks his last and
the most important thing, without knowledge of which it would
not even have been worth the world’s coming into being. It is a
most peculiar feeling, sometimes Filling one with such trembling
that it would hinder speaking, were there not the accompanying

25
feeling of triumph, the sense that you are creating perfect combi¬
nations of words, like those that once raised the dead and demol¬
ished walls. These two feelings occur even in poor poets. Study of
technique makes them appear more rarely, but produce greater re¬
sults.
Poetry has always wished to dissociate itself from prose. By
both typographic (earlier calligraphic) means, beginning each line
with a capital letter, and acoustic means, the clearly-heard rhythm,
rhyme, alliteration; stylistically, creating a special “poetic” lan¬
guage (the troubadours, Ronsard, Lomonosov), compositionally,
attaining a special conciseness of thought, and eidolologically, in
the choice of images. And everywhere prose has followed behind
her, insisting that there is really no difference between them, like
a poor man tormenting a rich relative with his friendship. Recently
its strivings seems to have been crowned with success. On the one
hand, it has, beneath the pen of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
gained the manners of fortune’s favorite, on the other, poetry, re¬
membering that the midwife is a necessary condition of its exis¬
tence, tirelessly searches for newer and newer means of influence
and has approached the forbidden sphere in Wordsworth’s verse,
Byron’s composition, free verse, etc., and even in outline, since
Paul Fort^ prints his poems in lines like prose.
I think that it is impossible to find the exact boundary be¬
tween prose and poetry, just as we will not find it between plants
and minerals, animals and plants. However, the existence of hybrid
individuals does not degrade the pure type. And in regard to
poetry, its latest investigators have come to an agreement. In Eng¬
land, Coleridge’s axiom still prevails defining poetry as “the best
words in the best order.” In France—the opinion of Theodore de
Banville:^ a poem is that which has been created and cannot be
corrected. Mallarme has sided with these two opinions, saying:
“Poetry is everywhere there is the external intensification of
style.”
Expressing himself in the word, the poet always addresses
someone, some listener. Often this listener is he himself, and here
we have to deal with a natural split of personality. Sometimes it is
a sort of mystical interlocutor, a friend or beloved not yet ap¬
peared, sometimes it is God, Nature, the People...
This is in the moment of creation. However, it is a secret to
no one, much less the poet, that every poem finds itself a real,

26
living reader among contemporaries, at times among descendants.
This reader scarcely deserves the contempt poets have so often
poured upon him. It is thanks to him that books are printed, repu¬
tations created, it was he gave us the opportunity to read Homer,
Dante, and Shakespeare. Besides, no poet should forget that in re¬
gard to other poets, he is himself only a reader. However, we are
all like the man who has learned a foreign language through text¬
books. We can speak, but do not understand when people speak
with us. There are innumerable manuals for poets, but manuals for
readers do not exist. Poetry develops, movements are replaced by
other movements while the reader remains always the same, and
no one tries to illumine the comers of his dark reader’s soul with
the lamp of knowledge. This is what we shall be concerned with
now.
First of all, every reader is deeply convinced that he is an
authority; one because he has risen to the rank of colonel, another
because he has written a book on mineralogy, a third because he
knows that there is no real skill in it: “I like it—that means it is
good, I don’t like it—that means it is bad; for poetry is the lan¬
guage of the gods, ergo, I can judge it absolutely freely.” That is
the general rule, but in its more complex aspects, readers are di¬
vided into three basic types—naive, snobbish and ecstatic. The
naive reader searches poetry for pleasant memories: if he loves na¬
ture, he censures poets who do not speak of it; if he is a socialist,
a Don Juan or a mystic, he searches for poems in his specialty. He
wants to find images familiar to him in verse, references to things
he likes. He speaks little of his impressions and usually does not
justify his opinions. In general he is rather goodnatured, though
subject to fits of blind rage, like any herbivorous creature. He is
common among critics of the old school.
The snob considers himself an enlightened reader: he loves to
speak of the poet’s art. Usually, he knows of the existence of some
technical device and watches for it while reading a poem. It is
from him that you will hear that X is a great poet because he in¬
troduces complex rhythms, Y, because he creates new words, Z,
because he excites by means of repetitions. He expresses his opin¬
ions extensively and at times interestingly, but, considering only
one, more rarely two or three devices, he inevitably errs in the
most deplorable manner. He is found exclusively among critics of
the new school.

27
 The ecstatic loves poetry and detests poetics. In former times,
he was found in other areas of the human spirit. He demanded
the burning of the first doctors, anatomists, who dared to reveal
the secret of God’s creation. He was among the sailors who hissed
the first steamship, because a seafarer must pray to the Virgin
Mary to give a propitious wind and not burn some sort of fire¬
wood to make some wheels spin. Supplanted in every other place,
he has remained only among readers of poetry. He speaks of the
soul, the color and the taste of a poem, of its marvelous strength,
or on the contrary, its sluggishness, of the poet’s coldness or
warmth. One rarely meets with him, for he has been supplanted
increasingly by the first two types, even among the poets them¬
selves.
A cheerless picture, is it not? And if poetic creation is the im¬
pregnation of one soul by another through the word, like natural
impregnation, it recalls the love of angels for Cainites, or, what
amounts to the same thing, mere bestiality. However, there can be
another reader, a reader-friend. This reader thinks only of what
the poet says to him, becomes as if he had written the given poem,
remembers it through its intonations, its movements. He experi¬
ences the moment of creation in all its complexity and poignancy,
he knows very well how all the poet’s achievements are tied
through technique and how its very perfections are a sign that the
poet is marked by God’s favor. For him the poem is precious in all
its material charm, just as his beloved’s spittle and a hairy chest is
for the singer of psalms.3 You won’t deceive him with partial
achievements or bribe him with an attractive image. A beautiful
poem enters his consciousness as an immutable fact, changes him,
determines his feelings and actions. Only on condition of his exist¬
ence does poetry fulfill its conciliatory task of ennobling the
human race. Such a reader exists, I at least have seen one. And I
think that if it were not for man’s stubbornness and negligence,
many could become such.
If I were Bellamy/* I would write a novel on the life of the
reader of the future. I would tell of readers’ movements and their
struggle, of enemy-readers denouncing poets’ insufficient divinity,
of readers like D’Annunzio’s Gioconda,^ of readers like Helen of
Troy, to win whom one must supass Homer. Fortunately, I am not
Bellamy, and there will be one less bad novel.
What the reader has a right to and, therefore, ought to demand

28
of the poet will be the subject of this book.6 But it will not teach
poets to write verse, just as an astronomy textbook will not teach
how to create heavenly bodies. However, for poets it may serve as
a test of things already written, and in the moment preceding cre¬
ation, provide the opportunity of weighing whether a feeling is
sufficiently rich, an image ripened, or an emotion strong, or
whether it would not be better to give oneself some liberty and
save one’s powers for a better moment. One ought to write, not
when one can, when one must. The word “can”ought to be
thrown out of all spheres of poetic investigation.
Delacroix said, “It is necessary to study tirelessly the tech¬
nique of one’s art, so as not to think of it in moments of creation.”
Indeed, it is necessary either to know absolutely nothing of tech¬
nique, or to know it well. The sixteen-year-old Lermontov wrote
“Angel” and only ten years later could he write a poem equal to
it. But then “Angel” was unique, while all of Lermontov’s verses
from 1840 to 1841 are beautiful. A poem, like Pallas Athene,
arisen from the mind of Zeus, sprung from the soul of the poet,
becomes an individual organism. And, like every living organism, it
has its anatomy and physiology. First of all we see the combina¬
tion of words, the flesh of the poem. Their properties and qualities
are the subject of stylistics. Then we see that these combinations
of words, complementing one another, lead to a definite impres¬
sion, and we notice the skeleton of the poem, its composition.
Then we clarify for ouselves the entire nature of the image, that
sensation which spurred the poet to creation, the nervous system
of the poem, and thus master the eidolology. Finally (although all
this is done simultaneously), our attention is attracted to the
acoustical side of the verse (rhythm, rhyme, combination of vow¬
els and consonants), which, like blood, flows in its veins, and we
understand its phonetics. All these qualities are characteristic of
every poem, the most brilliant and the most dilettantish, just as it
is possible to dissect the living and the dead. But physiological
processes in an organism occur only on condition of a certain per¬
fection, and, having dissected the poem in detail, we can only say
if everything is in it that should be, and in sufficient quantity for
it to have lived.
The laws of its life, that is, the interaction of its parts, must

29
be studied specially, and for this the way has yet hardly been pre¬
pared.

In The Guild of Poets: Almanac (II-I1I) (Berlin, 1923), pp. 98-107.

30
 THE ANATOMY OF A POEM

Among the numerous formulas defining the essence of poetry,

two stand out, proposed by poets themselves, poets who pondered
the mysteries of their craft. Coleridge’s formula: “Poetry is the
best words in the best order.” And Theodore de Banville’s formula:
“Poetry is that which has been created and, therefore, does not
need alteration.” Both these formulas are based on an especially
clear sense of the laws by which words affect our consciousness. A
poet is one who considers all the laws governing the complex of
words he has chosen. One who considers only a part of these laws
could be a prose artist, and one who considers nothing but the
ideological content of words and their combinations would be a
man of letters, a creator of business prose. The enumeration and
classification of these laws is poetic theory. Poetic theory must be
deductive, not based only on the study of works of poetry, just as
a mechanic explains various constructions, and does not simply de¬
scribe them. However, the theory of prose (if such a thing is pos¬
sible) can be only inductive, describing the devices of one or
another prose writer. Otherwise it would merge with poetic theory.
Besides, according to Potebnia’s^ definition, poetry is a lin¬
guistic phenomenon or a special form of speech. All speech is ad¬
dressed to someone and signifies something that concerns both
speaker and listener, and to the latter the speaker ascribes some
characteristics found in himself. The human personality is capable
of endless subdivisions. Our words are an expression of only a part
of us, of one of our faces. We can tell of our love to the beloved
woman, to a friend, in court, in a drunken company, to flowers, to
God. Clearly, each time our tale will be different, since we change
depending on the situation. Closely tied to this is the same sort of
multiformity in the listener, since we also address only a certain
part of him. Thus, addressing the sea, we can note its kinship with
us or, on the contrary, its estrangement, ascribe to it concern for
us, indifference or hostility. Description of the sea from the folk-
loristic, pictorial or geological point of view, often tied with ad¬
dress, is not relevant here, since, clearly, address in this case is
merely a device, and the real interlocutor is someone else.
Since in every address there is some volitional starting point,
the poet, in order that his words be effective, must clearly see the
relation between speaker and listener and sense the conditions

31
 under which a connection between them is really possible. This is
the subject of poetic psychology.
In every poem both parts of the general poetics supplement
each other. Poetic theory may be compared to anatomy and
poetic psychology to physiology. And the poem is a live or¬
ganism, subject to examination—both anatomical and physiolog¬
ical.
Poetic theory may be divided into four parts: phonetics, sty¬
listics, composition and eidolology. Phonetics investigates the
acoustical side of verse, the rhythm, that is the alternations of rais¬
ing and lowering the voice, the instrumentation, that is the quality
of the connections between various sounds, the study of endings
and the study of rhyme from its acoustical side.
Stylistics examines the impression produced by a word de¬
pending on origin, age, classification in one or another grammatical
category, or place in the sentence, and also by a group of words,
which form virtually a single whole, for example, a simile, a meta¬
phor, etc.
Composition has to do with the ordered units of ideas, and
studies the intensity and succession of the thoughts, feelings and
images included in the poem. Here applies the study of stanzas, be¬
cause one or another stanza is a great influence on the poet’s train
of thought.
Eidolology sums up the themes of poetry and the poet’s pos¬
sible relationships to those themes.
Each of these parts passes unnoticed into the next, and eido¬
lology directly adjoins poetic psychology. One cannot draw sharp
dividing lines, and one should not. In really great works of poetry,
all four parts receive equal attention, they are mutually comple¬
mentary. Such are Homer’s epics, such is The Divine Comedy. Ma¬
jor poetic movements usually direct particular attention to some
two of the parts, joining them together and leaving the other two
in the background. Lesser ones single out only one part, some¬
times even some one device included in its stock. I should point
out, incidentally, that Acmeism, arisen in the last few years, pre¬
sents as its basic requirement uniform attention to all four parts.
The French poets who formed the now-disintegrated group, L’Ab-
baye,“ adhere to the same requirement.
Let us try to conduct a test of this fourfold analysis on ma¬
terial taken from the sphere of that condensed poetry which serves

32
as liturgy. Dionysius the Areopagite^ recounts that angels, extoll¬
ing God, exclaim: “alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” Basil the Great^ ex¬
plains that in human language this means: “Praise to Thee, O
Lord!”^ Our Old Believers sing: “alleluia, alleluia, praise to Thee,
O Lord!” Among the Orthodox the word alleluia is repeated three
times. Hence a great controversy.
In regard to phonetics we see in the singing of the Old Be¬
lievers one line of trochaic heptameter with a caesura after the
fourth foot, a line of integral meter and in it agitation fully cor¬
responding to the purpose; the trochaic enneameter of the Ortho¬
dox inevitably breaks into two lines, hexametric and trimetric, ow¬
ing to which the integrity of the appeal is lost. Moreover, since
with any contiguity of long and short lines we always try to equal¬
ize our impression of them, singling out the short one and sup¬
pressing the long one, the angelic words gain the character of a
sort of refrain, a supplement to the human ones, and are not equi¬
pollent to them.
In regard to stylistics, in the old wording we observe the cor¬
rect replacement of a foreign word by a native one, as, for ex¬
ample, in the sentence, “Avez-vous vu Aunt Masha?” while in the
new one, “Praise to Thee, O Lord!” is an absolutely unnecessary
translation, like, “Drop by for our five o’clock at five o’clock.”
In regard to composition, the old wording again has the ad¬
vantage, owing to its trinomiality, much more akin to our con¬
sciousness than the tetranomiality of the new wording.
And in regard to eidolology, we feel in the old wording an ap¬
peal to all three persons of the Holy Trinity separately, while in
the new, it is unknown to whom the fourth appeal applies.
We trust that the time will come when poets will weigh their
every word with the same care as creators of religious canticles.

The Almanac Draco (Petersburg, 1921).

33
 ON TRANSLATIONS OF POETRY

There are three methods for translating verse: by the first,

the translator uses whatever meter and combination of rhymes
happen to come into his head, his own vocabulary, often alien to
the author, and at his personal discretion now lengthens, now
shortens the original; clearly, such translation can only be called
amateurish.
By the second method, the translator acts, for the most part,
in the same way, but introduces a theoretical justification for his
act; he assures us that if the poet being translated had written in
Russian, he would have written in just that way. This method was
very widespread in the eighteenth century. Pope in England, Kos¬
trov 1 in our country translated Homer that way and enjoyed ex¬
traordinary success. The nineteenth century rejected this method,
but traces of it remain in our own day. Even now some still think
that it is possible to substitute one meter for another, for example,
pentameter for hexameter, forego rhyme, introduce new images
and so forth. The spirit preserved is supposed to justify everything.
However, a poet worthy of the name uses precisely the form as the
only means of expressing the spirit. I shall try to outline now how
this is done.

II

The first thing that attracts the reader’s attention and, in all
probability, the most important, if often unconscious, basis for
the creation of a poem is its idea or, more exactly, its image, since
a poet thinks in images. The number of images is limited, evoked
by life, and the poet is rarely their creator. Only in his relationship
to them is his personality revealed. For example, the Persian poets
thought of the rose as a living being, the medieval poets as a sym¬
bol of love and beauty; Pushkin’s rose is a beautiful flower on its
stem, Maikov’s rose is always a decoration, an accessory; in Vya¬
cheslav Ivanov the rose assumes mystical value, etc. Naturally, in
all these cases both the choice of words and their combinations are
essentially different. Within the bounds of the same relationship

34
there are thousands of nuances: thus, the comments of Byron’s
Corsair stand out against the background of the author’s psycho¬
logically flowery description of him in their laconism and techni¬
cal choice of expressions. In his gloss to “The Raven,” Edgar Allan
Poe speaks of an undercurrent theme, scarcely outlined, and for
that very reason producing an especially powerful impression. If
someone translating that same “Raven” were to transmit with
greater care the external plot of the movements of the bird, and
with less—the poet’s longing for his dead beloved, he would have
violated the author’s conception and failed to complete the task
he had taken upon himself.

Ill

Immediately after the choice of image, the poet is confronted

with the question of its development and proportions. Both deter¬
mine the choice of the number of lines and stanzas. In this the
translator is obliged to blindly follow the author. It is impossible
to shorten or lengthen a poem without at the same time changing
its tone, even if the quantity of images is retained. Both laconism
and amorphousness of image are determined by the conception,
and each extra or missing line changes its degree of tension.
As for stanzas, each of them creates a particular train of
thought, unlike the others. Thus, the sonnet, stating some propo¬
sition in the first quatrain, reveals its antithesis in the second, out¬
lines their interaction in the first tercet and in the second tercet
gives it an unexpected resolution, condensed in the last line, often
even in the last word, for which reason it is called the key of the
sonnet. The Shakespearian sonnet, with quatrains unconnected by
rhyme, is supple, flexible, but devoid of sufficient strength; the
Italian sonnet, with only feminine rhymes, is powerfully lyrical
and stately, but of little use for narrative or description, for which
the usual form is perfectly suited. In the ghazal, the same word,
sometimes the same expression repeated at the end of every line
(the Europeans incorrectly break it into two lines) creates an im¬
pression of gaudy ornament or incantation. The octave, extensive
and spacious like no other form, is suitable for calm and unhurried
narration. Even such simple stanzas as the quatrain and the coup¬
let have their peculiarities which the poet takes into account, if

35
only unconsciously. Moreover, for any sort of serious acquain¬
tance with a poet it is essential to know what stanzas he preferred
and how he used them. For that reason exact retention of the
stanza is the duty of the translator.

IV

In the realm of style, the translator should really master the

author’s poetics in regard to this question. Each poet has his own
vocabulary, often supported by theoretical considerations. Words¬
worth, for example, insists upon using colloquial language. Hugo—
upon employing words in their direct senses. Heredia--upon their
precision. Verlaine, on the contrary, upon their simplicity and
casualness, etc. One should also elucidate—and this is especially
important—the character of the translated poet’s similes. Thus,
Byron compares a concrete image with an abstract one (a famous
example is Lermontov—“The air as pure and fresh as a child’s
kiss”), Shakespeare—an abstract with a concrete image (an ex¬
ample in Pushkin—“A sharp-clawed beast, gnawing at the heart, is
conscience”), Heredia—a concrete with concrete (“Like a flock of
falcons flown down from their native cliffs...the warriors and cap¬
tains bid Palos farewell”); Coleridge draws the image of a simile
from among the images of a given play (“and each soul sang, like
that arrow of mine”); in Edgar Allan Poe the simile moves into de¬
velopment of image, etc. In poetry there are often parellelisms,
complete, inverted, shortened repetitions, exact indications of
time or place, quotations interspersed in the stanza, and other de¬
vices with special hypnotizing effects upon the reader. It is advis¬
able to preserve them carefully, sacrificing less essential things. Be¬
sides, many poets have paid great attention to the semantic mean¬
ing of rhyme. Theodore de Banville even maintained that rhyme
words, as the dominant ones, arise first in the consciousness of the
poet and form the poem’s skeleton: for this reason it is desirable
that at least one of a pair of rhymed words correspond to the
word at line-end in the original.
It is necessary to warn the majority of translators with regard
to the use of such particles as “already,” “only,” “just,” “you
know,” won’t it?” etc. These all possess a powerful expressiveness
and usually double the verb’s effective power. One can avoid

36
them, choosing among synonymous but non-homologous words,
of which there are many in Russian, for example: “road—way,”
“Lord—God,” “Love—passion,” etc., or resorting to contractions,
like “wind,” “dreaming,” “song,” etc.
Slavonicisms or archaisms are permissible, but with great
caution, only in the translation of old poets, who predate the Lake
School and Romanticism, or of stylists like William Morris^ in
England or Jean Moreas in France.

Finally, there remains the acoustical side of verse: it is hard¬

est of all for the translator to transmit. Russian syllabic verse is
still too little developed to reconstruct French rhythms; English
verse allows an arbitrary mixture of masculine and feminine rhyme,
which is not characteristic of Russian. It is necessary to resort to
relative transmission: to translate syllabic verse in iambs (some¬
times trochees), to introduce regular alternation of rhymes into
English verse, resorting here, where possible, to masculine rhymes
only, as more characteristic of the language. Nevertheless, it is es¬
sential that this relative transmission be strictly adhered to, be¬
cause it was not created by chance and, for the most part, really
gives an adequate impression of the original.
Each meter has its own feeling, its own peculiarities and pur¬
poses: the iamb, as if going down stairs (the accented syllable be¬
ing lower in pitch than the unaccented), is free, clear, firm and
beautifully transmits human speech, the tension of the human will.
The trochee, rising, winged, is always agitated and now anxious,
now moved, now amused; its sphere is song. The dactyl, leaning
on the first accented syllable and swinging the two unaccented
ones as a palm tree does its top, is powerful, stately, speaks of the
elements at rest, of the deeds of gods and heroes. The anapest, its
opposite, is impetuous, fitful, it is the elements in action, the ten¬
sion of inhuman passion. And the amphibrach, their synthesis, lull¬
ing and transparent, speaks of the peace of an existence divinely
light and wise. Different measures in these meters also differ in their
characteristics: thus, iambic tetrameter is most often used for lyric
narration, pentameter-for epic or dramatic narration, hexameter—
for discourse, etc. Poets often struggle with these characteristics

37
of form, demand other possibilities of them and at times succeed
in this. However, such a struggle always affects the image, and for
that reason, it is essential to preserve its traces in the translation,
strictly observing the meters and the measure of the original.
The question of rhyme has been of great interest to poets:
Voltaire demanded acoustical rhyme,Theodorede Banville—visual;
Byron readily rhymed proper names and used compound rhyme,
the Parnassians rich rhyme; Verlaine, on the contrary, used sup¬
pressed rhyme; the Symbolists often resort to assonance. The
translator should determine the character of his author’s rhyme
and follow it.
Also extremely important is the question of the run-over of a
sentence from one line to another, the so-called cnjambement.
Classical poets like Corneille and Racine did not permit this; the
Romantics brought it into general use; the modernists have devel¬
oped it to the extreme. In this too, the translator should consider
the views of the author.
From all that has been said, clearly, the translator of a poet
must be a poet himself and, besides that, a careful investigator and
perceptive critic, who, selecting what is most characteristic for
each author, allows himself to sacrifice the rest when necessary.
And he must forget his own personality, thinking only of the per¬
sonality of the author. Ideally, translations should not be signed.
One wishing to advance the technique of translation can go
even farther: for example, maintain the rhymes of the original,
render syllabic verse as such in Russian, find words for rendering
characteristic modes of speech (British military language in Kipling,
Laforgue’s^ Parisian jargon, Mallarm6’s syntax, etc.).
Of course, for the ordinary translator this is by no means ob¬
ligatory.
Let me repeat briefly what it is obligatory to observe: 1) the
number of lines, 2) the meter and measure, 3) the alternation of
rhyme, 4) the nature of the enjambement 5) the nature of the
rhyme, 6) the nature of the vocabulary, 7) the type of similes, 8)
special devices, 9) changes in tone.
These are the translator’s nine commandments: since there is
one less than those of Moses, I hope that they will be better ob¬
served.

in Principles of Literary Translation (Petersburg, 1919).

38
 I

[Valery Bryusov. Paths and Crossroads: Collected Poems.Vol. 1.

Moscow: Skorpion, 1908.]

Lately whole articles have been devoted to Bryusov, the best

critics have been writing about him, and it would be strange in a
short review to attempt to characterize his work, so complex and
unified in its complexity. But then, another task presents itself
to the critic: to note, if only in general outline, those peculiarities
of form and thought which distinguish the second volume of Paths
and Crossroads from the first. And most striking of all is the
wholeness of the plan and the firm decision to follow the path of
Symbolism, which in the first volume sometimes weakened with
inclinations toward Decadence and Impressionism. Bryusov
operates with only two quantities—“the self” and “the world” and
in severe diagrams, devoid of anything fortuitous, gives the various
possibilities of their interrelation. He reveals new horizons for elu¬
cidating the question of acceptance of the world, transferring
events to a higher plane of thought, where the esthetic standard
loses its validity and gives place to the ethical standard. At a wave
of his hand, flowers again bloom in our world, which intoxicated
the gaze of Assyrian kings, and passion becomes eternal, as in the
times of the goddess Astarte.1

The world is again beautiful and more than redeems itself.

...And whether there is or not a road through the grave,

I was! Iam! I do not need eternity!

The distinguishing feature of Bryusov’s ballads is their

nobility.

Even in the circles most hostile to him, Bryusov earned the

reputation of a master of form. He shares the dreams of Mallarme
and Rene Ghil about the return of the word’s metaphysical value,
but resorts neither to neologisms nor intentional syntactic diffi¬
culties. Through severe selection of expressions, sharpened clarity
of thought and brazen music of phrase he achieves results which
were not always the lot of his French colleagues. The eternally
unsubmissive word no longer fights with him; it has found its
master.
39
 Lately one often hears attacks on Bryusov from the most
antithetical camps. They reproach him for pride, self-conceit, con¬
tempt for real life. There is nothing surprising in this. People are
already long accustomed to consider poets officials of the literary
department, and have long forgot that spiritually they descend
from the line of Orpheus, Homer and Dante. Bryusov is blamed
for having remembered that.

Speech (Rech’), May 29, 1908.

11

[Fedor Sologub. Fiery Circle . Poems. Book VIII. Publication of

the journal The Golden Fleece.]

Sologub’s poems have a strange property. You read them in

magazines, newspapers, you are surprised at their refined form and
you forget them in the day’s commotion. But later, perhaps in a
few months, when you are alone and sad, suddenly a certain
strange and familiar melody sounds on the strings of your soul
and you remember some poem by Sologub, read through once,
but all whole. And none are completely forgotten. All of them
have the ability of stars to appear at this or that hour of the
nighttime silence.
I explain this by the fact that Sologub avoids the fortuitous,
the pearls of his experiences are brought up from the depths,
where all souls merge into one accord. In his work he follows the
advice of Schopenhauer: to renounce the will for the sake of
contemplation. But in his every phrase, in every image, one feels
how difficult this victory was, and the sharp reader finds lightning
bolts at every step, petrified, but still warm. Sologub’s tranquil¬
lity wounds more painfully than the turbulence of others.

In Homo Sapiens, Przybyszewski1 speaks in passing of a

man who imagined he saw the broken wings of a big white bird.
A few years ago that seemed the ideal of man’s fate. A powerful
Hight upward, a relentless fall, and then the silence of despair.
But Sologub did not follow this path. In the valley of sorrow
he discovered a tender, unbiting sun, and found sweetness in the

40
 juice of bitter subterranean grasses. Here he invites men to admire
his treasures: the blood-stained idol of Polynesian villages,
the supple stalks of wormwood and the sinful crimson of the ruby.
He is no longer lucid and powerful, striving toward God, he is a
soothsaying wizard who has his paradise on the star Mair.2 Having
crossed the bounds of fire, where all living things perish, his work
lives a differenct existence, it is like the leaden waters of a be¬
witched lake which reflects the whole world, but reflects it trans¬
figured, and, looking into it, it seems that all else is shadow and
raving madness.

Turning to the formal side of Sologub’s work, first of all you

note the complex mechanism of his devices. His themes are ever
familiar and ever new: caressing death, love without desire, sorrow
and an impulse toward revolt. But for each one there is a new
image, words disturbing in their unexpectedness. Like all great
artists, Sologub avoids calling things by their names; often he
gives only one characteristic of some event, but one so powerful
and apt that it replaces pages of description.

His verse, gentle and melodious, is devoid of both the brazen

ringing of Bryusov’s verse and the unexpected turns of Blok’s. But
then, he was less subject to the influence of the old masters; in
him, together with the same fascination, one feels less literariness.

in the book Fiery Circle there are some old poems, and for
this reason alone, less powerful ones. But they are successfully
woven into the general structure of the book, and serve as ties,
binding its separate elements.

The book is published as it should be published: beautifully

and simply.

Speech September 18, 1908.

Ill

(Konstantin Balmont. Only Love. Second Edition (1908). ]

So recently written, and already an historic book. Thus falls

41
the lot of either very good or very bad books, and of course,
Only Love belongs to the first category. In my opinion it most
deeply reflects Balmont’s talent, proud as the thought of a Euro¬
pean, colorful as a southern tale, and pensive as the Slavic soul.
In it he is that very Balmont-Arion1 whom they rightly called by
the ancient tender name of the mellifluous poet. And the readers
of Balmont’s latest works (are there many of them?) will read
with sorrow this book, strangely beautiful, refined in thought
and feeling, in which perhaps the germs of later decay already
hide—the corruption of the virgin Russian word in the name of
its wealth. There is something unmitigated in the melodiousness
and imagery of these poems, but they are still timid, like a girl
in the instant of her fall. Balmont said: “If I approach the abyss,
lost in admiration of a star, / I will fall not regretting that I will
land on stones.” He has come immeasurably close to the star
of pure poetry, and now the swiftness of his fall is merciless. Only
Love concluded the brilliant morning of the renaissance of Russian
poetry. At that time the formulas of a new life were only pro¬
jected, of a literature united with philosophy and religion, of a
poetry as guide of our actions. It was necessary to go over unex¬
plored roads, to reveal hidden worlds in one’s soul and to learn to
look at things already known with a fresh and ehthusiastic gaze,
like on the first day of creation. Balmont was one of the first and
most insatiable discoverers, but his thoughts were not confined to
the Promised Land, he delighted in the charm of the path. But
then, no one’s hands picked such dazzling flowers, in no one’s
curls rested such golden bees. It seemed that his muse was not sub¬
ject to the laws of gravity. And justly, before all other “Deca¬
dents,” he gained recognition and love.

But when the time came for creative work, and the swords
were beaten into plows and hammers, Balmont turned out to be
alien to everyone. Came the time of the great sunset.

And these confused wanderings-through the folklore of all

lands and peoples which have occupied him recently, add nothing
to his repute. There has been much talk about whether his talent
would revive, his former love of the word and his intuitive under¬
standing of its laws. An answer to this question we await from him
alone.
Spring, No. 10, 1908.
42
 rv
[Yury Verkhovsky. Various Poems. Moscow: Skorpion, 1908]

In this book there are “Melodies of Fet,” “Variations on a

theme of Pushkin,” “Sonnets of Petrarch,” and much else—only
Yury Verkhovsky himself is missing. The poet was either unable
or unwilling to express his soul. He is a student, not a creator, but
perhaps precisely in this lies the peculiar charm of his book. In¬
deed, the last few years have brought poetry so many new words,
images and devices that it is difficult for us to become absorbed
in study of the old masters, to revive in our memory forgotten
joys and sorrows. Verkhovsky helps us do this. He learned from
Baratynsky, Yazykov, Delvig, Polonsky and Maikov1 —and he was
able to find features in their work not noticed before, familiar to
us and enchanting. Less valuable are his imitations of contempo¬
rary poets: Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely and others. Even if
only because these poets are alive and speak for themselves, and
their work is not in any need of reminder.

Verkhovsky loves and understands the Russian language. He

avoids both French and Slavic turns of speech and uses Slavoni¬
cisms with great tact.

Unfortunately, one cannot say the same of the form. His

poems, almost always complete in thought, often do not have
a balance of images: they are sometimes too long, sometimes
too short for their theme. In his verse one feels neither melodious¬
ness nor animation and the prearrangement of effects is too evi¬
dent. But then, there is in it that noble seriousness that comes
only with disinterested and deep love for art.

Whether Verkhovsky ever reveals his true face or not—what

difference does it make? He is alone in literature, his book will
scarcely be successful in our time of ten thousand faiths, and
this will serve as direct evidence of its value and necessity.

Speech, November 29, 1908

43
 V

[Andrei Bely. Urn: Poems. Moscow: Grif, 1909.]

Of the whole older generation of Symbolists, Andrei Bely is

the least cultured—not in the bookish culture of the academics,
something of a Siamese order which is valued only because it is
difficult to get, and few have it; in this culture he is strong, he
writes both of “the philosopher of Marburg” and of “the golden
triangle of Hiram,”1 —but in the true culture of mankind, which
teaches respect and self-criticism, grows into flesh and blood and
puts its mark on every thought, every action of man. Somehow
once cannot imagine that he was ever in the Louvre, that he
read Homer... And I am judging now not by Ashes and not by Cup
of Blizzards^, God be their judge, but by the whole creative work
of Andrei Bely, which I have been following for a long time and
with interest. Why with interest will be apparent from what
follows.

The poet Bely quickly assimilated all the subtleties of con¬

temporary poetic technique. Thus the barbarian immediately ac¬
cepts the fact that one should not eat fish with a knife, wear colored
collars in the winter or write sonnets with nineteen lines (as one
not unknown poet did recently). He uses free verse and alliteration
and internal rhyme. But he cannot write a regular poem with clear
and distinct images and without a bluster of unnecessary words. In
this he is inferior even to the third-rate poets of the past, like
Benediktov, Mei, or Karolina Pavlova.3 And one can strongly
argue against his understanding of iambic tetrameter, the meter in
which almost all of Urn is written. Tracing the development of
the iamb in Pushkin, we see that this great meter inclined more
and more toward use of the fourth paeon,4(the one which gives
verse the greatest sonority. It is incomprehensible why Andrei
Bely renounces such an important means of giving life to his often
wooden verses.

But what is the charm of Andrei Bely, why does one even
want to think and speak of him? Because there are themes in his
work, and these themes are truly profound and unusual. He has
enemies—time and space, and friends—eternity, the ultimate goal.
He makes these abstract concepts concrete, contrasts them to his

44
personal “self’; they are for him real beings of his world. Combin¬
ing the too airy colors of the old poets with the too heavy and
harsh ones of contemporary poets, he achieves surprising effects,
which prove that the world of his dreams really is magnificent:
“Satin, scarlet roses, / Wistful, crystal fountain.”
The reader will be dissatisfied with my review. He will
certainly want to know if I am praising or reproving Andrei
Bely. I will not answer this question. The time for conclusions
has not yet come.

Speech, May 4, 1909.

VI

Vladimir Pyast. Fence: Poems. M. O. Vol’f, 1909.

In this book, one finds a few epigraphs from Edgar Allan

Poe, and in literary circles they spoke of his influence on the
young poet. But in my opinion, the latter is closer to the English
pre-Raphaelites than to the great mathematician of the senses. The
same pensiveness, the same absence of posing and natural nobility
of line. But more softness perhaps, bordering sometimes on diffu¬
siveness, the obscurity of unreasoned mysticism. This is generally
the distinctive characteristic of the book in question-the weari¬
ness of an experienced, inspired soul, with which thought does
not keep pace.
Thought, as a literary device, is kept especially in the back¬
ground in Pyast. He even seems to flaunt his attitude towards it,
creating poems where there is nothing but image, an impassioned
transport. His experiences amount to only seconds, but how lucid
those seconds are. And his poems, often devoid of structure, live
like a loosed arrow, in the piercing thrill of Bight. Sometimes the
feeling reaches such intensity that it creates an almost visible copy
of the instant. Such is the poem beginning: “We froze in a solemn
vow, / We understood that we are children of the Lord.”
As a technician Pyast lacks much: his favorite hyperdactyl-
lic rhymes irritate the ear, the verse is not flexible, is occasionally
flaccid, and the poverty of the language is especially painful. But
on the other hand other riches lead you to imagine yourself in a
curiosity shop among all those poisoned arrows, sea-urchins, can¬
dlesticks and broken Greek vases.
45
 And I am happy for Pyast that his book has the shortcomings
which exclude it from newsstands in railroad stations.

Speech, July 6, 1909.

VII

Valerian Borodaevsky. Poems. SPb. : Ory, 1909.

If I am not mistaken, Borodaevsky1 appears in print for the

first time, but even so one cannot consider his book premature.
One senses that behind his poems stand years of thought,
years of persistent creative work. He has something to say, and he
wants to say it as well as possible. Thus the refinement of his
forms, a series of new meters and new stanzas.
Almost every one of his poems is written on a truly artistic
theme, and reveals to us the obsessions of a strange, mocking and
frightened soul. One would like to adopt the following lines from
the book itself as its epigraph: “And why so cold? And why so
soon? / And why are the roads covered with snow?”
As a mystic, Borodaevsky does not know the benevolent
Christ of the sunny fields of Judea; a Russian Christ is dear to him,
“oppressed by the burden of the cross,” with lips too parched to
give blessing. This Christ sees the most agonizing doubts, the
blackest sins, and he forgives, not because he loves, but because he
understands. The Magi did not bear him gifts of gold, and he does
not have a paradise of white lillies.
In conformity with this, Borodaevsky’s poems are dull in
tone and unwholesomely refined in their intermittent rhythms. He
feels neither lines nor colors. As for syntax, his breath, short and
quick like that of a man dead tired, does not permit him to create
the long, majestic periods, the refined expressions, toward which
the Russian language is so disposed. And the absence of literari¬
ness in his verse, the failure to treat thought as the basis for a
poem is terribly annoying. His seriousness sometimes even pro¬
vokes a smile, for example in the poem “In the Museum.”
There is an introduction by Vyacheslav Ivanov, magnificent
in style and image, an example of what criticism should do accor¬
ding to Oscar Wilde: extend the subject in question and give it a
fascination which it perhaps does not possess.

Speech, September 21, 1909.

46
 VIII

Sergei Gorodetsky. Russia: Song and Ballads. Moscow: Sytina, 1909.

Valerian Borodaevsky. Poems. Spb.: Ory, 1909.
Boris Sadovskoy. Late Morning. : Poems. Moscow, 1909.
Ivan Rukavishnikov. Poems, Book Six. Spb.

On a cool spring morning, it is good to walk alone along a

path, not expecting any meetings. The sun on the grass, on your
clothes, the slightly damp earth sinking softly underfoot—and then
you involuntarily start to sing, dancing and clicking your heels,
swinging your shoulders and waving your cane. To sing, of course,
without words—you don’t remember words on such a marvellous
morning. This is not the stately hymn of maturing ideas for a
creative work, like those Schiller had, it is the spontaneous rapture
of being—the neighing of horses swimming, the head-long flight of
the skylark, the frantic leaps of a playing dog. You are carried
away with a song like that, and you don’t need to get anything
else from it. But Sergei Gorodetsky conceived the strange idea of
putting words to it, made a book of the resulting verses and called
it Russia, the fifth book of his poems. I read it with a feeling of
sweet melancholy and even greater embarrassment, for the author,
rushing to put words to a melody that was still growing, didn’t
have time to evaluate them, or even to pick suitable ones. It is
absolutely out of the question to speak of style, interesting struc¬
ture or technical precision here. Gorodetsky forgot everything he
ever knew, or should have known as a poet. The book is called
Russia, but there is no Russia here—there are only light feet,
cocked army caps and smiling red lips. Whether this has anything
to do with literature I don’t know, but with poetry, I think it
does.
Valerian Borodaevsky’s book of poems is in a completely
different vein. You feel in it a knowledge of many metrical secrets,
alliteration, assonance; the rhymes in it are first tender and limpid
like a distant echo, then clear and confident like clashing silver
shields. But a deep dissatisfaction with the world and a burning
thirst for something different do not allow the poet to concen¬
trate on his images, they are often not well thought out and have
an annoyingly accidental quality. And therefore in the highest and
most beautiful notes of his song, you hear the tremor of approach¬
ing hysteria.
True, he does not sing much, he prefers to speak of his

47
visions with a simple and frightening voice. First he sees God,
lighting his cigarette by a shack and staring out into the barren
steppe, then as in the mines, “the grayish necks and hanging lips of
the prison horses tremble.” Sometimes he is solemn, and then
words escape his lips which are convincing in their unexpectedness.

Seal of the Antichrist! Judas! Day of Judgement!

You are always the same, —icon of Byzantium.
But your fire is brighter! -They are forging and
burning hearts...
O, sages... Deaf-mute slaves!

Vyacheslav Ivanov has reason to call him “a Byzantine at

heart” in his preface; for Borodaevsky, Christianity is the right to
suppress and damn, for him Passion Week has not yet ended with
the Resurrection.
His most typical colors are black and red, as if for someone
who looks through tightly closed eyelids.
But perhaps it is exactly this repressed cruelty which makes
his work deeply individual, despite the noticeable influences of
Tyutchev, Fet and Vyacheslav Ivanov.

Boris Sadovskoy1 is chiefly a prose writer. In his book

Late Morning he has collected poems from the last five years, but
you feel no difference in them, neither improvement nor develop¬
ment.
He adopted a particular manner of writing immediately, com¬
pletely grammatical and unpretentious, and it seems he does not
plan to deviate from it one iota.
Let Bryusov, like a hunter, lie in wait for secrets in the night¬
time labyrinths of passion and thought, let Ivanov raise the shining
banner of Christ-Dionysus, and Blok now madly grieve for the
Beautiful Lady, then madly laugh at her—Sadovskoy looks at
them suspiciously. “In the foggy haze of the frost the creak of
runners, the barking of dogs, the groaning of the water-carrier”—
these themes will never change, one can go through one’s whole
life with them.
I do not think that anyone could bring himself to reproach
a poet for such modesty. If he can do only a little, at least he is
quite aware of his powers. A few stanzas inspired by Bryusov and
Bely only support my idea, they sound so hesitant, so artlessly
48
imitative of the peculiarities of both models.
Of course, Boris Sadovskoy will not do for the roles of con¬
quistador, champion, bearer of gold bullion and diamond diadems
to fill the treasure-house of poetry, but he has made a pretty good
colonist for the regions already tamed and cleared.

If Gorodetsky sings, Borodaevsky speaks and Sadovskoy

writes, then Ivan Rukavishnikov is daring. Undoubtedly talented,
hard-working, thoughtful, he is absolutely deviod of the poet’s
sense-taste. Sometimes this even helps hims: he wanders along a
narrow ledge like a lunatic and really does find sweet smelling
lawns, silver fields, and bewitched lands. But more often-oh,
how often this happens! —he falls painfully, and not into the abyss,
but only into the mud; and his poems are spotted with blots of
hideous prosaisms.
In his book there are poems in the shape of a chalice,a sword,
a cross and a triangle, an imitation of the Alexandrian poets. There
are many new metres and new stanzas in it. Characteristic of Ruka¬
vishnikov is the frequent repetition of some word or expression,
giving his images a persistent character.
And in his works you often encounter themes of the occult,
treated not deeply, but originally.
His book is material for poets, and rich material—but it
would be awful to call its author a poet.

Apollo, No. 1, 1909.

IX

The Almanac Death. SPb., 1909.

Pavel Sukhotin. Asters. Moscow, 1909.
Vladimir Pyast. Fence: Book of Poems. SPb., 1909.
Sergei Krechetov. The Flying Dutchman: Poems. Moscow, 1910.

Recently the question of the revival of the epic has occupied

many Russian poets. Did a few decades’ experience with Symbo¬
lism turn out to be enough for a detailed development of eternal
images, for great and confident strides in poetic thought, or did
our organism not take the saving venom of Decadence and did we
return from whence we came-how are we to know? It is painful

49
to speak of the second possibility. But in the first case, contem¬
porary poets accept the challenge of the old, compete with them
on their own ground and with their own weapons.
After “City of Women” and “The Last Day,” which are epics
in the French sense of the word (i.e., simply big poems), Valery
Bryusov printed the romantic epic “The Fulfilled Promise” and
dedicated it to the memory of Zhukovsky.1 Sergei Solowev wrote
an epic in hexameters, Kuzmin—the lyric epic “The New Rolla”2
about life in the thirties of the last century (only excerpts of it
have appeared in print). And so it is even more interesting to note
Petr Potemkin’s3 attempt to write an epic of contemporary life
in iambic tetrameter without stanzas, as Pushkin wrote them (the
Almanac Death, “Eve,” and epic by Petr Potemkin).
But alas, this attempt remains merely an attempt. In Po¬
temkin’s epic there are some truly profound allusions, some
truly picturesque descriptions, but it lacks the most important
thing—a successful idea and a well-conceived plan.
The story if about Boris, a young man whose soul is ex¬
hausted by constant fear of death. The author attributes this to
an “absurd childhood”—a boring description vaguely reminiscent
of Oblomov’s youth4 —and apparently does not even suspect that
fear as well as love is a primordial characteristic of man’s soul.
Boris tries to escape from it into a world of dreamy visions and
develops his ability to control his dreams at will. But when the
image of a woman appears in them—first of a prostitute with coal-
black brows, then the Princess Tamara, then Cleopatra (both the
latter from Lermontov and Pushkin, according to the author)3 —
there is a crisis in Boris’ life. Eternal Eve entices him with unheard
of happiness, but demands an unheard of payment as well—volu-
tary death. Boris forgot the sweet and dreadful Ancient Name,
and when he remembered it, there was only one thing left for
him—flight from a sixth-story window.
First of all, Petr Potemkin’s hero is unsuitable for an epic.
He is not typical of our times (let us at least remember the recent
revolution), and he has neither the internal strength, nor that com¬
plexity of emotional experience which gives value to the “solitary”
type of Huysmans’ novel, des Esseintes.^ He is simply lethargic,
and since he is essentially the only character in the epic, he com-
unicates to it the same quality of lethargy.
The verse of the epic is distinguished by its clarity and com¬
parative terseness, but it lacks sonority. Logical caesurae, not

50
always internally justifiable, hamper its flow; the overabundance
of the fourth paeon weakens it. There are almost no examples of
the second paeon, the greatest of the variants of the iamb.7
“Eve” is Potemkin’s second epic, and in comparison with the
first, it is undoubtedly a step forward. But it still seems that this
typical lyric poet has but few of the qualities essential for writing
big things.

When you open the first book of poetry by an unknown

poet-and Pavel Sukhotin8 is really little-known—you involun¬
tarily ask yourself: what new problems will he try to touch upon,
what images govern his soul, what sort of attitude does he have
toward the world, toward himself, what sort of pose does he
adopt. You do not expect any sort of fulfillment—but promise,
hints at promise even, and you forgive in advance everything but
insipidity. And it is often sad, as in this case, when you get no
answer to your questions.
Not one poem in Pavel Sukhotin’s book sticks in your
memory, not one stands out among the rest. In almost every one
there are slips, there are apt expressions as well, but one wants to
attribute both to the general endowments of the author, rather
than to specifically poetic gifts. He is undoutedly “literary” and
has taste. The crimson sunsets of the mysterious suns in the poems
of Andrei Bely, whom he imitates somewhat, have become flatter
and simpler in his verse. Now it is no longer necessary to climb
to the snowy heights for them, they can be seen from any balcony.
The sharp lines of the landscapes of Bunin and Pavel Sukhotin
have become carefully retouched photographs. From the rhythmic
standpoint his verses are uninteresting and often unsuccessful.
Perhaps Pavel Sukhotin is very young, perhaps he has not
found himself yet? We shall hope so, despite the fact that bold¬
ness of approach is characteristic of talented youth and in Asters
there is none.

In Fence, Vladimir Pyast’s book of poems, there is both the

daring of youth and the wise caution of a real worker. He loves
hyperdactylic rhymes, changes the usual rhyme alternations of the
sonnet, creates new stanzas. From the dates of his poems you can
see that he does not write often, but waits for his moods to crystal¬
lize, clothed in the single, inevitable images and rhythms.

51
 He is a lyric poet and the situations of his poems are uncom¬
plicated, the figures and landscapes cloaked in the light smoke of
reverie. There is a God, but He is only the state of a higher, blessed
enlightenment. He is “the whole, personal, thrice-single ‘self’.”
There are angels as well, but they too are only a state of the hu¬
man soul on the road to perfection, states possible even in our
world. In moments of despair the poet remembers them with a
sort of deeply intimate sadness, like something lost not too long
ago. The path to perfection is love and of course, love of woman.
For this, Vladimir Pyast has word-hymns, word-flowers.

Shy, tender, luminous, it looks with open eyes,

Born of virgin soil, burned with a secret, womanly.
In it is reflected, in it is born, with songs and caresses,
Everything extraordinary, everything harmonic,
everything infinitely universal.

The themes of Vladimir Pyast are the rosy reflections of

Coming Dawns, and his damning arrogant poems from the section
“To Ananka”-nor more than a pose—are successful, if you please,
objectively, but are not at all characteristic of him. Not in vain is
one of them called “Diaboli Manuscriptum.” And what’s a devil
to Pyast!
In the first centuries of Christianity, when ecstasy was just
as usual as scepticism is now, there were almost no general prayers,
excluding the ones in the Old Testament, and every member of
society would instinctively create his own address to God, some¬
times of one sentence, or of two or three words. But then the
words were joined together like the atoms of a diamond; it was
said of them that earth and sky would pass before one word of
the Scriptures would change. And the latest creators of prayers
gathered them in garlands, already given value by the centuries.
In Vladimir Pyast there are such words, come as if from
without: “We sank in a solemn embrace, / We understood that we
are the children of God.” Or: “...But why now do 1 kiss the dust
of the mountain, / Where Thy voice did ring, thrown back by a
loud echo?” Or: “...and I shall be, like a park, all filled with
Thee...”
But Vladimir Pyast lives in our time, he cannot pray, he has
to write poetry. And so, in order for poetry to come out, he
makes up artificial lines to stick in between the inspired ones, he
mixes poetry with literature. What results is a showcase of Tait

52
diamonds,9 where among masses of artificial stones, they assure us
there are real ones as well. Literature is law-bound and wonderful,
like a constitutional government, but inspiration is an autocrat,
fascinating in that is living soul is above iron laws. I reproach the
muse of Vladimir Pyast for fearing to be autocratic, although she
has a right to be.
Of course, what I have just said should not influence a favora¬
ble appraisal of Vladimir Pyast’s book. Though among the young
swans of Russian Symbolism he is not the strongest, or the proud¬
est and most handsome—he is the most mellifluous.

In Sergei Krechetov’s book,10 there is a poem “The Young¬

est Judges.” In it he reports that they pronounced their inimical
judgement upon him; that his chisel chases cold stanzas and makes
their steel into icy armor; that he dreams of the sacred towers of
Medina, and so many other interesting and awful things. And at
the end he says:

So! I am not a poet! But my crimson robes,

I’ll not take off to the market, joking and laughing,
I’ll lay at the feet of the queen invisible to you
Both pain and rapture.

And so, the whole thing is in the queen. Perhaps he is an

occultist and secured the love of the queen Cleopatra—but why
does he write poems then, and not quietly occupy himself with
some sort of involutions? Perhaps he is a mystic and dreams of
the Eternal Feminine, but once again—why does he write poems
then, and not read papers at the Religio-Philosophical Congress?
Obviously his queen is his artistic ideal. In that case Sergei Kreche-
tov is sadly mistaken in thinking that she is invisible—she is well
known to every high school student. Bryusov embraced her, and
Aleksei Tolstoy, and Maeterlinck11 and even (oh, horror!) Len¬
sky1 - and Roslavlev.1-^ It is a story right out of the Decameron.
Actually, the images of every poem by Krechetov are bor¬
rowed from some other poet.
The borrowing of whole lines are not uncommon, and not
chance lines, but those which define the mood; so, in a famous
poem by Aleksei Tolstoy, the line “And all this happened once
before,” in Krechetov reads “All this happened once before.” You
cannot defend yourself against chance, but in these two poems the
images are similar as well.

53
 Besides that, Krechetov is not familiar with the most elemen¬
tary rules of stylistics. For example, here is an excerpt from the
poem “The Accursed Tower”:

No one knows if long

The gray-haired king lived in that tower.

Like a May day, fresh and sweet,

His young daughter bloomed.

Once, possessed by a demon,

He became drunk wthi sinful ardor.

Hiding in the gloom, like a thief in the night,

He stole past into her chamber.

The king destroyed his dear daughter,

He loved her but one night... etc.

The brevity of Diary of Events13 and philosophizing to boot.

And the author thinks he can make a thing like that pass for an
aromatic legend of the Middle Ages!
However many shortcomings there are in Sergei Krechetov’s
book, justice demands we note the merits as well. First of all,
the easy and confident verse, especially in anapestic meters. Then,
ringing, unexpectedly pleasing rhymes.
Here is a stanza from the poem “The Flying Dutchman,” as a
little example of the positive side of Sergei Krechetov’s verse.

Born to the sea, a favorite of Fortune,—

If, on the heights of the darkening masts
Above me, blue lights flare.

Apolloe, No. 2, 1909.

The Journal Scales, No. 9, 1909. Moscow.

The Journal Island, No. 2, 1909. SPb.

In No. 9 of Scales1 a series of poems by Mr. Ellis,2 the well-

known translator and critic, is printed. It is odd to see that the

54
man who appropriated the brazen language of Dante and the
snake-like grace of Baudelaire, who boldly defended the canons of
Symbolism from its enemies and at times even from its friends,
turned out to be pale, artificial and quite frankly dull in his own
poems. He does not think in words and images as poets do, he
muses like a theoretician, and his musings are directed towards the
field of mystical and occult philosophy, a waterless waste where
flowering oases are so rare. But unaware of this, with the naivete
of a hyperborean Symbolist, he writes of stigmata, thorns, and
burning wounds. Words aromatic in reference to SS. Sebastian,
Francis of Assisi, Benedict, but in reference to Mr. Ellis, they are
a bit strange. Both stigmata and thorns here are abstract, and sym¬
bolism turns to allegory, because it goes not from the real to the
other-worldly, but the other way around. Bryusov is the one who,
when he wants to dress in armor, puts on the mask of a knight as
well. Mr. Ellis’ verse is flaccid and boneless;one simply should not
start an anapest with the words no lish’ [but only]. . . , but he
writes: No lish’ k zemle, iznemogshi, sklonilas’...
The themes of his verse are interesting, the emotional exper¬
iences are deep, but in order to handle them, you need a great
talent, and Mr. Ellis does not have it.

The second number of Island3 contains Annensky’s poems

“It happened at Wallen-Kosk” and “Balloons.” What actually
happened at Wallen-Kosk, what attracted the attention of the
poet?
Why nothing. “A light rain fell from the damp clouds,” after
a sleepless night they yawned until they cried, and a Finn threw a
wooden doll down the waterfall for half a ruble. But... “there is
such a sky, such a play of sunbeams that the heart pities the doll’s
suffering more than its own.” He found the word. There is suffer¬
ing, one’s own, and other people’s, and that of others is more
dreadful, more pitiable. For Annensky, to create is to go out to
the sufferings of others, to cry with other people’s tears, shout
with other people’s mouths, to teach his own mouth silence and
his soul nobility. But he is greedy and cunning, he has the moon’s
drunken eyes, to use Nietzsche’s expression, and he always returns
to his own wound and reopens it, because it is only thanks to it
that he is able to create. Thus, every pilgrim must have his hut
with half-obliterated spots of someone’s blood in the corner, where
he can come to learn horror and anguish.

55
“Children’s balloons, fathers’ money, buy balloons,gentle¬
men!”—let the cry ring louder than all these Yaroslavtsy, these
Petersburg bourgeois... or these Parisian camelots4 on the wet
pavement, under the smoky sky, and of course, not on the festival
of the vernal Dionysia... So much more painful, so much more
astonished will be the glance of a person left alone for a moment.
Annensky’s verse is supple, everything in it has the intonation
of ordinary speech, but there is no singing. His syntax is just as
nervous and rich as his soul.

Apollo, No. 3, 1909.

XI

Konstantin Mikhailovich Fofanov. After Golgotha. SPb., 1910.

Vasily Cholba. In My Dreams... Near Life: Poems, Aphorisms.
SPb., 1910.
Evgeny Yantarex. Poems. Moscow, 1910.
Iosif Simanovsky. New World: Poems. Bobruisk, 1910.
Dmitry Rem, Aleksei Sidorov. Poems. Moscow, 1910.

Long, long ago, people liked to call Konstantin Fofanov the

first Russian Decadent. They even published him in Northern Flow¬
ers} But obviously this happened by some tactical scheme of
the early leaders of Modernism, for there is absolutely no reason
to suppose that Fofanov had an inkling of the great revolution in
Russian art that took place in the Nineties. He is the typical imita¬
tor of the “school” of Apukhtin, Nadson and Frug.2
The same, perhaps the only, failure to understand the rules
of rhythm and style in the annals of poetry, the same wordy
cliches, worn to despair, the same circle of ideas, near and dear
to the ordinary man in the street of the Eighties. After Golgotha
is a mystery-epic. In flaccid and clumsy verse, it relates several
well-known legends of Christ and the Virgin Mary’s descent into
Hell, passages from the Apocalypse. Perhaps Fofanov heard of
those who once formed a society of religious research and wanted
to join them. How does he do it? Well, here:
•

The earth is insignificant, the earth is transient;

56
 And the cross of Golgotha is its lighthouse...
But the heart loves and believes dimly,—
That life-immortality and death—is not gloom.

What can one add to this? Really only that “The Volga
falls into the Caspian Sea.”

Vasily Cholba reminds one of K. Fofanov in many respects,

but he is much more talented and cultured. It is obvious from his
poetry that he knows both Yazykov and Alexei Tolstoy, probably,
and even Heine. His old cliches don’t worry one, they are almost
always appropriate and lend his muse a quality of languor, which
is a little tedious, but nevertheless suits his muse. His images can
be daring without being garish. For example, in the poem “I
sailed across the sea,” he adds an interesting new touch to the
theme of travel:

And I understood then, that a single

Distant dream enchants us, that it warmed my soul,
That my poor antipode, like me, yearns
For a land—my native soil—to him unknown.

His rhythms are not banal; the sonnets are constructed

properly. He can write blank verse, a great rarity in our day; he
knows secrets which allow him to unexpectedly replace rhymes
with assonance in the middle of a poem. It is too bad really, that
the accent in his poems often does not fall on the words it should
according to the sense.
To the reader for whom expressions like “trembling bliss, the
silvery moon, the sweet cup of love,” and so forth still mean some¬
thing, the poems of Vasily Cholba may give real pleasure. But if
the reader is not a complete cretin, he must indignantly turn away
from the aphorisms, ungrammatical, pretentious, and shallow,
which have been appended to the book.

In the even flow of quotidian thoughts,

In the dead calm of lonely nights,
Somewhere in the lost, far, far days,
In days forever stilled, wrathless,
There was always something anxiously recalled...

This is the first poem that turned up in EvgenyYantarev’s

57
book. It is impossible to read it or discuss it.
Just try to literally think of nothing, to look and not see
what is around you. In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, it
will not work. But Yantarev’s poems bring you close to that
repellent Nirvana of cheap furnished rooms. If the poems of Zina¬
ida Gippius, also often written without colors, images, or mobile
rhythm, resemble a sick pearl, then Yantarev’s poems resemble
soggy twilight seen through an uncleaned window, or a sticky
whitish spider web on torn wall paper, in a corner with cock¬
roaches.

It is awkward for me to discuss Iosif Simanovsky’s book in

an article entitled “Letters on Russian Poetry.”4 For it was not so
long ago that Lev Tolstoy, reading in a pamphlet by Igor Severya¬
nin the lines “Stick the corkscrew into the springy cork, and
women’s looks won’t be so timid,” was sadly surprised at the state
to which Russian poetry had come, as if poetry were somehow
responsible for the impossible freaks of literary imposters.
Iosif Simanovsky has supplied his book with a preface. In it,
after a completely incoherent account of the “ideas” of his book,
after cries that “the instant,” taken in itself is “endless, eternal,”
that “the evening turns into a symbol of the world,” and other
Symbolist toys from the nursery, he quite rightly says that “not
technique, but the originality of the undertaking and the images
created can be a guarantee of talent in a young poet.”
But alas, there are no images at all in New World; it is impos¬
sible to create them by such primitive methods as beginning nouns
with capital letters; and originality in this book, if we are to ignore
some badly understood Andrei Bely, lies only in a certain type of
peculiar, wild absurdity.
After all, if a young poet runs a ring through his nose or
walks backwards, it is still impossible to call this originality, prom¬
ising for Russian literature. Worst of all, Iosif Simanovsky does not
know Russian literature at all. Instead of “bilsia, ” he writes “bi-
yalsia,” instead of “korchakh”—“korchak,” “izgas,” instead of
“pogas;” in his works, one sees expressions like “pulse beats,”
“freezing in a writhing coil,” “thirsty cry.”
His only excuse is that the book was published in Bobruisk.5

Under the title Toga Praetexta>6 Dmitri Rem and Aleksei

Sidorov published their poems together in one book. One can

58
explain such a combination by the fact that both of them have too
few poems. So, the first has 27 pieces, the second, only 21. But
one ought to discuss them separately.
Dmitri Rem... But here 1 want to make a digression. It is so
dull to write reviews, both laudatory and querulous, with technical
expressions and without.
It would be possible to write analyses, but who are you try¬
ing to write them about now? About three or four authors, not
more. You would like to answer the poets who send their poems
for comment with something of your own, dear and well-worn,
to respond like an echo to the call of their dreams and not be, in
the end, like Belinsky next to Pushkin, Sancho Panza next to Don
Quixote...
Dmitri Rem I shall discuss on his merits. He is above all deli¬
cate, and deep and refined in his delicacy. He can say:

Each day sharp autumn sorrows

Pierced my heart.
Each day my lips whispered:
Thy kingdom come!

This delicacy leads him to a knowledge of the secret and

joyous meaning of earthly expanses. “It is so good... Such a
sleep they sleep / Come from the east to the sunset, / Tired,
silent wanderers.”
And it forces him to deny or detest the immortality of the
soul:

I am alone in the silence of the hall,

And she will not be with me...
Don’t be sad, she is tired,
And the tired need peace...

But why is the final delirium

Clouded with persistent fear?
You forgot the priest in black?
He told her that there is no death.

But this very delicacy subordinates him to other, more

fully developed poets of delicacy.
Here is a line inspired by Blok: “With radiant heart I wel¬
come Thy coming.”

59
 And here, from Kuzmin: “We drank tea from pale blue
glasses...”
Aleksei Sidorov has entitled his section “First Poems.”
If these really are his first attempts, one can place some hopes
in him. He imitates Valery Bryusov not at all badly and Andrei
Bely even more successfully. However, for an imitation of the
first he has neither the technique, the temperament, nor the
taste (where Bryusov has a David, he has a Semiradsky),7 and
for an imitation of the second, the daring and freshness of inven¬
tion by which the poetry of Bely is mainly held together.
In his book there are childish lines, trick lines, but he
generally feels rhythm, loves rhyme and writes poems not because
he wants to, but because he must.

Apollo, No. 6, 1910.

XII

Teffi. Seven Fires: Poems. Spb.: Shipovnik, 1910.

Daniil Ratgauz. Ennui of Being: Poems. SPb.: Volf.
Konstantin Podovodsky. Summit Lights: Poems. Moscow, 1910.

In Teffi’s poems one enjoys most of all their literary quality,

in the best sense of the word. A book like this could have ap¬
peared in French, and then some of the poems from it would have
probably, and quite rightly, ended up in the Walch Anthology.1
The poetess speaks not of herself, nor of what she loves, but of
whom she might have been and of what she might have loved.
Hence the mask, which she wears with solemn grace and, it seems,
a just perceptible smile. This greatly reassures the reader, and he
is not afraid to be taken in with the author.
Teffi loves the Middle Ages, and knows it for what Verlaine
knew it to be-vast and delicate. Besides, she knows the tales of
the Middle Ages, but not the sugary didactic ones, or the taste¬
lessly ornamental ones you find in Tennyson, but the authentic,
elegantly simple ones like those in Perrault, Mme. d’Aulnoy,^ and
other storytellers of the seventeenth century.

Starving children on twisted legs.

60
 A limp dandelion by a dusty stump!
And an old bird, gone blind in the cage!
I’ll tell! I know! Listen to me!

In the sapphire tower of a golden palace

Queen Gulda with downcast eyes,
For the carpet of the throne of Lord God
Embroiders the ruby pattern of happiness.

Seven mountain deer humbly serve her,

They blink their emerald eyes, snort,
Paw the ground and wait for orders.
Wait to go where the downcast eyes direct...etc.

Teffi deals less successfully with the themes of Assyria and

Babylon. The desire to find in them a beauty other than the
beauty of ornamentation and to link it to our own experiences
seems to be too exotic. You somehow don’t believe in Queen
Shammuramat, and the slave Atoraga, and the Mountains of
Sindzhar, perhaps only because these names sound so unusually
and unpleasantly harsh in Russian. Anna Comnena, after writing
the biography of her father, Emperor Alexius, apologized to her
readers for having had to destroy the noble rhythm of the Greek
language with references to the coarse and dissonant names of
the crusaders.^ Our poetess, apparently, is less sensitive to the
rhythm of the Russian language.

In the country there are shopkeepers who only know how to

read and cannot write. I believe Ratgauz^ is one of them. Other¬
wise he would not have had the nerve to give us the thoughts and
feelings of backward youths of sixteen in tediously ungrammatical
poems:

There is no joy in earthly love,

No bliss in earthly strivings,
And dimmer grows the light of happiness,
Paler the spectre of perfection.

How wretched are all our dreams,

How futile all our hopes,
As in the whirlwind of eternal vanity
We, like specks of dust, are imperceptible!

61
 In this excerpt is the whole of Ratgauz. Already the unpleas¬
antly polished verse shows that he is completely indifferent to the
theme he has touched on; the uninteresting, overworked idea re¬
veals the clumsiness of the author in his choice of other people’s
feelings, and the drab words-a complete lack of poetic originality;
and when we learn from other poems that he considers himself a
poet and believes that although generations may be long forgotten
the songs are not, you feel like saying of him, in the words from
his own piece “The Dreamer,” which is appended to the end of
the volume, that “...these men, callous by nature, stuffing their
littlebrains with other people’s wit, speaking other’s words...
these none too clever gentlemen think themselves bearers of the
world, demi-gods... Well, let them!...”

“You can’t put a horse and a trembling doe in the same

cart,” said Pushkin.5 Konstantin Podovodsky apparently decided
to try it in his own work, striving to combine the negative aspects
of two such different poets as Balmont and Ratgauz.
Judging by the fact that on the cover of Summit Fires there
is the label “Volume 4,” one should not assume that its author is
still young and searching for himself. Rather, here we have a case
of innate lack of taste, contempt for the Russian language and a
certain peculiar stupidity which whispers words and images to
the author which are exactly the wrong ones for what his theme
demands. And it is a pity! He has the temperament and poetic
scope which, under favorable circumstances, might have helped
him to create something of value.

Apollo, No. 6, 1910.

XIII

Poetry in Scales

Before 1905, when the belletristic section appeared in Scales,

chaos reigned in Russian Symbolist poetry. Alongside Balmont
and Bryusov, World of Art1 promoted such dubious figures as
Minsky2; New Path2 published poems by Roslavlev, Fofanov and
others. Even Skorpion, cautious Skorpion,^ did not avoid the

62
common fate :it published Bunin and in Northern Flowers printed
a long poem by this same Fofanov.
Criticism hostile to the new movement in art watched all this
and sniggered maliciously. Earlier cries of indignation about the
“eccentricity of the Decadents” remained only in the most pro¬
vincial publications, while in the more prominent ones, they were
replaced either with indications that “Decadence” had been
played out, or declarations that “it” never even produced anything
essentially new.
Intentionally or not, I don’t know, Scales, by including a
literary section, refuted both these opinions in all its work. Thus,
poems in Scales, especially of late, are divided into two sharply
differentiated groups: the revolutionaries or the guardians of
tradition. The leaders preserved for themselves the right of revo¬
lution, while the rear-guard was entrusted to the youth. Owing
to this sort of formation, the whole column gained an impetus
beyond that of a movement, where the leaders must simulta¬
neously direct and restrain their forces. But this was also the
reason for its disorder: one cannot and indeed should not go
through the whole world like a cavalry attack...
Symbolism was dying out. The very arguments which had
arisen over the definition of this apparently fully elucidated liter¬
ary doctrine, indicated dissatisfaction with it in the circle of
poets. New problems arose, peculiar to each master, and their
works were called Symbolist only for lack of a more suitable
name.
A few remarks about the poets presented in Scales.
Konstantin Balmont, so fragile, so incorporeal in the first
period of his work, grew passionately fond of things and placed
the music potentially hidden in them above everything. In his
epithets he does not pursue accuracy; he wants their very sound,
not the concepts hidden in them, to define the image he needs.
However, even here, where possible, he changes adjectives into
nouns: voiceless—voicelessness, cherishing—cherishment, etc. The
last example is especially characteristic: he changed the very
“cherish” into an adjective and then made a noun out of it.
Neglect of verbs—that is what makes his recent poems ghastly
and inert, because poetry is thought, and thought is, above all,
action. Be that as it may, his endeavors are of enormous theoreti¬
cal interest, and in time they will be appreciated at their true
value.
63
 Bryusov, who revived a noble art in Russia, forgotten since
the time of Pushkin, writes simple and regular poems; and having
given examples of classical purity and strength in Urbi et orbi and
Garland,5 like Jacob joined battle with his God. He brings asso¬
nance into poetic practice, uses hyperdactyllic rhymes, new
stanzas, repetition of the same lines. Finally, in the poem “To
Someone,” which begins with the line “Farman or Wright, or
whoever you are!”^ he resolutely approaches the contemporaneity
of which poets are so afraid, and comes out the victor.

Then come: Vyacheslav Ivanov, whose entire poetic work is

a constant revolution, sometimes even against canons he estab¬
lished; Mikhail Kuzmin, with all the unexpected daring of his
themes and devices, a vocabulary unprecedented in Russian
and a verse which sounds exquisite and strange; and Andrei Bely,
who attempts to bring the colorful Impressionism of his youthful
works to the most everyday experiences.

Zinaida Gippius, with her mastery frozen at a single point,

stands apart, as do Fyodor Sologub and Aleksandr Blok, who
have printed their most characteristic poems in other publications.
Of the young poets, the “guardians of tradition,” especially
promoted by Scales are: Sergei Solovyov, Boris Sadovsky, and
Viktor Gofman.
Sergei Solovyov printed his best poems in Scales, those in
which, under the guidance of Bryusov’s poetry, he continues the
work of Maikov, sometimes even surpassing the latter in the
chasing of the verse and the strength of its graphic quality.
Boris Soadovskoy maintains memories of the traditions of
Pushkin’s epoch, studying its second-rate poets. It seems that the
current of Modernism has not touched him at all. However, dry
precision of rhythm and image, taste and a noble striving toward
work on verse reveal how close the poet is to the new trend, with¬
out which he could scarcely have freed himself from the chains of
Realism, for by temperament he is no conqueror.

Viktor Gofman is a student now of Balmont, now of Bryu¬

sov. With reason, he wrote in his youth a salutory poem to both of
them. But this apprenticeship did not go farther than a borrowing
of devices and a similarity of images. Through a youthful admira¬
tion of the refinements of culture, his own perception of the world

64
can be seen—a tedious but sometimes keen sensuality. And it is un¬
fortunate that recently he has begun to imitate the seraphic Blok.
Of those more rarely published in Scales, one can mention
Yury Verkhovsky—a poet of the Boris Sadovskoi type, but more
diffuse and bookish, and Odinoky, who has set himself a series of
interesting problems, and is seriously working at their solution.
One cannot say that there were not serious slips in the poetry
section of Scales; such, for example, are its silence in regard to
Innokenty Annensky (in all that time, it seems, there were no
more than three notices and not one of his poems); the failure to
enlist the contribution of Pyotr Potemkin, one of the most original
young contemporary poets; and finally, Ellis’s promotion in the
last year.
But despite all these blunders, the history of Scales can be
viewed as the history of the main course of Russian Symbolism.

Apollo, No. 8, 1910

XIV

Innokenty Annensky. The Cypress Chest: Second Book of Poems.

(posthumous). Grif, 1910.
Alexander Roslavlev. Carousels. SPb., 1910.
Evgeny Kurlov. Poems. Moscow, 1910.
Alexander Rotshtein. Sonnets. SPb., 1910.
Vasily Knyazev. Satiric Songs. SPb.
Sasha Cherny. Satires. SPb, 1910.

A whole series of critical articles by Modernists, representa¬

tives of the old school and even new-comers, has appeared about
Innokenty Annensky’s recently published book. And it is charac¬
teristic that they all agree in judging The Cypress Chest an indis¬
putably outstanding book, the creation of a great and mature tal¬
ent. This was perhaps influenced by the fact that Annensky, while
not siding ideologically with the circle of Russian Symbolists,
nonetheless deviating significantly time and again from the goals
he set himself, studied under the same teachers—the French poets,
worked on the same problems, and suffered from the same doubts,
although in the name of something different. The Russian Symbol¬
ists undertook a hard but noble task—to lead their national poetry

65
out of the Babylonian bondage of ideology and prejudice in which
it had languished for almost a half-century. Besides their work,
they had to spread culture, to speak of basic truths, to defend pas¬
sionately ideas which had already become generalities in the West.
In this respect, one can compare Bryusov with Peter the Great.
Annensky remained a stranger to this battle. Whether it was
the sheer estheticism of a soul spoiled by the beauties of Hellas, or
a pious, although apparently egotistical striving to use his powers
in the best way that forced him to isolate himself spiritually—who
knows?
But only now, when poetry has won the right to be alive and
develop, most of the seekers of new paths inscribe on their banner
the name of Annensky as our “Tomorrow.” Here is how he him¬
self defines his relationship to Russian Symbolism in the poem en¬
titled “To Another:”

Your dreams are Maenades^ by night,

And the lunar whirlwind in the twinkling expanse
Casts the waves of tresses up along their shoulders...
My best dream: behind the cloth of Andromache ;2

On her head an echafaudage, 3

And it coquettishly covered with a kerchief,
But nowhere would my severe pencil
Yield a bit of its harmonies.

The last two lines are especially characteristic of our poet. In

his poems he captures the harmonic balance between image and
form—a balance which frees both these elements, allowing them to
strive together like two brothers toward the precise embodiment
of emotional experience.
The range of his ideas is sharply new and sparkles with the
unexpected and sometimes the paradoxical. For him, what is typi¬
cal of our era is not our faith, but our lack of it, and he fights for
his right not to believe with the bitterness of a prophet. With a
look burning with curiosity, he pierces the darkest, most remote
recesses of the human soul; for him only pretense is odious, and
the question with which he confronts the reader: “but what if
filth and baseness are only torments amid the splendor somewhere
shining there?”—is no longer a question for him, but an indisput¬
able truth. The Cypress Chest is the catechism of contemporary
sensibility.
66
 Annensky worked long and hard on verse technique and po¬
etic syntax and made great gains in this area. By placing the sub¬
ject at the end of the sentence, he gave it a peculiar significance
and power, as for example in the lines:

I knew that she would return

And be with me—Grief.

Whimsically reshuffling subordinate clauses, he achieved, like

Mallarm6, a hieratical majesty and prompted intonations of voice
unknown in poetry before him.

Oh no, not the figure, let him be so gently vacillating,

I from your temptations harbor
Not the damp luster of raspberry smiles,
But the cool serpent of suffering.

His alliterations are not accidental, the rhymes have a great

power of suggestion.
The readers of Apollo know that Innokenty Annensky died
on November 30th, 1909. And now is the time to say that not
only Russia, but all of Europe, has lost one of its great poets...

Two or three years ago, when Roslavlev’s^ first book came

out, Chukovsky, with his characteristic courage, stated the opinion
of the educated majority, namely, that Roslavlev was a typical rep¬
resentative of the Modernist masses, unreliable even in a burst of
enthusiasm, intoxicated with what they do not believe in and
with the thoughtlessness of boors dragging the ideals of the leaders
out into the street. The article caused a sensation and—what is
much more important—influenced, it seems, Roslavlev himself.
The mark of a certain restraint makes this new book more literary
than the first. Now he is no longer dissatisfied with God, but only
with human culture (the poem “Panopticum”), and borrows his
ideas and images not from Artsybashev,^ but from Leonid Andre¬
ev (“Angel”). Occasionally, amid the rehashings of almost all the
Modernists, from Bryusov to Potemkin inclusive, which make up
his style, there gleam his own images, and his own style begins to
show through. “Uncle John” is almost all good. They say that the
group of Italian “Futurist” artists vowed not to draw “nu” for ten
years, so that this genre of painting would once again regain its
original freshness. If Roslavlev would renounce the fatal idea of

67
deciding universal questions with home remedies, drawing his
knowledge of philosophy from Balmont’s poems, if he would
stop speaking in generalities about the City and the Devil, if he
would try to develop his taste, then he would be a poet.

Evgeny Kurlov obviously intends to imitate Sologub. This is

apparent both in the pretentious introduction (a sort of manifesto
of extreme individualism) and in the predominance of lyrical
reflection over images and colors in his book. Sometimes this
leads to good results; you find true streaks in the book, singing
lines, no banal ideas. But alas, the exacting style of Sologub is not
within Kurlov’s power, and he often makes use of words and ideas
from a more accessible poet—Balmont. And this creates an un¬
pleasant impression, because the time for imitating Balmont has
already passed, and the time for studying him has not yet come.
According to the advertisement in the collection in question,
it seems that Kurlov has already published three books.^ It is sad
to think that one must explain the wretched cries, the comic
inaccuracies that mottle his poems not by the early youth of the
author, but by something else.

Love of the sonnet usually flares up either in a period of

poetic renaissance, or on the contrary, in a period of decline.
In the first case, one finds new possibilities in the tight sonnet
form: either the meter varies, or the rhyme alternations change;
in the second case, one seeks out the most complicated and inflex¬
ible and at the same time most typical formula for the sonnet,
and it takes on the character of a canon. The sonnets of Shake¬
speare and the sonnets of Heredia,7 these are the two poles in
the history of the sonnet, and both are irreproachable. The
difference in their reception especially allows one to evaluate
their charm, as always in sonnets based exclusively on inspired
calculation. In both, the refinement of effect goes hand in hand
with confidence of expression and lapidarity of style.
After this short apercu, what can one say about the sonnets
of Alexander Rotshtein?° The exacting sonnetist would not
have written sonnets in anapests or with only masculine rhymes,
would not have rhymed four adjectives or three verbal adverbs
in a row, would not have repeated the very same line twice. . .
But the daring innovator would have found the necessary words,
instead of the cliches of cheap estheticism, which is what all the

68
ideas and images in Alexander Rotshtein’s book come to.

For me, it is beyond doubt that for a good satirist, a certain

bluntness of perception and narrowness of horizon are indispen¬
sable, that is, what is generally called common sense. It is well
known that people of the higher sort, ennobled through long
poetic contemplation, do not laugh and do not become indignant.
Such, according to Marcel Schwob,^ was Whitman.
But perhaps we love satire because it is the voice of the
crowd, trying to state its opinion of life, of the world, of every¬
thing about which usually only the elect speak. And there is
nothing surprising in the fact that, not having learned to revere, it
only despises, but in such a way that its disdain is sometimes
worth a great deal of reverence.
I do not know why, of the two elements of satire, disdain
and indignation, Vasily Knyazev10 chose the latter. Not having
the great talent of a Nekrasov or even the inventiveness of a
Minaev,11 he is forced to content himself with meaningless
phrases like the traditional “punishing lash,” “mournful songs,”
“poor sufferer of the people,” and so forth (everything listed
was copied from one page). He roundly abuses Otto Weininger12
(whom, as is clear from the poem, he has either not read or not
understood), abuses contemporary writers for their immorality
and many others who happened to attract his attention. His
verse, not without a certain pleasant glibness, and is almost always
unoriginal and resembles now Kurochkin, now Minaev, now
Veinberg.14 But it seems to me that he does have talent.

Sasha Cherny chose the better part—disdain. But he has

enough taste to occasionally replace his peevish smile with a
gracious or even good-natured one. He is very observant and
searches not for people’s vices, like Knyazev, but their character¬
istic traits, so that it is not always his fault if they only turn out
to be ridiculous. He loves nature shyly but passionaltely, and he
becomes a real poet when speaking of her. Besides that, he even
has his own philosophy—a consistent pessimism which does not
spare the author himself. His verse, original and cultivated,
abounds with the intonations of the spoken language, and even
his awkwardness makes you happy, as a promise of the poet’s
future development of himself. But even now his Satires are a
valuable contribution to our poor satiric literature.

69
 XV

Fyodor Sologub. Collected Works. Vols. 1,5. Spb.: Shipovnik.

Sergei Solovyov. April: Second Book of Poems. Moscow: Musaget,
1910.
Nikolai Morzov. Star Songs. Moscow: Skorpion, 1910.
Nikolai Brandt. No Peace for My World: Poems. Kiev, 1910.
Sergei Gedroits. Verse and Tales. SPb., 1910.

Sologub has written a great deal, but there may be even more
written about him. So perhaps it is unnecessary labor to write
about him again. But when I read critiques of Sologub, strange
questions crop up, so simply formulated as to be inappropriate.
How can this be so? He is Gogol’s successor but has not estab¬
lished any particular school; he is a refined stylist, but the major¬
ity of his poems are almost indistinguishable from one another;
he is a formidable visionary, but of his visions we only remember
Nedotykomka, the Dog and the star Mair.1 Why this happens I
do not know and will not attempt to give an answer, but I will
try to examine the poetry of Sologub from the point of view of
the general demands made of the poet.
Sologub’s images...but what kind of images can there be if
the poet has said there is only “self,” which is the sole reality,
and which created the world. And it is not surprising that this
world is only a desert in which there is nothing to love, because
love means to feel something higher and better than yourself, and
this is impossible by definition. As if through a glass blackened
with soot, the poet looks about him. There are no colors, and
lines too are somewhow suspiciously obliterated; the light of dawn
through it is cold and sad, life—pale, the day—clear, the abyss-
mute. His vocabulary is noble, but so inexpressive; compare it
even with the vocabulary of Bryusov or Balmont; not to mention
Ivanov or Annensky, in whom the adjective, by its depth and color,
completely overwhelms the noun.
The reluctance to sketch and model is especially telling in
Sologub’s rhymes; for rhyme in verse is the same as the angle in
the plastic arts: the transition from one line to another must be
outwardly unexpected, inwardly substantiated, free, delicate
and resilient. But Sologub, rhyming identical forms of verbs or
adjectives, taking the endings of such words as gadaniia, veshcha-
niia for dactylic rhymes, unwittingly de-wings his verse.
The strength of Sologub as a poet lies in the fact that he has
70
been and has remained the only consistent Decadent. Everything
that wounds a sick consciousness is removed from his poems; his
images are minute and disappear, leaving behind a scarcely audible
melody, perhaps only an aroma. To achieve this, he does not de¬
pict things as he sees them, and loves most of all “what is not in
the world.” His muse is “the angel of dreams unseen on paths un¬
trod,” who, as on a knightly shield with a coat of arms, holds in
her hands “an unread book, with a forbidden secret.” And of
course, he speaks most of all about death, this great poet-mystifier
who obviously never died, although he loved to affirm the con¬
trary.

Poets have various inspirations: the inspiration of love, of suf¬

fering, of wisdom, of power. Sergei Solovyov chose for himself the
inspiration of well-being. Speaking of Kiev he exclaims:

Was it not here that the Byzantine sovereigns

Sent their precious gifts?
In the chambers the cries did not fall silent,
Nor the loud and heady feats.

Here, about Russia:

All of Russia is grain and sky.

Hundreds of miles—all the same:
Golden waves of grain,
Rye swelling with the wind

Here, about the estates of Lord Ravenswood:2

Not one forbidden, ancient fir

In the wood did the enemy axe touch,
And far away in the markets, the trout
From your deep lakes is famous.

Here, about ancient Greece:

Dirty with earth and golden dung,

With strong hands, like white bark,
You squeeze the nipples of a stubborn wild goat.
And streams of milk ring against the bottom of the pail.

He loves books, the old ones more—not to read them, how-

71
ever, but to admire them in some small but select library or to
take one along with him to the woods, to somehow justify his
dreamy wanderings. Obviously, he is not a reader, because all of
his bookish images Joan of Arc, and Richard the Lion-Hearted,
and John the Baptist are only feeble re-tellings of events famous
in history and legend.
As a true man of the soil, he is sensual. All the naive eroticism
of the eighteenth century, with its “beauties not more than four¬
teen,” “Bosoms,” and other “hidden charms” occupied a not un¬
important place in his poems. But where a more serious attitude
toward love appears, he is almost a student of Apukhtin.-^
It is wonderful to see in him a real closeness to Byzantium.
For it is through Byzantium that we Russians inherit the beauty of
Hellas, as the French inherit it through Rome. And often Greek
idylls and elegies, played out on lawns in suburban Moscow, are
the personal achievements of the poet Sergei Solovyov, and have
their own special keenness.
Compared with Sergei Solovyov’s first book, his verse is im¬
proving, but rather along the lines of delicacy and melodiousness
than of forged brass, as the poet himself dreams. The only thing
that is annoying is the sometimes careless attitude toward the Rus¬
sian language. Such expressions as “oral roses,” “the faun pan¬
pipes into the melodious trunk,” “sweet-grassed verdure of the
earth” all this is simply misunderstood by Vyacheslav Ivanov.

Boom, boom, boom!

Bo-bo-boom!
Who thunders
In the hills?
It is god
Boomboomgod.
He cats beans and peas!
O, you god!
Boomboomgod!
Don’t you eat
All the peas!
To your feast,
Commander,
Invite the whole world!

72
 What is it? A parody on Ivan Rukavishnikov? No, it is a poem
by Nikolai Morozov.4 This is his humor. But here are some serious
lines:

He sought the long path to the truth

In the vale of lies and vulgarities.

A deep blackness shrouded him,

And no light from heaven burned.
etc.

Here are some especially starry ones:

In the sky blue hemisphere,

There, where the Milky Way glitters,
Appeared in the atmosphere
Above the earth a meteorite.
etc.

Is it possible that an author along in years can make his debut

with a book of poems which have such a collection of images, de¬
vices and crystallized experiences? Or is it that scientific poetry
that Rene Ghil5 and his supporters are talking about so much in
France? No, there, everything is based on the search for a synthesis
between art and science, but in Nikolai Morozov’s poems, we see
neither. Only magnificent contempt for style, mockery of the de¬
mands of taste and a complete failure to understand the purpose
of verse, so characteristic of the Russian poet-revolutionaries of
the end of the nineteenth century, and perhaps also banality of
experience, dullness of poetic perception and rudeness in regard
to eternal themes—that is Morozov’s poetry.

Why did you visit us

In the backwoods of a forgotten village?... 6

The major distinguishing trait of Nikolai Brandt’s7 poems is

their prosiness. When the idea or image is prosaic, you can still ac¬
cept the situation: the author, it seems, is sufficiently intelligent
and well-read not to try to mask this shortcoming, characteristic
of many greater poets, but the prosaism of his expressions is often
too agonizing: he tempts you so to slam that little book shut so
73
that you will not ever open it again. As if aware of this, Nikolai
Brandt sometimes falls into the opposite extreme, and writes
things that have the taste not even of sugar, but of saccharine.
Such is his “epic in symbols,” “Through Life.”
His themes are banal-decadent with an inclination towards
Parnassianism, from which, by the way, this poet, almost unsur¬
passed in the amusing clumsiness of his expressions, is still so far
removed: The Curse of Eve, The Alexandrian Executioner, The
Dance of Solume, Dream of a Masochist, Mandragora,8 The Sor¬
row of Satan, etc.
But good lines do turn up in his work, sometimes even good
stanzas. Here, for example, is the beginning of the poem “The La¬
bor of Sysiphus:”

Wedging his foot in the sand, clenching his teeth until they hurt,
Straining the iron knots of muscle.
The shaggy giant, pushing the rough rock,
Tries to roll it to the summit of the cliff.

It is amusing to note that the title of the book is printed in

the shape of a cup. Apparently even Ivan Rukavishnikov, who has
written several “figured poems,” has not only admirers, but even
imitators.
Why do poets write? It is not difficult to answer this ques¬
tion: some—to tell people something new that happened to them
personally: an idea, an image, a feeling, it does not matter; others,
for the pure delight of creation, divinely complex, joyously diffi¬
cult. But why do non-poets write; why, for example, does Sergei
Gedroits?9
It is not “the chafing of a captive thought,” because there are
no thoughts in his poems, there are only generalities; vanity? hard¬
ly; he only with difficulty imitates poor imitators of Apukhtin.
Why then? Why?
His style is terrible; Vladimir Gordin himself does not have
a style like this:

Falling asleep from thoughts of inconsolable anguish,

I whispered your name yesterday.
And you came to me from the unknown distances,
From the transparent dome of the height of the heavens
You descended, as soon as I summoned you.

74
 Falling asleep from thoughts of anguish, “tv6e” (instead of
“tvoe”), “dali” (instead of “dali”), dome of the height of the
heavens—is all that really Russian? And it is the same on every
page. Everything is accidental in this book, unstable and viscous
like a boggy swamp: you can exchange one adjective for another,
rearrange the stanzas, make one poem out of several and several
out of one.
There are even pictures in the book, just as unnecessary and
colorless as the poems.

Apollo, No. 9, 1910.

XVI

Ivan Bunin. Complete Works, Vol. VI. SPb., 1910.

Yury Sidorov.Poems. Moscow: Altsiona, 1910.1
Yury Verkhovsky. Idylls and Elegies. SPb.: Ory.
Negin. The Coming Faust. Riazan, 1910.

Poetry should hypnotize—in this lies its strength. But the

methods of this hypnotism are different, they depend on the con¬
ditions in each country and epoch. Thus, in the beginning of the
nineteenth century, when, with the memory of revolution still
fresh, France strove toward the ideal of a government of the com¬
mon man, French poetry leaned toward antiquity as the cultural
basis of all civilized peoples. Germany, dreaming of union, resur¬
rected native folklore. England, having paid tribute to self¬
adoration in the persons of Coleridge and Wordsworth, found ex¬
pression for her society’s temperament in the heroic poetry of By¬
ron.
Later Hugo hypnotized with his affectation, so unusual for
facile French poetry after the eighteenth century. Heine hypno¬
tized with his sarcasm, the Parnassians, with exoticism, Pushkin
and Lermontov with new possibilities for the Russian language.
And when the most intense moment in the life of our nation
had passed, and everything more or less leveled off, the Symbolists
came onto the Field, wishing to hypnotize not with themes, but
with the very method of their communication. They wore out
one’s attention, first with original suggestive repetitions (Edgar
Allen Poe), then with intentional obfuscation of the basic theme

75
(Mallarme), then with flashing images (Balmont), then with archaic
words and expressions (Vyacheslav Ivanov), and attaining this,
suggested the appropriate feeling.
Symbolist art will predominate until the fermentation of con¬
temporary thought ceases, or—on the contrary—becomes so strong
that one can harmonize it poetically. This is why one must con¬
sider Bunin’s poetry, and that of other imitators of Naturalism, as
mere counterfeits, most of all because they are dull and do not
hypnotize. Everything in them is clear, and nothing is beautiful.
When you read Bunin’s poetry, it seems that you are reading
prose. The apt details of landscape are not interconnected by a
lyrical development. The thoughts are niggardly and rarely go be¬
yond a simple trick. Great flaws turn up in both the verse and the
Russian. And if you try to reconstruct the spiritual side of Bunin
from his poems, the picture turns out even sadder: reluctance or
inability to delve deep inside himself, a dreaminess that is unin¬
spired in the absence of fantasy, a keenness of observation without
enthusiasm for the tiling observed, and an absence of the tempera¬
ment that alone makes a man a poet.

Yury Sidorov, who died about a year and a half ago, was
what is called an interesting man, to judge by the article-obituaries
by Andrei Bely, Sergei Solovyov and Boris Sadovskoi which are
appended to his book of poems. You can believe that when read¬
ing his poetry, still so immature, so imitative. Rarely, but some¬
times at least, his own themes appear, for example, the poem
“Oleograph”; the basic columns of the poetic structure he con¬
ceived already begin to take shape: the England of Sir Walter
Scott, the mysticism of Egypt and a hidden passion for Byzantium.
His love of the eighteenth century seems accidental to me, and
too clearly inspired by Kuzmin.
Certainly one ought to reproach the poet for his imitation of
the writing manner of the poets from Pushkin’s time, which leads
him finally to an imitation of Benediktov;^ and for his imitation
of the contemporary “wizard,” which makes him write, for exam¬
ple, such lines as these:

Palace of Yaldabaoth-'
Faded with the gall of angry days,
Through you we with knowledge became gods,
O promised, prophetic serpent.

76
 It is possible to analyze this, but it is boring. It seems time to
leaveYaldabaoth to the popularizers of religious history.

Idylls and Elegies by Yury Verkhovsky4 is a better example

of how much one can do in poetry, without even possessing great
talent. This book will become the friend of everyone who simply
loves poetry, not searching in it for something to arouse dulled
nerves, for new horizons, or for answers to world problems. In
Yury Verkhovsky’s poetry there is no daring, but at the same time
there is no outcry, clumsiness or annoying carelessness of form.
Many poems are good, and there is not one bad one. The poet con¬
sciously chose for himself the role of Theon. Remember in Zhu¬
kovsky :5

...Theon, near domestic Penates,

Modest in his desires, without splendid hopes,
Stayed on the shore of Alphea.

And he did not miscalculate. In his verse is everything nature

can give a simple, untroubled soul—the joy of the morning, the
quiet pleasure of the day and all the intimacy of evening, and at
night—dreams of reminiscences whose traces no one can find. His
landscapes are not as clear as Bunin’s, but much more delicate and
fresh, as befits landscapes of the north.
And on all of his poems lies the mark of his perception’s dis¬
tinctive feature, which the poet himself depicts best of all:

Visions of earth
Flooded with radiance;
And shrouds of simplicity
Envelop the sky.

In this book, Yury Verkhovsky is already a fully developed

poet, who, if he is to study, then only under such masters as Push¬
kin, Baratynsky and Delvig.

The Coming Faust by Mr. Negin7 could only appear in Russia.

He clearly disapproves of all the starry-eyed conversations about
ancient Russian culture, and our capacity for quickly seizing ideas
from the West. In the book there is not one even slightly unfeigned
line, not one even slightly uncommonplace thought. The verse is

77
exceptionally bad. However, it seems that it was not a “poet” who
worked out this book, but an advocate of social reconstruction,
partly in the spirit of Lev Tolstoi. He made use of the dramatic
form as a means of popularizing his ideas, with the same touching
ingenuousness as earlier writers of geography in verse.

Apollo, No. 10, 1910.

XVII

Modest Druzhinin. —K.E. Antonov. Blissful Distances. —Baron N.

A. Vrangel. —Vladimir Gessen. Yellow Leaves. —Sergei Alyakrin¬
sky. Chains of Fire. —Alexander Mitrofanovich Fedorov. —Dmitry
Svyatopolk-Mirsky. Poems. —E. Astori. Dissonances. E. I. Shtein.
—Sofia Dubnova. Autumn Pipe. —Igor Severyanin. —Fyodor Ka-
shintsev. Pains of the Heart. —F. Lado-Svetogorsky. —Sergei Klych-
kov. Songs. —Modest Gofman. Hymns and Odes. —Velimir Khleb¬
nikov, Vladimir Kamensky. Hatchery of Judges. —Ellis. Stigmata.
—Benedikt Livshits. The Flute of Marsyas. —Marina Tsvetaeva.
Evening Album. — Ilya Ehrenburg.

Before me I have twenty books of poems, almost all by

young or at very least unknown poets. Strictly speaking, only four
stand outside literature, however wide the meaning of that ill-
fated word. Three are Modest Druzhinin’s,1 completely lacking
not only poetic temperament and knowledge of the technique of
poetic creation, but even an elementary feeling of irony, which al¬
lows him to address his beloved with this sort of “Entreaty”:

Why should you guard your innocence,

Vainly torment yourself with passion,—
Pay tribute to nature, pay that debt
And let me possess you!

And one is K. E. Antonov’s Blissful Distancesr He simply

did not learn how and when one can use “high-class” words. Ex¬
pressions like “the worshipper of terrible depravity,” “conceives
an opinion of himself,” etc. mottle his badly rhymed lines.

78
 The other books I would like to divide into amateurish ones,
daring ones, and books by writers.
Let us begin with the first group. For my life, I would not be
able to understand why they appear, if the authors themselves had
not obligingly explained in verse or prose. Thus, one of them, pay¬
ing his inability to write its due, and declining all praise in advance,
hopes to touch certain of his female acquaintances with his poems.
Another informs us that in publishing, he is fulfilling the will
of his wife, who has died. A third justifies himself by the fact that
he first thought “of illustrating a musical work with poems” (I do
not know how successful this idea was). And more in the same
vein.

Not all the collections of this type are invariably awful. For
example, Vladimir Gessen’s Yellow Leaves3 is almost good. It con¬
tains poems from 1889-1892, and indeed, if they had been printed
in good time, they would have given the author an honorable po¬
sition among the representatives of Russian poetry of the time!
His verse is perhaps too facile, confident and melodious, the
thoughts and images, although worn thin (now), reveal good taste.
For the dilettante reader or the anemic, who find the poetry of re¬
cent years, complicated and rich in its internal content, slightly be¬
yond their powers, this book can provide a real pleasure.
Unfortunately one cannot say the same about the poems of
Baron N. A. Vrangel.4 The book is dated 1911, but there is not
even a shadow of that delicacy, that instinctive knowledge of the
laws of poetry in it, that there is in Vladimir Gessen’s poems,
which are close to these in method and direction. The author is for
some reason captive of a pose that was the mode about thirty
years ago—that of the champion of an ideal, coldly pious, affected¬
ly sincere, coolly and listlessly enamoured of his love, tearfully en¬
raptured with his homeland, and wildly ecstatic with Italy. It is
obvious that he is not at all interested in the fate of poetry, and
perhaps does not even guess that such a thing exists; for him there
are no ideals in the future, no precious memories in the past. I do
not believe that he has read Pushkin.

No better, although in a completely different vein, is Sergei

Alyakrinsky, who wrote the book Chains of Fire? He is a Moder¬
nist: when you find a sloppy rhyme in his work, he will tell you it
is assonance; if you ask him about some line for which there is no

79
place in the metrical scheme, however contrived it may be, he will
declare that its rhythm caresses his ear; if you express bewilder¬
ment in regard to the expression “the emanating calls of the day,”
he will turn his back on you. The timid reader really has reason to
be disconcerted. But leaf through his book, and you will be reas¬
sured. He has no understanding of assonance, he is completely in¬
nocent of rhythmic innovations, his soul is no more refined by his
emotional experiences than your own, he is the typical dilettante,
except that he writes not like Nadson, but like Balmont and Blok.
He developed the most questionable features of the talents of
these two poets, he obscured their obscure expressions, screamed
in those passages where they raised their voice, and tried to scare
us. They won’t understand me, he thought, but then, they didn’t
understand Bryusov at first either. And he can always find him¬
self a critic who is not educated enough to study more complicated
phenomena, who will declare him the only real poet, among so
many versifiers, who brings to the world the “message of Spring.”
Then for a whole season he will shine in the editorial offices
as a young talent. Such things have happened and do happen.
However, I hope that this will not happen to him. He shows too
little enthusiasm in his filibusterous attack upon Russian litera¬
ture.
Gessen, Baron Vrangel and Alyakrinsky are models of the
three categories of poet-dilettantes.

Here are several varieties: Alexander Mitrofanovich Fedorov6

wields verse better than Gessen, and is perhaps more “trained,”
but he creates the impression of a sort of eunuch in poetry. His
high notes quite often turn shrill, and he perceives the world not
even like a woman, but just like an old lady, a eunuch, a world
which for him is either “a vale of grief and sorrow,” or “a sound¬
less prayer,” or simply falls apart into a series of details unconnec¬
ted by a general progression. And the author’s declarations that his
soul is akin... to Imatra7 Falls, do not destroy, but support this
opinion. However, the poems where he imitates Bunin are some¬
times quite literary.

More refined, newer, but still in the same vein are the Poems
of Prince Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky.lS Reading them, one wonders
if the author did not purposely narrow his horizon, reject sharp
emotional experiences and exciting images, grow fond of the most

80
unexpressive epithets, so that nothing would distract one’s thought
from the smooth succession of fine and sonorous stanzas. It is as if
he is still afraid to admit he is a poet, and until he does, I do not
wish to be more bold than he.

I would say that E. Astori, who published the book Disso¬

nancesP has a secret affinity of soul with Baron N.A. Vrangel, if
their souls were even the slightest bit involved in the creation of
their poems.

E. I. Shtein’s book,1® which is entirely filibusterous, has an

unexpected vagary. The author does not imitate anyone, but
wants to express only one sensation, namely, surprise at the most
commonplace phenomena. He does this, it is true, with only the
aid of exclamation points, and the inopportunely placed pronoun
“such,” and for this reason is not in any position to contaminate
the reader. But the attempt to create from the book a sort of pro¬
clamation of a new (in this case not terribly new) attitude is inter¬
esting in itself. I would not have thought of placing him in the
category of the daring if his poems more closely resembled poems.
But now it seems that he landed in literature completely by acci¬
dent.

The author of the book Autumn Pipe, Sofia Dubnova,11 is

completely under the spell of Blok. She is indebted to him for her
images, emotional experiences, rhymes, rhythms and so forth. The
original is good and the copy is not at all as bad as some critics
thought. But it is a dangerous path. To surpass Blok in his own
field, one needs a quite exceptional talent, but Sofia Dubnova did
not project her paths of development.
The reader is perhaps surprised that I devoted so much space
to the poems of “amateurs.” But young writers must dissociate
themselves from those whom they wrongly consider or could con¬
sider their confederates. For it is just as unfair to see in Emelyanov-
Kokhanovsky1 2 one of the founders of Russian Symbolism, as it
is to see in Alyakrinsky and poets of his kind the successors of Blok
and Bely.

Sometime, about twenty years ago, there were very few daring

81
poets, and they were worth their weight in gold. And indeed,
when war was declared on the past, when we had to rush to the as¬
sault, what could have been more useful than cannon fodder?
Through the debris of hysteria and posing the young contemporary
poets came to the shrine of art. But I do not think that this path
was profitable for the new seekers after “their own.’’ The young
contemporary poets are no longer Chekhovian heroes striving to
escape from a stuffy life, but seafarers like Sinbad, deserting bles¬
sed Bagdad “to look curiously at new subjects.” And only a rever¬
ent attitude toward the greatest wealth of poets, toward their na¬
tive language, saves them, as Sinbad was saved by reverence for the
laws of Allah.
Of all the daring poets whose books now lie before me, the
most interesting is perhaps Igor Severyanin: he is more daring than
all the rest. Of course, it is impossible to take nine-tenths of his
work as anything more than a desire for scandal, or as incompar¬
ably pitiful naivete. Where he wants to be elegant, he resembles a
parody on the novels of Anastasia Verbitskaya, he is clumsy when
he wants to be refined, his daring is not always far from insolence.
“I am branded as Baudelaire once was,” “well-parted... a cavalier
desirable to many,” “Menshevik,” “grisette,” and similar expres¬
sions only hint at all the clumsiness of his style. However, his verse
is free and inspired, his images truly and sometimes happily unex¬
pected, he already has his poetic persona. I will quote one poem,
which shows his keen fantasy, his inclination toward irony and a
certain cold intimacy.

South in the North

I left by the eskimo hut
A skewbald reindeer,-he looked at me wisely,
And 1 got fruit
And started drinking wine.
And in the tundra you understand? it was southerly...
In the cracks of ice-the click of castanets...
And I burst out laughing a pearl laugh,
Training my lorgnette upon the eskimo!

It is difficult, and I do not wish to judge now whether this is

good or bad. It is new-thank you for that.

The joyless daring of Fyodor Kashintsev in his book Pains of

the Heart1 5 is not promising. He speaks of the loathsomeness of

82
life and the horror of death, of the eternal lie and universal decay,
perhaps with the grimace of Prometheus but not thunderously,
only whiningly. He gives too little basis for justification of his pes¬
simism, and he expresses it in words that are too colorless, bare of
metaphors. I he few beautif ul lines and stanzas drown in this book
that always repeats the same things about the same thing. No, a
philosophical lyric is not written that way. Baratynsky and Tyu¬
tchev could show Fyodor Kashintsev a great deal, if he plans to
continue writing poetry.

The next three books show peculiar daring: Lado-Svetogor-

sky, Sergei Klychkov and Modest Gofman. All three try to squeeze
their work into a narrow framework the first into the frame¬
work of a single definite image, the other two of a definite style.
Such a Procrustean bed can scarcely be termed desirable in poetry,
although it does save us, as an outward discipline, from many
gaffes which might be made without it.
F. Lado-Svetogorsky speaks of the Azure Country,1 (> of that
paradise everyone envisions. He even tries to outline its topo¬
graphy, gives names to its valleys and rivers. But his words are so
dead, there is so little of the sharpness of a real hallucination in his
descriptions, that we see only a dream, and not sensation, hope
and not faith. Such a book commits neither the author nor the
reader to anything.

In Sergei Klychkov’s Songs17 it is difficult to tell what be¬

longs to the poet himself, and what to Balmont and Gorodetsky.
It seems that he only stumbled accidentally upon the theme of
heathen Russia, and started working on it too hurriedly; there is
neither Russian daring, Russian sorrow, nor that strange crossing
of Byzantine, Finnish, magic and Indian culture in which atmos¬
phere Russia was bom only a confection, a Slavic Arcadia with
its unfailing Ladas and Lelyas, princesses and maidens. The rhyth¬
mic refinements, the abundance of assonance, so valued in Russian
songs, are replaced in his book by metrically plain lines and dull
rhymes. It is just like an explanatory text for the paintings of Mrs.
Bohm.1'' The advertisement on the cover promises a second book
of verse by the same author Dubrama and an epic “'The Lament
of Jaroslavna.” If Sergei Klychkov does not try to widen his poetic
horizon as soon as possible, he is on a dangerous path.

83
 Modest Gofman wrote the very elegantly printed book Hymns
and Odes.19 From some newspaper I learned that this book was
written under the influence of the author’s trip to Greece.
This explains and excuses a great deal: its deliberate non¬
contemporaneity, the wide use of effects that have ceased to be
such for us, the poverty of poetic devices, the mistakes in Russian;
but it especially emphasizes other shortcomings: diffuseness of
thought, insipid images and absolutely inexcusable carelessness in
translation. Thus, in the Homeric hymn to Dionysus, the poet asks
God, who fertilized the vineyards, for long life, but in Modest Gof¬
man’s translation—he asks for a happy, carefree youth; in the
hymn to Hera, Homer says that the gods honor her as an equal of
Zeus; Modest Gofman translates: “Gods... honor with the light¬
ning-bearing Zeus to the Goddess bring.” It seems to me that the
reason for such distortions of the original is the translator’s insuf¬
ficient ability to deal with the difficulties of Russian verse.
The whole book is written in rare antique meters, which, al¬
though this is not the first time they appear in Russian poetry,
still, taken together, are a pleasant novely for the general public.

The height of daring this year, of course, is the collection

Hatchery of Judges,-® printed on the back of wallpaper, without
the letter “b,” without hard signs and with some other tricks too.
Of the five poets who submitted poems to it, only two are really
daring: Vasily Kamensky and Velimir Khlebnikov; the rest are
simply impotent.
Vasily Kamensky speaks of Russian nature. It is boundless
for him, so he can comprehend only details. The relation of large
branches to small ones, the cry of the cuckoo in the forest, the
play of small fish under a raft—these are the themes of his poems,
and it is good, because the poet does not have to strain his voice,
and everything he says comes out naturally. Even his countless
neologisms, sometimes very daring, the reader understands with¬
out difficulty, and from the whole cycle of poems, carries away
the impression of fresh and happy novelty.
Velimir Khlebnikov is a visionary. His images are convincing
in their absurdity, his ideas, in their paradoxicality. It seems that
he dreams his poems and later writes them down, preserving all the
incoherence of the series of events. In this respect, one can com¬
pare him with Aleksei Remizov,- ^ who used to write his dreams.
But Remizov is a theoretician, he simplifies the contours, outlines

84
them with a thick black border, to emphasize the significance of
“dream” logic. Velimir Khlebnikov preserves all the nuances, so
that his verse, losing in literariness, gains in depth. This sometimes
results in completely incomprehensible neologisms, far-fetched
rhymes, turns of speech that offend the most accommodating
taste. But then, what doesn’t one dream, and in dreams everything
is significant and valuable in itself.

Among the poets daring in conception, one can count the

author of Stigmata, Ellis, as well. He knows how verse should be
written, skillfully, although somewhat monotonously, combines
idea with image, and uses beautiful verse worked out, in the main,
by Bryusov. But here is his task: “In all its triple consistency, the
book Stigmata... is a symbolic representation of the whole mystical
path.” And for verse-representation, verse-means of expression,
there is insufficient internal self-justification, joyful enthusiasm
and development of the verse-end-in-itself. Perhaps Mr. Ellis could
write a beautiful book of meditations and descriptions of his mys¬
tical path, really experienced and valuable, but why this should be
in verse, I do not know.

Flute of Marsya,22 a book by Benedict Livshitz, sets itself

serious, and most importantly, purely literary tasks, and handles
them, perhaps not always skillfully, but at least with inspiration.
Its themes are often non-artistic, and forced as well: the sinful love
of some girls for Christ (there are things toward which, even for es¬
thetic considerations, one should act reverently), the rational apo¬
theosis of sterility, etc. Such non-contagion of the poet with his
themes is reflected in the epithets, monochrome-bright, as if dis¬
covered by electric light. But then, the supple, dry, confident
verse, the deep and apt metaphors, the ability to let others feel an
actual emotional experience in every poem, —all of this places the
book in the truly valuable class and makes it not only a promise
but an achievement. In the book, there are in all twenty-five
poems, but it is apparent that they are the fruit of long prepara¬
tion. And you believe not that this is a lethargy of creative spirit,
but rather the laconicism of ambitious youth aspiring to greatness.

Marina Tsvetaeva in the book Evening Album is inwardly tal¬

ented, and inwardly original. Although it is true that her book is
dedicated to “the memory of the splendid Maria Bashkirtseva,”23

85
and the epigraph taken from Rostand, the word “mama” is almost
never off the page. All this only suggests the youth of the poetess,
which is confirmed by her own verse-confessions. Much is new in
this book: new is the (sometimes excessively) daring intimacy;
new are the themes, for example childhood love; new is the spon¬
taneous, unthinking admiration for the trifles of life. And, as one
would have thought, here all the most important laws of poetry
are instinctively divined, so that this book is not just a charming
book of girlish confessions, but a book of fine poetry.

Ilya Ehrenburg set himself a series of interesting tasks: to re-

real the visage of a medieval knight, who has only accidentally
turned up in our surroundings, to portray the Catholic love for the
Virgin Mary, to be refined, to create clear, expressive verse. Not
one of these tasks did he even remotely fulfill, having none of the
essential qualities. Here is his feeling for the Middle Ages: “...the
king, surrounded by vassals, carelessly sets right the crown.” Here
is an appeal to the Virgin Mary: “Recall how in sinful languor you
hid sinful thoughts. And in a cave on harsh straw to your shame
bore the Son.” Here are “refined” images: “You ran to the garden
after white flowers,” or “on the thin [?] little table was hot choc¬
olate tenderly [?] served in little lilac cups,” or “and you lazily
moved the pink vessel, to give a special shine to your delicate
nails.” But to create any sort of verse, he must write “////"instead
of “/////, ” “pazhi” instead of “pazhi, ” and Mary, in his poem, longs
“after her cavaliers.”

Apollo, Nos. 4 and 5, 1911.

XVIII

Vladimir Kulchinsky. The Broken Harp. Yaroslavl, 1910.

Konstantin Bolshakov. Mosaic: Poetry and Prose. 1911
Vladimir Narbut. Poems. Book I. SPb., 1910.
Alexander Diesperov. Poems. Moscow, 1911.
Lev Zilov. Poems. Book II. Moscow, 1911.

For the critic who wishes to be conclusive and, if possible,

useful to his readers as well, it would follow that he must adhere
to many “working hypotheses.” One of them is especially handy:

86
that is tiie division of writers by their creative quality into the cat¬
egories of the competent, gifted and talented.
There are many competent ones, very many. They rarely end
up m the journals, but read their verses in drawing-rooms, leaving
the impression of some sort of peculiar emptiness, and they say
that they do not want to publish and write for themselves. But
once they have come out with a book, they usually become more
unpleasant and speak of jealousy and waiters’ intrigues.
The gifted fill up the empty pages of journals with their
works, appear at philanthropic soirdes and among their acquain¬
tances who sometimes include critics) are considered promising
young poets, although they are already over forty. Of the talented
it is not worth speaking: they are always individual and each de¬
serves special analysis.

\Tadimir Kulchinskv is hardly even competent: he is simply

lethargic. In his lethargy he makes use of the most hackneyed
ideas, feelings and images; having started to sketch some picture,
he never carries it through, he has never had the desire to use a
new rhyme, a new meter. His book is a contemporary Telemach-
iad'A it too one can force people to read as a form of punishment.

It seems to me that only inexperience and inability to treat his

works critically prevents Konstantin Bolshakov, author of the
book Mosaic2 from moving from the category of the competent to
that of the gifted. Only the first verses are positively awful; all
these little bladelets of grass and breezelets, reminiscences and day¬
dreams reek of painful boredom. But then the later ones, imita¬
tions of Balmont, though sometimes a bit too servile, gladden with
their genuine spontaneity and a certain peculiar, youthful exalta¬
tion. The prose passages in the book are worse than weak.

Diesperov is gifted. He worked on The Golden Fleece^ and, it

seems, on The Pass,5 ‘and “Grif”6 published his book. In every
poem there is something which justifies its existence—a thought, a
feeling.... But both these thoughts and these feelings are just as
meager as the rhythms and words. Diesperov’s poetry is like a
model for real poetry: everything is there, everything is in place,
but everything is 1/10 its real size. Too much effort is necessary
on the part of the reader for his images to become live, the colors
sparkling- Will everyone want to crack a coconut shell to get a sun-

87
flower seed? Diesperov is a private without hope of ever becoming
a general.

Narbut’s book of poems ^ does not produce a bad impression:

in contrast to Diesperov’s book, it is brilliant. There are technical
devices in it that charm the reader (although there are also some
which cool his ardor), there are apt descriptions (although there
are artificial ones too), there is intimacy (sometimes affectation as
well). But how can one not forgive failures in the presence of suc¬
cesses? A good impression—but why does this book awaken wist¬
ful reflections? It contains nothing besides pictures of nature: of
course even in these one can express one’s world view, one’s indi¬
vidual sorrow and individual joy, everything that is valuable in
poetry—but this is exactly what Narbut failed to do. Why is this?
Has the poet really ceased to be a microcosm? Has the time of vul¬
gar specialization by theme really come for poetry as well? Or is
this only the distinctive device of a strong talent, developing its
abilities one at a time? I hope to God! In that case it is dreadful
only for him, and not for all of poetry.

There is no better way to poison one’s faith in young poets,

perhaps even in young poetry, than to read through the “poems”
of Lev Zilov.8 Everything, thoughts and devices, are taken from
one man...Boris Zaitsev.9 Let it not be said in reproach to the lat¬
ter that what is good in prose is unbearably tedious in poetry. And
in general, what sort of tastelessness is this—for a poet to imitate a
prose-writer! Every thought conditions its form in advance—poetic,
prosaic, pictorial or musical, otherwise it is not a thought, but
thoughtlessness.

Apollo, No. 6, 1911.

XIX

Vyacheslav Ivanov. Cor Ardens. Part One. Moscow: Skorpion,

1911. 2 R. 40 k.

If it is true—and it is most likely—that the poet is the.blazing-

ly creative feat of his life, that poetry is the truthful narration of
the genuinely experienced mystical path, that Confucious, Moham-

88
med, Socrates and Nietzsche are poets, then Vyacheslav Ivanov is a
poet too. An immeasurable gulf separates him from the poets of
line and color, Pushkin or Bryusov, Lermontov or Blok. Their
poetry is a lake which reflects the sky, the poetry of Vyacheslav
Ivanov is the sky reflected in a lake. Their heroes, their landscapes
are more lofty as they become more lifelike; the perfection of
Vyacheslav Ivanov’s images depends on their illusory quality. The
Lermontovian Demon descends from the heights of perfect know¬
ledge to Georgia to kiss the eyes of a beautiful girl; the hero of
Vyacheslav Ivanov’s epic, black-legged Melamp, goes off to the
“bottomless abysses,” to Snake Field to contemplate the marriage
of Snake-Causes with Serpent-Aims.
Here is Pushkin’s landscape:

...I love the sandstone slope

Before the hut two rowan trees,
The gate, the broken fence
In the sky, grayish clouds...

Here is Vyacheslav Ivanov’s landscape:

You remember: dream masts,

Like at the docks of Lorrain,
Rushed up from the fog
Of river blue
Toward the ethereal illuminant,
Where the lunar siren
Rocked the silver-bosomed,
Numbing dreams.

As you see, they are in complete antithesis.

Of course, even Vyacheslav Ivanov sometimes speaks of
things and phenomena without insisting on the ideas included in
them and revealed by the x-rays of his insight, and the above-
named poets raised their voices from the transmission of the most
secret mysteries,—but neither he nor the others could help feeling
like guests, though desired ones, in a sphere foreign to them.
I called the images given by Vyacheslav Ivanov illusory. Real¬
ly, they are so full, all their component parts so uniformly and in¬
tensely bright, that the attention of the reader, unable to grasp the
whole, dwells on details, only vaguely suspecting the rest. This
gives rise to a feeling of dissatisfaction, but it also forces one to re-

89
read again and again poems that are already familiar.
Language.... Vyacheslav Ivanov treats it more as a philologist
than as a poet. For him, all words are equal, all turns of phrase
good; for him there is no secret classification of them into “mine”
and “not mine,” there are no deep, often inexplicable sympathies
and antipathies, He wants to know neither their age nor their
country of origin (“in the vernal splash, the cry of the forest
soothsayers” and “the whistle of the Harpies in the Lethean swell
of the laurel” stand side by side). Like images, they are only the
clothing of ideas for him. But his consistently intense thought, his
precise knowledge of what he wants to say, make his choice of
words so amazingly diverse, that we are justified in speaking of
Vyacheslav Ivanov’s language as distinct from the language of
other poets.
Verse.... Vyacheslav Ivanov handles it perfectly; it seems
there is not a single device, however complicated, that he would
not know. But for him it is not an aid, not a golden joy, but again
only a means. It is not verse that inspires Vyacheslav Ivanov,—on
the contrary, he himself inspires his verse. And that is why he
loves to write sonnets and ghazals,^ these difficult and crucial but
already formulated verse forms.
I shall speak of the most important thing in Vyacheslav Iva¬
nov’s poetry, of that golden staircase along which he leads the fas¬
cinated reader, of the content, when the second volume of Cor Ar¬
dens appears, which should make up a single book with the first.

Anthology. Moscow: Musaget, 1911.2 R.

Of the thirty names found in this almanac of poetry, half are

unknown. And at the same time, it contains neither Balmont, nor
Sologub, nor Gippius, not to mention the many “young” poets
who have already proved themselves. Therefore it is not fair to
draw any sort of general conclusions from this book about the fate
of Russian poetry. Here the editor did not wish to be a producer,
to single out the general from the particular by a skillful distribu¬
tion of material, or to highlight any one movement by a deliberate
choice of names. He was only a censor of literacy and good taste.
He fulfilled this humble task well.
The almanac opens with a poem by Vladimir Solovyov, print-

90
ed for the first time, which is not, however, among his best things.
Vitold Akhramovich^ contributed four poems: the first in¬
spired by Andrei Bely, the second-by Blok, the third—by Solo-
gub, the fourth—by Kuzmin.
Alexander Blok appears in the full flower of his talent: the
way his regal madness fits into sonorous verse is worthy of Byron.
Valerian Borodaevsky recounted some not very interesting
themes in not very good poems. He shows a noticeable inclination
toward a mechanical production of poems, which was not present
in his book.^
Andrei Bely’s poem “Before an old painting” is beautiful; of
the two paths departing from Romanticism—the way of Heine and
the way of Goethe—the second, more difficult one served as the
inspiration for this poem.
Yury Verkhovsky behaves like a child, but without grace.
One line is borrowed from Bryusov.
Eight poems by Maximilian Voloshin.5 Seven of them are the
cycle Cimmerian Spring.6
Poems by Sergei Gorodetsky dated 1908. Admirers of his
poetry will read them with pleasure, while they will dissuade his
opponents of nothing.
Four Abyssinian songs by the author of this review, written
independently of the real poetry of the Abyssinians.
The ghazals by Vyacheslav Ivanov are a magnificent mosaic
of words; his “Spiritual Verses” are perhaps too clearly beautiful
for this genre.
P.K. clumsily but openly imitates Kuzmin and Sergei Solo-
vev.
The insipid poem by Samuel Kissin^ is at least original.
Sergei Klychkov has made progress since the publication of
his book.^ His “Shepherd” is good, and you catch the smell of the
sea in his “Fishwife.”
In Mikhail Kuzmin’s cycle Autumnal May, there are fine,
classically irreproachable poems that could not have better refuted
the author’s pessimistic lines:

All the names are pale, and all titles old,

But love is always new.
Can I convey your charm
When words are so feeble?

91
 Pyotr Potemkin’s poems are uneven, as usual, although now
there are more successful expressions than unsuccessful ones.
Vladimir Pyast’s first poem is magnificent, built on hypnotic,
but not tiresome, repetitions. The two others are considerably
weaker—as if someone else wrote them.
The Catholic sonnets by Sergei Raevsky^ are immature, arti¬
ficial and dull.
One can now find such poems as those of Grigory Rachinsky
only in minor weeklies and illustrated supplements to provincial
newspapers.
After having raised our hopes, Dmitri Rem contributed
poems that were just adequate; one would like to expect some¬
thing better from him.
Semen Rubanovich is unpleasantly glib, almost impertinent;
his lack of taste is not redeemed by novelty of imagery; but he is
undoubtedly capable of writing poetry.
Sergei Ryumin^ arouses no thoughts, fears or hopes; his
poems are bad, to put it simply and bluntly.
M.S. is sincere, intelligent, feels deeply, but seems to have too
little strength for a poet, although he does know many stylistic de¬
vices that make verse alive.
Margarita Sabashnikova’s* ^ poems, obviously, are born of
the author’s mysticism, but they are convincing neither as mystical
insights nor as poetry.
Boris Sadovskoy is as impersonal as usual, as painstaking as
usual. He has ability as well as taste and love for poetry—but not
enough of one thing: talent.
The boring knight from Niva illustrations^—Alexei Sidorov
has an equally boring princess; the verse is flaccid; the rhyme
“zhenikh ” with “ponik” is incomprehensible.
There are some fine poems among the fourteen by Sergei So¬
lovyov; as always, he was more successful with poems on antique
themes than with contemporary ones.
Lyubov Stolitsa’s^ poems are bold, powerful, and finished,
but there is a certain lisping voluptuousness in them that creates
an unpleasant impression.
Vladislav Khodasevich’s poems captivate with their free, sure
strokes, their seriousness and their restrained grief; what is more,
they are irreproachable in form.
Marina Tsvetaeva’s two poems do not add anything to the im¬
pression we got from her recently published book.

92
 Ellis writes at length, tediously, with pretentions to refine¬
ment and with major blunders.

Apollo, No. 7, 1911.

XX

Northern Flowers for 1911. Collected by “Scorpion” Press, Mos¬

cow. 1 R. 50 k.

A year and a half ago the journal Scales was discontinued and
the “Scorpion” Press, so as not to lose contact with its readers, de¬
cided to resume publication of almanacs. The first of them makes
a favorable impression. Somov’s cover ^ and the familiar names of
Bryusov, Balmont, Kuzmin, Gippius and others win the reader
over. But upon looking through the collection, and even upon
reading it, one feels a certain disappointment. What was good six
or seven years ago in Scales, reinforced with articles and critiques,
seems somehow helplessly unconvincing now. If one excludes the
tiny comedy by Mikhail Kuzmin Liza the Dutchwoman, with its
amusing couplets, two poems by Valery Bryusov, brilliant in con¬
ception and execution, and his epic “Underground Dwelling,” in
which the influences of Dante and Edgar Allan Poe cross in a pe¬
culiarly profound way—we are left with nothing which will not ir¬
ritate us. Zinaida Gippius calls poor assonances “misplaced
rhymes,” the first instead of the last words in the lines of the
poem rhyme—such an obviously artificial vagary can scarcely be
called a useful technical innovation and, besides, positively inter¬
feres with following the sense of the poems.
How is one to explain to Konstantin Balmont, who has writ¬
ten an essay on Egyptian love poetry, that between the most
beautiful words there must be some connection, and that the es¬
sence of sugar is bitter to the taste? Here is the first sample of his
prose I came across: “The Egyptian dove resembles in its tender¬
ness and delicacy of feeling even more the Hindu paramour, whose
name was Radga, and with whose love-fancies and plaints Jayade-
va’s charming epic is filled...” Letters of a Russian Traveller? in
comparison with this treacle, is a model of tense style and strict
precision of image. In the translation of the Egyptian songs them¬
selves, there is nothing Egyptian—only late Balmont.

93
 The poems by Yurgis Baltrushaitis are well thought out, ma¬
ture and devastatingly dull.
The poems by D. Navashin,^ who appears for the first time,
apparently, in print, are very poor and, worst of all, promise noth¬
ing. His short story “The Pirate” is written in a sugary, insipid
style and is almost without any plot.
If it were not for the inappropriate and already tiresome ero¬
ticism, Boris Sadovskoy’s story “Under Pavel’s Shield” would be
good.
The foreword is well and vividly written: the motto of the al¬
manac’s contributors is stated in it: “faith in the high importance
of art as such, which cannot and must not be a means toward any¬
thing else, supposedly higher, and a steadfast attempt to serve as
best we can precisely this ‘higher art’.”

Apollo, No. 8, 1911.

XXI

Yurgis Baltrushaitis. Earthly Stages. Moscow: Skorpion. 1 R. 50 k.

Ilya Ehrenburg. I Live. SPb. 1 R.
Graal Arelsky. Blue Azure. 50 k.
S. Konstantinov. Miniatures. 1 R.
S. Tartakover. A Few Poems. 50 k.
Alexander Konge and Mikhail Dolinov. Captive Voices. 1 R.
Lev Markovich Vasilevsky. Poems. 1 R.
Alexander E. Kotomkin-Savinsky. Collected Poems. 75 k.
Yury Zubovsky. Poems. Kiev: Lukomore. 85 k.

Yurgis Baltrushaitis belongs to the older generation of Sym¬

bolists, one actually feels in him the stamp of the founders of
Skorpion 1 and Scales: an elevated, even solemn attitude toward
theme and a terseness of verse, although not always in accordance
with the significance of the idea.
Baltrushaitis is a Symbolist, but I would rather call him a
“metaphorist,” if this neologism were not so ugly. In most cases,
his poems are only similes, used for the description of an experi¬
ence and not playing their own non-auxiliary role. Thus, one
wants to see the word “like” in front of them, and then a lyrical
wave, an epic tale, a sudden breakthrough into real life. But the

94
thick blood of men at the end of the last century prevents the
poet from breaking away from the web of metaphors, and his
poems, interminably similar to one another, pass by the reader,
austere, solemn and unneeded.

Ilya Ehrenburg has made great progress since the publication

of his first book. ^ His poems now have neither the childish blas¬
phemy nor the cheap estheticism which, unfortunately, have
already managed to poison several beginning poets. He has moved
from the ranks of imitators to the ranks of students, and some¬
times even sets off on the path of independent creation. In his
terze rime,^ there is a real feeling of paganism, sweet in an earthly
sense and slightly miraculous. He skillfully combines lyrical deve-
lopement with historical method, and at the same time almost nev¬
er raises his voice to a shout. Of course, we have the right to de¬
mand a great deal of work from him, especially on language—but
the main thing is already accomplished: he knows what poetry is.

Graal Arelsky^ is one of those poisoned by Ilya Ehrenburg’s

first book, although his dialogues are more refined, his descriptions
more careful. Nevertheless, Igor Severyanin and the contemporary
poet-exotics influenced him. There is great naivete in his predilec¬
tion for high-ranking persons: infantes, marquis, tsarinas, kings,
etc.—all of them lack life. He seems to have no statement of his
own which must be spoken at any price, and which alone makes a
poet, there is only the ardor of youth, an aptitude for versifica¬
tion, taste and knowledge of contemporary poetry. If one thinks
of how many writing poetry do not have even these qualities, one
cannot help but welcome his appearance.

S. Konstantinov’s book made me very happy. Not that there

was nothing to criticize. One can criticize it, even ought to—for
colorless, unpleasantly polished verse, for thought-slogans already
expressed by others, and for the Romantic rubbish, dear to the
heart of Graal Arelsky. But it contains a certain genuine, healthy
joy in all creation, whimsical, and at the same time stable, images,
intoxication with his own and others’ strength. Not without rea¬
son are three whole poems devoted to the image of Zarathustra.
Balmont of the Burning Buildings period,^ and Bryusov, whose in¬
fluence on the author is very noticeable, make up a fine school.
One would like to believe that this is not the last time you will

95
meet with the name of S. Konstantinov is poetry.6

It seems that S. Tartokover^ is also an indubitable poet. He

has concentration of thought and great inner experience. He
handles the materials of verse skillfully and carefully. But he not
only does not feel the Russian language, he does not know it. His
syntax is impossible, his vocabulary absurd. “Weaked, rejected, ex-
pent, hope succumbs”—such expressions turn up on every page.
Judging by these expressions and his last name, S. Tartokover is
probably a Jew. He would not be bad if he would just write in
Yiddish, like Byalik, Sholom-Ash and others.^ And then it would
be much more interesting to read his poems in translation.

The poems by Alexander Konge^ and Mikhail Dolinov^ are

preceded by Alexei Kondratev’s eloquent foreword: “It is good to
be young, to pine for an unearthly, sweet love during the white
nights and sing silver sonnets in honor of goddesses and princesses
from the kingdom of dreams.... The Muses love young poets....
They know that their young minions are modest, whether they
like it or not, and not in any condition to tell a crowd in detail of
all the caresses lavished upon them, sometimes they are not even
in a condition to sketch the face and the whole outline of the lov¬
ing Muse who just kissed them....”
It is difficult to add anything to this. To describe both poets
is hardly worthwhile. Both of them similarly describe “A White
Night,” “Forest Roses,” “The Evening,” “The Moon” (names of
poems), etc. The meters are sustained, as are the rhymes. The epi¬
thets are accidental and monotonous. A. Konge obviously prefers
Blok, Mikhail Dolinov—Bryusov. That is for the readers. As for the
authors, one can only advise them to try to awaken the poets in
themselves, who are still nowhere in sight.

However strange it may be, the poems of Lev Markovich Va¬

silevsky^ 1 have much in common with those of Alexander E. Ko-
tomkinJ“ Even if Vasilevsky writes:

Twilight, like tentacles, creeps.

Twilight shrouds the woods,
in the slow dying vanished
The echo of minutes slipping away...

96
And Kotomkin:

I hear marvelous sounds

Everything awakes anew.
The first sorrow of parting
The first sadness and love.

So what if Vasilevsky mourns over the fate of the Persian

woman, who is “at twelve a wife, and at twenty-live an old wom¬
an, and drags out her life without the life-giving ray,” and Kotom¬
kin joyfully invites the “deceitful world” to listen: “though we are
few, brothers, still, all of us are Slavs!...,” so what if it becomes
clear upon reading their books that Vasilevsky is just as incurable a
pessimist as Kotomkin is an optimist. So what if the first writes in
a new style, and the second in an old one—they are related by the
same lack of striking thoughts, of interesting emotional experi¬
ences, of words wrested from the soul, of a reverent attitude to¬
ward verse and of everything that we understand by the word
poetry.

Yury Zubovsky is young in the good, humane sense. He

seethes with images, every sensation new to him he takes as an un¬
earthly revelation, he is intoxicated with himself and those around
him. Much of what he says will seem unnecessary and uninteres¬
ting, much has already been heard. But there are lines and even
stanzas that evoke a joy like spring water, like an unexpectedly
discovered flower. As yet he is a vassal—to Blok. But if his inner
enthusiasm is not extinguished, he will manage to find his own
way.

Apollo, No. 10, 1911.

XXII

Alexander Blok. Night Hours: Fourth Collection of Poems. Mos¬

cow: Musaget. 1 R.
Nikolai Klyuev. Chime of the Pines Moscow: Znamensky. 60 k.
Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont. Complete Collected Poems. Vol.
Eight: Green Garden. Moscow, Skorpion. 1 R. 50 k.
Paul Verlaine. Collected Poems. Tr. Valery Bryusov. Skorpion.

97
Paul Verlaine. Memoires d’un veuf Altsiona. 1 R.
M.G. Veselkova-Kilshtet. Songs of a Forgotten Estate. 1 R.
Vadim Shershenevich. Spring Thaws. 60 k.
Ivan Genigen. Poems. 45 k.

Before Alexander Blok stand two sphinxes that force him “to
sing and weep” with their unsolvable riddles: Russia and his own
soul. The first is Nekrasovian, the second, Lermontovian. And of¬
ten, very often, Blok shows them to us, merged into one, organi¬
cally indivisible. Impossible? But did not Lermontov write “Song
of the Merchant Kalashnikov”? 1 From Nekrasov’s behests to love
the fatherland with sorrow and wrath, he accepted only the first.
For example, in the poem “Beyond the Grave,” he begins accusing¬
ly:

He was only a fashionable man of letters,

Only the creator of blasphemous words...

but immediately adds:

But the dead man is kindred to the people’s soul:

It piously reveres any end...

Or in the poem “Native Land,” after the magnificently ter¬

rifying lines:

Beyond the Black Sea, beyond the White Sea

In black nights and white days.
Wildly the dumb face stares,
Tartar eyes cast fire...

The lines that immediately follow bring reconciliation by means of

the rhythmic pattern itself, with three adjectives in a row:

A soft, long, red glow

Every night above your camp...

This transition from indignation, not to action or appeal, but

to harmony (though bought at the price of new pain—the pain is
melodious), to, I would say, a Schilleresque beauty, characterizes
the Germanic spirit in Blok’s works. Before us is not Ilya Muro-

98
mets, not Alesha Popovich, but a different guest, a renowned hero
from across the seas, a sort of Dyuk Stepanovich.2 And he does
not love Russia as a mother, but as a wife, whom one finds when
the time comes. In his Lohengringian sorrow, Blok knows abso¬
lutely nothing ugly or base to which he could finally say a manly:
no! But perhaps he wants to, even seeks it? But an instant later
even the theme of the small forgotten station sobs in him like the
most sonorous violin:

The cars went on their usual line,

Shook and creaked,
The yellow and red ones were silent,
In the green ones they wept and sang...

There is a Lermontovian tranquility and melancholy in Blok’s

purely lyrical poems and confessions, but here also is a characteris¬
tic difference: instead of the charming arrogance of a young hus¬
sar, he has the noble pensiveness of Michael Cramer. Besides that,
one is struck by still another trait in his work, uncharacteristic not
only for Lermontov, but for all of Russian poetry in general,
namely—morality. Appearing in its initial form as the unwilling¬
ness to do evil to another, this morality gives Blok’s poetry the im¬
pression of a certain peculiar, as well as Schilleresque, humanity.

For with a candle, in lengthy disquiet

Her mother does not wait for her at the door,
For her poor husband behind the thick shutter
Will not envy her...

he reflects almost at the moment of the embrace and falls in love

with the woman for her “youthful contempt” for his desire.
Blok knows, as no one else does, how to unite two themes in
one,—not juxtaposing them one to another, but fusing them chem¬
ically. In Italian Poems there is the majestic and radiant past, and
“a certain wind, singing through black velvet of future life,” in
“Kulikovo Field”—the invasion of the Tatars and the history of an
enamoured warrior from among the Russian troops. This device
opens limitless horizons for us in the field of poetry.
In general, Blok is one of the wonder-workers of Russian
verse. It is difficult to find an analogy to the rhythmic perfection
of such poems as “The Pipe Played” or “Today I don’t remember.”

99
As a stylist, lie does not avoid the usual beautiful words, he knows
how to extract from them their original charm.

Valentina, star, reverie,

I low your nightingales sing...

And his great service to Russian poetry is that he threw off

the yoke of exact rhyme and discovered the dependence of rhyme
on the initial momentum of the line. Ilis assonances, interspersed
in stanzas rhymed throughout, and not just assonances, but simply
inexact rhymes, always aim at some sort of especially delicate ef¬
fect and always achieve it.

1'his winter brought poetry lovers an unexpected and pre¬

cious gift. 1 speak of the book by Nikolai Klyuev,-’ who has been
almost unpublished until now. We meet in it a poet who has al¬
ready reached his full strength, a successor to the tradition of the
Pushkin period. Ilis verse is sonorous, clear, full of content. Such a
dubious device as that of placing the object before the subject is
completely appropriate in his work, and gives his poems a stately
firmness and significance. Carelessness of rhyme cannot disturb
anyone either, for, as always in great poetry, the center of gravity
lies not in the rhymes but in the words within the line. However,
such word formations as “imperious-eyed” or “to be many-eyed”
makes one recall with pride the same sort of efforts in Yazykov.
The spirit in Klyuev’s poetry is rare, exceptional it is the
spirit of one who has found his path.

Unattainable for death is the bottom,

And the rivers of life are swift-flowing.
But there is a magic wine
To prolong the enchantment eternally...

he says in one of his first poems, and proves with his whole book
that he drank of this wine. He drank, and heavenly springs opened
to him, shores of another land, and, emitting blood and flame, the
six-winged Archistrategos.^ Now, lucid, he came tb love the world
in a new way, snatches of sea foam, the chime of the pines in the
rambling forest wilderness and even the gilded sarafans of mature
young girls or the Solovetsian belts of fine, burly young men, dare¬
devils and devil-may-cares.

100
But...

Only one thing is lacking

The soul in exile from the vale:
That the expanses of cornfields, the bosom of waters
Not resound with a groan of pain...

And that to steal the crown of the Creator

Man not endeavor,
For which, disgraced for eternity,
I lost the radiant paradise...

Does not this sound like: Glory to God in the highest, and on
earth peace, good will toward men?^ The Slavic feeling of the radi¬
ant equality among all people and the Byzantine consciousness of
a golden hierarchism in their conception of God. Here, at the sight
of the violation of this purely Russian harmony, the poet for the
first time experiences grief and wrath. Now he has dreadful
dreams:

As soon as the dusk becomes darker blue,

And fog shrouds the river—
Father, with a rope around his neck,
Will come and sit by the fireside...

Now he knows that cultured society is only “a hollow rumble

of a thundering broken wave.”
But the Russian spirit is strong, it will always find a way to
the light. The leit-motif of the whole book is expressed in the
poem “Voice from among the people.” To replace the outdated
culture which has led us to a dreary atheism and idle spite, people
come who can say to themselves: “We are sunrise clouds, the dewy
dawns of spring...our chastening father is present in every aspect at
every moment...enchanting are our waters and our fire is many¬
eyed.” And what will these radiant warriors do with us, dark,
blindly arrogant and blindly cruel? To what torture will they sub¬
ject us? Here is their answer:

We, like the streams of underground rivers,

Shall run to you unseen
And in a boundless kiss
Shall fuse fraternal souls.

101
 In the works of Klyuev, the possibility of a truly great epos is
taking shape.

Konstantin Balmont is an eternal, disturbing riddle for us.

Here he writes a book, then a second, then a third in which there
is not a single intelligible image, not a single genuinely poetic page
and only in a wild bacchanal rush all these “hundredfold ringings”
and “selfimmolatednesses” and other Balmontisms. Critics take up
the pen to announce “the end of Balmont”—they love to deliver
the coup de grace. And suddenly he publishes a poem, and not just
a beautiful one, but an amazing one that rings in your ears for
weeks—at the theatre, in a cab, and in the evening before you fall
asleep. And then it begins to be seen that perhaps even “selfimmo-
latedness” and “initially-red Adam”^ are beautiful, and that only
your own insensitivity prevents you from understanding this. But
months pass, and despite all the efforts you make, the Balmont¬
isms are not any more familiar and then you again begin to get
used to the strange idea that even a very great poet can write very
bad poetry. But still it is dreadful...
However, these fears need not concern the reader, and, speak¬
ing of Balmont, the critic always runs the risk of being taken in. In
Green Garden there is this amazingly beautiful poem—“Star¬
faced”:

His face was like the Sun—at that hour when the Sun
is at its zenith,
His eyes were like stars—before they fall from the heavens...

and farther on:

“I am the first,” quoth he, “and the last”—and booming

thunder answered.
“The hour of reaping,” said the Starry-eyed—“Prepare the
scythes. Amen.”
We in a faithful crowd arose, in the sky the fractures glowed red,
And seven golden heptastera led us to the border of
the wilderness.

Green Garden (Kissed Words) was inspired in Balmont by the

songs and legends of the Khlysty.^ Many poems are simply imita¬
tions. Of course, their genuine religious flavor was lost in Balmont,

102
who could never distinguish heavenliness from airiness. But there
are stanzas in which their inherent naivete is beautifully repro¬
duced, for example in the poem about the Tree of Paradise:

But the only evil in it,

Is that there is a prohibition,
O fatal tree,
You sow rebellion...

or slyness:

We are, not according to the law,

We are by grace.
Having illumined the icon,
We lie down on the bed.

or, finally, the wildly energetic expressions:

1 give him my curse,

I give him my threefold curse,
My fourfold curse I give.

A strange fate befell Verlaine. Somehow, the previous genera¬

tion, just after a long period of inattention, pronounced him their
maitre, his name was a motto, they were absorbed in reading his
poems. Even now the graying Symbolists like Rene Ghil, having
magnanimously forgotten past quarrels, devote whole studies to
him. But the young generation of Frenchmen, in the persons of
their most brilliant representatives, stubbornly refuse to think
about him. And so with us. Of the Modernists only Bryusov, An¬
nensky and Sologub have translated him. Youth is silent. There
can be many explanations for this fact. For example: Symbolism
in its beginnings had much in common with Romanticism, broad¬
ened, deepened, ennobled. And Verlaine is a direct successor of
Villon,^ so dear to the Romantics. He was sincere, amorous, freely
elegant, devout and depraved,—really, a charming figure for those
times when people had a supply of gay thoughtless energy, not dis¬
sipated by their drowsy fathers, the Parnassians or the tongue-tied
poets of our Eighties. Youth does not have such a rich legacy, but
the habit of gaiety has remained, and for that reason, it more
strictly chooses its favorites, demanding from them sweeping plans

103
and their fitting execution, conscientious and productive efforts
and not childish enthusiasm, but the sacred fire of Prometheus.
Verlaine, obviously, did not have this. His poetry is a lyrical inter¬
mezzo, precious as a human document and a description of the
era, but only that.
Valery Bryusov’s book gives a full idea of Verlaine as a poet.
A perfect knowledge of all his poetry allowed the translator to use
Verlaine’s own vocabulary in those passages where exactness of
translation is unthinkable. Many stanzas, even poems , vie with the
original in charm.
The translations from Romances sans paroles9 turned out es¬
pecially well. The article included in the book is of exhaustive na¬
ture.

Memoires d’un veuf}® published by “Altsiona” Press, serves

as a fine supplement to Bryusov’s book, for a more full acquaint¬
ance with Verlaine. Verlaine is no less fascinating as a prose writer
than as a poet. A series of extremely witty paradoxes, unexpected
images and moments of purely French aristocratic delicacy scat¬
tered through the whole book makes reading it captivating.

The poems of Mrs. Veselkova-Kilshtet have one unquestion¬

able virtue: their theme. It is an elegant idea to devote a whole
book to the poetry of forgotten estates, so touchingly forlorn,
scattered through great and terrible Russia. The author has both
knowledge of her theme and love for it. There are entirely success¬
ful poems and excellent individual stanzas.
For example, a girl’s languor in the poem “Patience”:

For Grandfather I lay out the cards,

And he watches. King and ace...
Oh, heart, your king is in the garden,
And in vain I yearn for him.

But one is unpleasantly struck in this book by the lack of

purely literary aims of, to some degree, interesting artistic devices.
And the stamp of dilettantism, even if of a clever and talented
sort, lies indelibly upon it.

Vadim Shershenevich^ is entirely under the influence of

Balmont’s poetry. But, perhaps this is the most natural path for a

104
young poet. There is neither slackness nor bad taste in his poems,
but neither is there strength or novelty. He has only announced
that he exists by this book, and one can accept that fact without a
scornful grimace. But he must still prove that he lives as a poet.

How often people take an abundance of ideas, a wealth and

diversity of impressions as poetic talent. It is precisely in the ab¬
sence of it that these very qualities prevent a person from becom¬
ing even a decent versifier. He gets lost in periods, breaks the most
immutable laws of poetry, lapses into bad taste and bad grammar
and all—to more precisely express the thought or sensation dear to
him. Such is Ivan Genigin. Only great refinement would show him
that he is not a poet. But that is the very thing he is lacking.

Apollo, No. 1, 1912.

XXIII

Valery Bryusov. Mirror of Shadows: Poems. Moscow: Skorpion,

1912. 2 R.
Mikhail Zenkevich. Wild Purple: Poems. Tsekli Poetov, 1912. 90 k.
Elizaveta Kuzmina-Karavaeva. Scythian Shards: Poems. Tsekh Poe¬
tov, 1912. 90 k.
Georgy Ivanov. Embarkation for the Island of Cythera: 1 Poesies.
Ego, 1912. 50 k.

Probably more has been written about Valery Bryusov than

about any other contemporary poet, and probably there is no one
else with whom representatives of the most diverse movements are
angry. One cannot help but admit that they all have a right to be,
for Bryusov enticed each of them in turn with the hope of calling
him their own; and having enticed them, slipped away. But how
terrible: we do not perceive his work as a conglomeration of
poems dissimilar to each other, but, on the contrary, he seems uni¬
fied, harmonious, indivisible. It is not eclecticism: stem poverty
rather than frivolous diversity expresses the distinctive trait of
Bryusov’s themes. Here we have something different. It is no won¬
der that the words “Bryusovian school” sound just as natural and
clear as Parnassian school” or “Romantic school.” Indeed, a con¬
queror but not an adventurer, careful but not decisive, as calculat-

105
ing as a brilliant strategist, Valery Bryusov assimilated the charac¬
teristic traits of all literary schools that existed before him, per¬
haps through “euphuism” inclusive. But he added a certain some¬
thing to them that made them blaze with a new fire and forget
previous quarrels. Perhaps this something is the basis of a new
school coming to replace Symbolism; after all, Andrei Bely did
say that Bryusov transmits his precepts over the heads of his con¬
temporaries. Mirror of Shadows, more vividly than other books,
reflects this statement, which is new, consequently belonging to
tomorrow.

For all the lyre prophesied to us.

All by which the eye was moved in colors,
For the proud visages of Shakespeare,
For Raphael’s madonnas—
We must be on the watch of peace,
Sacred for all times.

In these simple and extremely noble lines, Bryusov empha¬

sizes his neither bestial nor divine, but simply human, nature, a
love of culture in its most vivid and characteristic manifestations.
Apparently at first the poet, considered a Symbolist, invoked
Raphael instead of Botticelli, Shakespeare instead of Marlowe.
That shows a synthetic understanding of the nineteenth century,
so desecrated and so heroic. And now the words of Daedalus, once
irritating, always intriguing, sound for us anew (the poem “Daeda¬
lus and Icarus”) in Garland:

My son, my son, fly midway

Between the first heaven and the earth.

Not one of the achievements of the human spirit is lost with

such an attitude toward poetry. In this world, simple and clear,
when you see it from an automobile, there are miracles as indis¬
putable and accessible to all, as “rain-washed groves,” or “vales,
where the forest is dark.” Here is Le paradis artificiel.

Languor of a secret hangover

Caresses my drowsiness,
Neither rapture, nor mirth,
Nor the sweetness of caresses are sharp.

106
 But these miracles (perhaps like all miracles) lead the tempt¬
ed to the country of “the unknown Gobi, where despair is the
name of the capital.”
Such realization of each image and absolute honesty with
oneself, is this not a dream for us, so recently freed from the fet¬
ters of Symbolism? And this dream is no longer a dream for Bryu-
sov.

From Bryusov’s wise Daedalus, soaring “between the first

heaven and the earth,” we move to Mikhail Zenkevich,2 a free
hunter, who does not want to know anything, except the earth.
His appeal to the air we can apply to the whole of the other world:

...O, air, free element,

Viscous, earthly armor!
Do not submit, like the others—
Water, earth and fire.

In their abysses we imagine emptiness.

And with hooting, like an idol,
Bound to a horse’s tail
That god, who betrayed the secret...

Where the demands of composition force him to turn to eter¬

nity and God, he feels out of his element, and always suspects
them of some sort of injustice. Thus, in the poem “Butcher Stalls,”
having described the slaughterhouse with lush, daring realism, he
exclaims:

And it seems that in the golden ether

The Scales weigh us just like the meat,
And the pans are just as rusty, the weights as heavy,
And the dogs just as greedily lick up crumbs.

He is completely content with the earth, but we do not have

the heart to reproach him for this self-restriction, because the
earth is really good to him and reveals itself before him fully and
intimately. When he addresses water, stones and metals in the sec¬
ond person, we feel that he bought this right with great know¬
ledge, bom of great love. And the heroes of his poems—Commo-
dus, Ahura-Mazdah or Alexander of Macedon^—they are no longer
men, but “granite gods, carved with copper in the mountains.”

107
And his warning to man resounds like the reminder of a great
truth we have forgotten:

Forge the elements in incandescent heat,

But with your soul, proud Tsar, be reconciled
And from the last slimy creature
Learn dark insight!

Elizaveta Kuzmina-Karavaeva is one of those poets with an

idee fixe. Her task is to create a Scythian epos, but there is still
too much youthful lyricism in her soul, too little of the defined
and, therefore daring, talent’s ability to judge by sight and resolu¬
tion. Play of metaphors, sometimes not just verbal ones, firm dog¬
matism of a vaguely mystical character, and naively hieratical
poses—all this is little help in creating an epos. Only shards of it re¬
main, but, to the honor of the poet, genuine Scythian shards.

I look, I look from the lonely tower.

Ah, to sleep, to sleep eternally!
The black spots of Russian fields,
The hoisted sails of a Turkish vessel.

With this definition of Russia as something far away, unne¬

cessary, reflection takes hold of us, is it really our homeland, and
didn’t we know sometime long ago another homeland, some free,
ancient, grassy Scythia. For Kuzmina-Karavaeva it is the promised
land, paradise, and perhaps for us as well. So, in people’s lives
many mystical revelations are explained simply by a sudden recol¬
lection of scenes which made a strong impression on us in early
childhood. The same thing probably happens in the life of a race.
A general illusoriness in combination with a hypnotic precise¬
ness of some one detail is the distinctive characteristic of Kuzmi-
na-Karavaeva’s poetry.

Off in the distance—a tree in smoke

And the illusoriness of the seas.
Now I know that I shall understand
The mute speech of beasts.

This is purely the psychology of a dream.

I think that these shards have a fair chance of merging into a

108
whole vessel, preserving the precious chrism of poetry, but this
will scarcely happen quite as quickly as the author thinks, because
the external plot of the book, the story of the love of a slave-prin¬
cess for her master, seems, to modem taste, unconvincing and ac¬
cidental against the truly ancient and strange outlines of the land¬
scape.

The first thing that attracts attention in Georgy Ivanov’s

book is the verse. Rarely is it so refined in beginning poets, now
impetuous and quick, more often only slow, always in accordance
with the theme. For this reason, reading each poem gives an al¬
most physical feeling of satisfaction. Reading carefully, we Find
other great merits: indisputable taste even in the most daring en¬
deavors, unexpectedness of theme and a certain graceful “silliness”
in the same measure tha Pushkin demanded it. Then, there is the
development of images in the poem Early Spring”: “in the verdure
mourns a marble cupid,” but he does not mourn simply, as he
mourned in the dozens of poems by other poets, but “mourns,
that his flesh is stone.” In another poem: the sun “with the flat of
his sword—magnificent radiance—struck the earth.” This indicates
great concentration of artistic observation and compels one to be¬
lieve in the future of the poet. In regard to theme, Georgy Ivanov
is wholly under the influence of Mikhail Kuzmin. The same un¬
usual transitions from the “beautiful clarity” and mocking delica¬
cy of the eighteenth century to rapturously ringing poem-prayers.
But of course the imitation is inferior to the original in complexi-
ity, strength and depth.

Apollo, Nos. 3-4, 1912.

XXIV

Marina Tsvetaeva. Magic Lantern: Second Book of Poems. Mos¬

cow: Ole-lukoie, 1912. I R. 50 k.
Pavel Radimov. Field Psalms: Poems. Kazan, 1912. 1 R. 25 k.
Vsevolod Kurdyumov. Azra: Poems. SPb. 60 k.
Anatoly Burnakin. Parting: Song-book. Moscow, 1912. 50 k.
Sasha Cherny. Satires and Lyric. Book Two. SPb.: Shipovnik.
Pyotr Potemkin. Geranium. SPb.: M.G. Kornfeld, 1912.

109
 The path of genius runs free and clear from theme to theme,
from device to device, but always to the same eternal, great Self....
Through rigorous toil, constant effort, talent achieves diversity,
without which there can be no great work. And it is always sad to
see a real poet search carefully and painstakingly, wishing to move
away from what he has already found, and renounce the redeem¬
ing dizziness of a conqueror.
Marina Tsvetaeva’s first book, Evening Album} compelled
one to believe in her, and perhaps most of all in her unfeigned
childlike qualities, so sweetly, naively unaware of their distinctions
from maturity. Magic Lantern, though, is an imitation, and what is
more, published by a stylized publishing-house “for children,” in
whose catalogue a total of three books are marked. The same
themes, the same images, only paler and drier, as if these were not
experiences and not memories of things experienced, but merely
memories of memories. The same with regard to form. The verse
no longer flows gaily and carelessly as before; it drifts and breaks
off, and the poet tries to replace inspiration with an ability, alas,
still too inadequate. There are no more long poems—as if she were
short of breath. The short ones are often built on repetition or
paraphrase of the same line.
They say that a young poet’s second book is usually the least
successful. We will count on that....

Pavel Radimov, as far as 1 know, is appearing in print for the

first time.^ It is wonderful to see that in his book there are all the
qualities necessary for a good poet, although they are still not
bound together, and although there is much backsliding and awk¬
wardness. This is material, but valuable material on which one can
and should work.
The author approaches his theme boldly and, good or bad,
tries to make use of it to the end. It seems that the French poets
influenced him. At least in his primitive poems one hears from
time to time now Rosny,^ now Leconte de Lisle,^ and, reading
the beautiful poem about the sexton and his dog, you remember
Francis Jammes^ without disappointment.

Vsevolod Kurdyumov’s poems^ are constructed as if they

were to be declaimed from a provincial stage. Gloomy romanti¬
cism, tearful sensitivity and a light touch of civic spirit—they have
everything.... The spirited endings must provoke rapture in the

110
gallery. But Russian literature is not a provincial state. Vsevolod
Kurdyumov must discard a great deal, a very great deal, and gain
even more if he wants to enter literature.

If the name Anatoly Bumakin^ meant nothing to me, if I be¬

lieved in the authenticity of his song-book, how I would fear for
the contemporary creative work of the people, how un-Russianly
sweet and weak it would seem to me. But fortunately, I know that
Bumakin, a former Modernist, is now a new-style critic, and I can
have no doubts of the intellectual origins of the song-book. Still, it
is unfortunate that a Russian critic fails to smell the aroma of folk
poetry to such an extent that he thinks to imitate it with any
means he possesses.

Another intellectual, Sasha Cherny,^ is more likeable in that

he puts on no mask, and writes as he thinks and feels; and he is
not to blame that it comes out pathetic and ridiculous. For future
ages, his book will be a valuable aid in the study of the dilettante
period in Russian life. For contemporaries it is a collection of all
that is most hateful to long-suffering but hardy Russian culture.

Pyotr Potemkin’s poems are to poetry what caricature is to

drawing. There are special laws for them, charming and unexpec¬
ted. It seems the poet has finally found himself. With amazing ease
and speed, but the speed of a pencil and not a camera, he sketches
the grotesques of our city, always surprising, always true to life. A
slight melancholy smile, which is felt in every poem, only increases
their artistic value. The so-called “serious” poems, for example
“Persian Geranium,” several from “Masquerade” and others, are
less interesting.

Apollo, No. 5, 1912.

XXV

Vyacheslav Ivanov. Cor Ardens. Part Two. Skorpion. —Nikolai

Klyuev. Fraternal Songs. Book Two. —Vladimir Narbut. Hallelu¬
iah: Poems. Tsekh Poetov. —Count Pyotr Bobrinsky. Poems. SPb.
—Oscar Wilde. The Sphinx. Tr. Alexander Deich. Maski.
 For a long time Vyacheslav Ivanov, as a poet, has been a
riddle for me. What sort of poems are these, that equally unfound¬
edly, some wisely praise, others abuse? Whence this artfulness and
floridity, and at the same time authenticity of language, affected
even according to the rules of Latin syntax? How is one to explain
this monotonous intensity, which gives a purely intellectual de¬
light and which completely excludes the “unexpected joy” of the
accidentally discovered image, of momentary inspiration? Why do
we constantly and everywhere find instead of the poet’s lyrical
surprise at his experiences—“is it really so?”—an epic (perhaps
even didactic), omniscient—“so it had to be”?
And only while reading the second part of Cor Ardens, the
section entitled Rosarium,1 did I understand what the problem is....
The most sensitive foreigners are convinced that Russians are
a completely unique, strange people. The mystery of the Slavic
soul—lame slave—is a generality in the West. But they satisfy
thmselves with a description of its contradictions. We Russians
should go further, searching for the sources of these contradic¬
tions. Undoubtedly, we are not just a transition from the psycho¬
logy of the East to the psychology of the West, or vice versa, we
are indeed a whole and complete organism, the proof of which is
in Pushkin; but among us, normally, there are reversions to the
purity of one of these types. Thus Bryusov is always and com¬
pletely a European in each line of his poetry, in each of his journal
notices. I would like to show that Vyacheslav Ivanov is from the
East. Tradition does not say whether the Tsar-magus Gaspar com¬
posed songs. But if he did it seems to me that they would have
been similar to Vyacheslav Ivanov’s poems. When he rode by night
on his decorated camel, seeing the same sands and the same stars,
when even the guiding star leading to Bethlehem became ordinary
and everyday, he sang songs, ancient, slow, their melodies reminis¬
cent of the five and six-foot iambs, the favorite meter of Vyaches¬
lav Ivanov.... Being very wise, for him the joy of learning was al¬
ready ended, for him there was neither preference nor hate, and
the things, ideas and names (ah, they are only Alaya,~ a deceptive
illusion) in these songs rose and fell like shadows. And just as he,
for the sake of sonorous names or secondary associations invoked
heroes forgotten by us, without a moment’s hesitation over them,
so Vyacheslav Ivanov speaks now about Francis of Assisi, now
about Perseus^ in one and the same poem, because both are for
him only Maya and at best, symbols. The style is the man-but

112
who does not know Vyacheslav Ivanov’s style with its solemn ar¬
chaisms, sharp enjambements, accentuated alliteration and an ar¬
rangement of words which thoroughly eclipses the general mean¬
ing of the sentence. A ponderous splendor, stupefying, barbaric,
as if the poet were not a willful child but the Persian emperor
Basileus^ in the imagination of the ancient Greeks.
That this stylization of Eastern poets is not a vulgar partis
pris is shown by the poet’s unconscious gravitation, according to
the law of repulsion, toward typically Western images and forms.
There are sonnets in the book, canzoni, ballades, rondeaux, ron-
delles, you could not list them all; images of the Renaissance and
ancient Greece are most common; Italy dominates the poet’s
dreams, even the epigraphs are almost all Italian. But in all these
poems, one senses a distinguished foreigner, for whom the laws of
the country are not obligatory, who admires, but does not love, is
interested but does not know, and haughtily refuses to change.
Only in the poems devoted to the East, and perhaps in the native
Russian ones, also strongly tinted with Eastern coloring and re¬
miniscent in their gaudy pattern of Persian rugs, only in them do
you find strength and simplicity, proving that the poet is at home,
in his native land.
How should one regard Vyacheslav Ivanov? Of course a great,
distinctive individuality is most valuable of all. But for others to
follow him who do not possess his gifts would be to enter upon a
risky, perhaps even fatal venture. He is dear to us, as an exponent
of one of the extremes found in the Slavic soul. But, protecting
the integrity of Russian ideas, we must, while loving this extreme,
persistently say “no” to it, and remember that it is not by acci¬
dent that the heart of Russia is simple Moscow, and not splendid
Samarkand.

Even now, neither criticism nor the public knows how to re¬
gard Nikolai Klyuev. What is he—an exotic bird, a strange gro¬
tesque, only a peasant by some amazing chance writing irreproach¬
able poems, or the herald of a new power, of folk culture?
With the publication of his first book Chime of the Pines,5 I
said the latter; Fraternal Songs strengthens me in my opinion. The
author says of them in the preface: “For the most part, they were
composed before my first book, or at the same time. They were
not included in the first book because they had not been written
down by me, but transmitted orally or in written form, without

113
my knowledge...” Models of folk art take shape in exactly this
way, somewhere in the forest, on the road, where there is neither
the possibility nor the desire to write them down, polish them,
where it is impossible to attach a clumsy ending to a successful
stanza, to forgo not only grammar, but meter. Klyuev’s inspira¬
tion is always the same, deeply religious.

The echo of the bells, now resonantly clear,

Now staccato golden, bewitches and intoxicates.
Who is this, to one side, majestically meek,
In the clothes of a foreigner, standing outcast?

For Klyuev, Christ is a leitmotif not only of poetry, but of life.

This is not sectarianism, by no means, this is the natural striving of
a lofty soul toward the heavenly Bridegroom.... Monasticism, as¬
ceticism are antithetical to it, it will not allow Mary to offend
gentle Martha:

Unmourned is the past.

For love unforgiven,
Guard the earthly, child,
If heaven is not given.

But it does have a proud consciousness, which places it above

the everyday.

We are the heralds of Christ,

The first-born of Adam.

The introductory article by Valentin Sventsitsky goes astray

precisely in its sectarian narrowness and unfoundedness. Revealing
every allusion, philosophically basing every metaphor, it cheapens
Nikolai Klyuev’s work, reducing him to a restatement of the doc-
times of the Golgothian Church.^

The first generation of Russian Modernists incidentally, were

also fascinated with estheticism. Their poems teemed with beauti¬
ful, often vapid words and names. They really have, as Balmont
said, “sounds, colors and flowers, aromas and dreams, all com¬
bined in an harmonious choir, all woven into one pattern.” A re¬
action arose in the second generation (with Bely and Blok), but

114
such an indecisive one that it soon died out. The third generation
ended this trend. Mikhail Zenkevich and even more, Vladimir Nar-
but came to hate not only vapid, beautiful words, but all beautiful
words; not only hackneyed refinement, but any sort at all: their
attention was attracted by everything that was really outcast, the
slime, dirt and soot of the world, but where Zenkevich softens the
shameless reality of his images with the mist of remote times or re¬
mote lands, Vladimir Narbut is consistent to the end, although
perhaps not without mischief. Here, for example, is the beginning
of his poem “Evil Creature.”

A sharp pain in the small of the back,

Pokes with an awl in the right side:
Of a stumpy gnome dreams
A spry wench forehead sweaty.
He presses, runs closer.
Roars, a second and hell grab:
The damp foot-clothes stink of
stables, rusty swamps etc.

Hallucinating realism!

It would seem like a simple Kunstkammerthis whole selec¬

tion of strong, earthy, solid vocabulary, these little Ukrainian
words, unexpected, sometimes clumsy rhymes, rather coarse stor¬
ies if it were not for the poem ‘The Fortune-Teller.” In it is an
explanation of the poet’s dream, bewitched and captivated by the
subjects surrounding it.

Tearful old woman by the window

Snuffles at me, spreading my hand:
“You’ve lived your days, and will live them alone.
But some sort of separation awaits you...”
All sooty, the incalculable load
Of the years she carries on her stooped back
She reminded me of campestrian Rus
(Feather-grass and camps), when she glanced,
And the earthy, evil witchcraft
Was so transparent, that 1 humbly
Without tears, without malice accepted it.
Like a field in autumn, the ripened grain.

115
 And in every poem we feel diverse manifestations of the same
earthy, evil witchcraft, elemental and bewitching with the new and
genuine fascination of ugliness.9

Those who love to grumble insist that in our time it has be¬
come very easy to write poetry. They are partly right—we really
are experiencing a poetic Renaissance. Special attention is paid to
poetry, to be interested in it is considered elegant, and it is not
suprising that more and more of it appears.... But to write good
poetry now is just as difficult as always. Take for example Count
Pyotr Bobrinsky. 10 His poems are metrically correct, neat in
rhyme, rather figurative, but they have neither strength nor mod¬
eration nor a proper alternation between light and shadow, every¬
thing that we are accustomed to demand of poems to consider
them poetry. In uncultured circles, it is customary to consider
such sheer prettiness to be estheticism. But then that is the same
as calling a man who eats sugar by the spoonful an epicure.
This is a dangerous sign, and one can sooner forgive amusing
slips of the pen like “the basalt couch of roses,” feelings carried
“beneath the heart,” “jagged armor,”l 1 or the couplet “in a
rush—gods, we proudly ordered our Don stallions to be saddled.”
All this indicates only the extreme youth of the author and keeps
us from passing a final verdict.

The translation by Alexander Deich of Wilde’s famous poem

The Sphinx^ undoubtedly deserves to be mentioned. It is the
first to be done in the author’s meter and to be fairly close to the
English.
However, Wilde’s Sphinx is not only an interestingly con¬
ceived work, but a splendidly executed one as well, and as one of
the strongest means of influencing the reader, one which best con¬
veys lyric emotion, the poet employs the carry-over of a sentence
from one stanza to another. There are several of them in the
poem, and each time these carry-overs signify a change of theme.
The translator, in his efforts to be literal, did not notice this and
gave only a very conscientious paraphrase. One ought to be thank¬
ful for that much.

Apollo, No. 6, 1912.

116
 XXVI

Alexander Blok. Collected Poems in Three Volumes. Book 1:

Poems of the Beautiful Lady. Book II: Unexpected Joy.
Book III: Snowy Night. Moscow: Musaget.
Mikhail Kuzmin .Autumn Lakes. Second book of Poems. Moscow:
Scorpion.

Usually, a poet gives people his creative works. Blok gives

people himself.
By this I mean to say that in his poems he not only doesn’t
resolve some sort of general problems, be they literary (as in Push¬
kin), philosophical (as in Tyuchev), or social (as in Hugo), but that
he doesn’t even indicate them, and that he simply describes his
own life, which fortunately for him is so marvelously rich with
internal struggle, catastrophes and enlightenment.
“I did not listen to tales, I am a simple man,” says Pierrot ^ in
“Harlequin,” and one would like to see these words as an epigraph
to all three books of Blok’s poems. At the same time he has a
purely Pushkinian ability to give a feeling for the eternal in the
momentary, to show the shadow of the genius watching over his
fate behind ever accidental image. I said that this is a Pushkinian
ability and will not take back these words. Is not even the Gavril-
iad2 imbued with a perhaps strange, but still religious sensation
more than many plump volumes of various Words and Reflec¬
tion? Are not Pushkin’s album verses a sacred hymn of the mys¬
teries of the new Eros?
There has been much conjecture about the Blokovian Beauti¬
ful Lady—people have wished to see in her now Woman, clothed in
the Sun, now the Eternal Feminine, now a symbol of Russia. But
if one were to believe that this is simply the girl with whom the
poet was in love for the first time, it seems to me that not one
poem in the book would refute this opinion, and the image itself,
grown more familiar, will become even more miraculous and will
gain infinitely from this in the artistic sense. We understand that in
this book, as in Dante’s La Vita Nuova, de Ronsard’s Sonnets,
Goethe’s Werther and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mai,3 a new vis¬
age of love is revealed to us; a love which wants blindness, feeds on
forebodings, believes omens and sees unity in everything because it
sees only itself; a love which once again proves that man is not just
an ape in perfected form. And we shall be on the side of the poet

117
when he, with the mouth of that same Pierrot, screams to the mys¬
tics gathered round him: “You won’t fool me, this is Columbine,
this is my bride!” In the second book, Blok seems to have looked
about at the world of objects surrounding him for the first time,
and having looked about, become indescribably joyful. Hence the
title. But this was the beginning of tragedy. Credulously enrap¬
tured with the world, forgetting the difference between it and
himself, a live soul, the poet, somehow at once and in a strange
way accepted and loved everything easily—the swamp priest, oc¬
cupied with God knows what in the swamp, but hardly only with
treating frogs’ feet, the dwarf holding back the pendulum with
his hand and with it killing a child, and imps, pleading not to be
taken to the Holy Places, and in the depths of this questionable
kingdom, as queen, in silks and rings, the Mysterious Ladies, Hys¬
teria and her servant Alcohol.
The Mysterious Lady is the leimotif of the whole book. This
is a false promise of materialization that will afford perfect happi¬
ness and the impossible, but it is not pure and mute like the stars,
whose sense and truth lie in the fact that they are unattainable,—
rather it is seductive and enticing, disquieting as the moon. This is
the siren of the city, demanding that those in love with her re¬
nounce their soul.
But the poet with the heart of a child, Blok, did not want to
embark upon such conciliatory adventures. He preferred death.
And half of Snowy Night, that which earlier made up Earth in
Snow,4 contains a constant and persistent thought of death, not
of the next world but only of the moment of passing into it. The
Masque of Snow is that same Mysterious Lady, simply despairing
of her victory and, in invitation, desiring destruction for the lover
slipping away from her. And in the poems of this period, one hears
not only hysterical ecstasy or hysterical torment, one already feels
in them the solemn approach of the Spirit of Music, conquering
the demons. Music is what unites the earthly world with the incor¬
poreal world. It is the soul of objects and the body of thought. In
the violins and bells of Night Hours (the second half of Snowy
Night), there is no longer hysteria—the poet has successfully
passed through that period. All the lines are firm and precise, and
at the same time not one image is delineated to the point of re¬
treat into itself, all are alive in the full sense of that word, all are
palpitating, they toss and drift into the “native land of
worldly violins.” Words are like notes, phrases are like chords. And
the world, ennobled with music, became humanly beautiful and
pure-all of it, from the grave of Dante to the faded curtains above
sick geraniums. Into what forms Blok’s poetry will flow next, I
think no one, least of all Blok himself, can say.

The poetry of Mikhail Kuzmin is for the most part “salon”

poetry—not that it is not genuine or beautiful poetry, on the con¬
trary, “salon-ness” is given to it as some extra quality making it
unlike others. It has responded to everything that for some years
past has excited the drawing rooms of Petersburg. The eighteenth
century from Somov’s point of view, the Thirties, Russian schis-
matism, and everything that has occupied literary circles: ghazals,
French ballades, acrostics and occasional verse. And one feels that
all this is first-hand, that the author was not following the vogue,
but took part in its creation himself.
Like Nets, Mikhail Kuzmin’s first book,^ Autumn Lakes is al¬
most exclusively devoted to love. But instead of the former tender
wit and intimacy so characteristic of love, we find impassioned
eloquence and the somewhat solemn seriousness of sensual attrac¬
tion. The bonfire has flared up and, from a welcoming flicker, it
has become majestic. Even if all. the familiar places are men¬
tioned—Boisson’s photographic studio, Moscow’s “Metropol”^—
it is clear to the reader that only one ancient image dominates the
dreams of the poet, the mythological Amour, the marvelously ani¬
mated “naked lad in a field of rye” shooting golden arrows. The
poet divines him, and only him, both in a fashionable dinner jacket
and beneath the regulation cocked hat. This even explains the re¬
petition, rather strange in contemporary poetry, of the words
“bow,” “arrows,” “pierce,” “prick,” that under other conditions
would seem like intolerable rhetoric.
This very same Amour with a traditional quiver flies down to
the poet at noon from a golden cloud and sits with him in the
noisy hall of a restaurant. Both here and there—the same “familiar
visage.” It is madness, yes, but it has another name too—poetry.
Somewhat detached but in profound inner accordance with
the whole stands the section of Eastern ghazals-“Spring Garland”
and “Spiritual Verses,” together with “Day of the Most Holy Vir¬
gin.” In the first, covered by the shadow of Hafiz,6 the impas¬
sioned eloquence of sensuality of which I spoke earlier was suc¬
cessfully harmonized with the bright colors of Eastern nature, ba¬
zaars and festivals. Mikhail Kuzmin passed by the heroic poetry of

119
the Bedouins and settled upon the poetry of their urban followers
and successors, which is well-suited to refined rhythms, affected
difficulty of locution and magnificence of vocabulary. In his Rus¬
sian poems, the second face of sensuality—its solemn seriousness—
became religious lucidity, simple and wise beyond any stylization.
It is as though the poet himself prayed in Volga-side cloisters and
lit lamps before ikons of antique design. He, who feels in every¬
thing the reflection of Another, be it God or Love, he has the right
to speak these triumphal lines:

I do not believe the sun that moves toward nightfall.

I do not believe the summer that moves toward decline,
I do not believe the cloud that darkens the vale,
Nor a dream do I believe—death in the form of a monkey.
I do not believe the deceitful ebb of the sea,
The flower I do not believe, that insists: “she loves me not!”

Mikhail Kuzmin holds one of the first places among contem¬

porary Russian poets. Only a few are blessed with such an amazing
harmony of the whole, combined with free diversity of details. As
a spokesman, however, for the views and feelings of a whole circle
of people united by a common culture and by rights ascended to
the crest of life, he is a poet of this earth, and finally, his fully de¬
veloped technique never overshadows the image, but only inspires
it.

XXVII

Sergei Gorodetsky. Willow: Fifth Book of Poems. SPb.: Shipov-

nik, 1913. 2 R.
Vladimir Bestuzhev. Return. SPb.: Tsekh Poetov, 1913. 1 R. 20 k.

Sergei Gorodetsky is a great joy to all of us. He appeared in

literature only seven years ago and has already managed to do so
much that one is dazzled. A series of poetry books, several books
of short stories, poems and tales for children, articles on questions
of literature, painting, theory of art, translations, prefaces—in a
word, in all spheres where the opportunity presents itself of think-

120
ing and speaking out, Sergei Gorodetsky. This lack of restraint in
creative power, absence of vacillation in executing what has been
conceived, and this uniformity of style in the most different en¬
deavors reveals an impetuous and strong nature, completely fitting
for the heroic twentieth century.
Sergei Gorodetsky began as a Symbolist, then declared him¬
self an advocate of mythopoeism, and now he is an “Acmeist.” In
Willow there are poems marked with the stamp of each of these
three periods. Symbolist poems in which the image, by compari¬
son with rhythm, plays a purely secondary role, are weaker than
the others. Having touched the heart of Slavdom, Sergei Gorodet¬
sky feels tht the measure of verse is not the boot, but the image,
as in Russian songs and byliny, 1 and however strong the experience
or deep the thought, they cannot become the material of poetic
creation until they are clothed in the live and tangible flesh of the
image, active and valuable in itself. Hence the insipidity and slack¬
ness of his Symbolist endeavors, for Symbolism is now simply a
literary school, one that has finished its cycle of development, and
not a voice on the road to Damascus as it was for the first Symbol¬
ists....
The mythopoeic period of Sergei Gorodetsky is very signifi¬
cant first of all because the poet fell into error, thinking that
mythopoeism is the natural outcome of Symbolism, while it is a
decisive departure from it. Myth is the self-contained image, hav¬
ing its own name, developing in internal accordance with itself—
and what could be more odious for the Symbolists who see in the
image only an allusion to “the great facelessness,” to chaos, Nir¬
vana or the void? Therefore we will not apply the Symbolist meth¬
od to mythopoeism. Sergei Gorodetsky’s failure showed us that.
His “Verines” (interestingly conceived and deeply felt, thanks to
the impressionism of the account and the absence of perspective)
is only a story of events and not the events themselves, and we can
only trust that everything was just as the poet relates, but not be¬
lieve in it.
Dreaming of myth, Sergei Gorodetsky understood that a dif¬
ferent school was indispensable for him, one more rigorous and
fruitful, and he turned to Acmeism. Acmeism (from the word ac-
me-the full development of all spiritual and physical powers) in
essence is mythopoeism. Because what, if not myths, will the
poet create who has repudiated both the exaggeration peculiar to
youth and uninspired, senile moderation, who strains all the pow-

121
ers of his spirit uniformly, who accepts the word in all its dimen¬
sions, musical, pictorial and ideological—who demands that every
creation be a microcosm. Criticism has more than once noted a
predominance of subject over predicate among the Symbolists. Ac¬
meism found this predicate in the development of the image-idea,
logically musical, uninterrupted throughout the whole poem.
“Wanderers,” “The Beggar,” “Wolf’ represent the masculine
element of Acmeism in Sergei Gorodetsky’s poems, the cycle Tor¬
menting Life—the feminine. It seems to me that the latter is more
familiar to the poet. Because, despite the splendid fervor and terse¬
ness of expression in poems of the first category, there is in them a
certain softness and delicate reverie that best of all defines the
author himself.

...As if sounds are all amorous

...And all words tender.

Vladimir Bestuzhev^ began his poetic activities with the early

Russian Symbolists and only this year was his first book pub¬
lished. In this, and in much else he resembles Yury Baltrushaitis.
However, Baltrushaitis, after all, took part in the life of his circle,
and his voice was heard, although rather softly, among the general
chorus of Symbolists. But reading the poems of Vladimir Bestu¬
zhev arouses an annoying feeling, as if you had recognized some¬
thing good too late, when it is no longer needed.
The primary and indisputable merit of Vladimir Bestuzhev’s
poems lies in there melodious quality. The transition of vowels,
the acceleration and retardation of rhythm, seem to fascinate the
poet most of all, and he pays absolutely no attention to anything
else. We will try, for example, to analyze the following poem, one
of the best in the book:

You hear—as in a cold river

The soundless water sing—
It runs in a free stream
And will never tire.
And we, when at evening-time
The sky will just grow dim,
Depart for eternal peace—
And silence and peaceful sleep;

122
 And drowsily and sweetly
Sings the soundless water—
That the night-time sleep, that the short dusk is
Not forever, not forever...

If one separates the concept of the river from the concept of

the water, the epithet “cold” can be applied only to the latter; the
epithet “free” in relation to the word “stream” says nothing to
our imagination; just as useless is the information that the water
“will never tire,” because no one even thinks of doubting this.
Then, in the second stanza the repeated form of the predicate
proves that the subject is sleep, while by “eternal peace” it is cus¬
tomary to understand death. The word “silence” is devoid of
strength and meaning (let us recall, for example, Edgar Allan Poe’s
“Silence’’-^), because what kind of silence is this, if one can hear
the water sing? “The short dusk is not forever” is a pleonasm.
Four and's in a row in two lines (the eighth and ninth) are unpleas¬
ant to the ear. And after all, very little is said in the whole poem.
All these mistakes are also characteristic of other poems by Vladi¬
mir Bestuzhev. Striving to conceal the poverty of thought and
image with pomposity of themes and expressions composed of in¬
correctly used cliches, these poems nonetheless “sing” and there¬
fore cannot be dismissed from poetry.

Apollo, No. 9, 1912.

XXVIII

Boris Gurevich. The Eternally Human: Book of Cosmic Poetry.

SPb. 2 R.
Alexander Tinyakov (Odinoky). Navis Nigra: Book of Poems.
Moscow: Grif, 1912. 75 k.
Nikolai Zhivotov. Southern Flowers: Poems. Book Two. 1912.

In our contemporary literary epoch, when Symbolism has

penetrated the crowd and ceased to satisfy the pious craving for
something new, crowds of Modernists have appeared, making a
fuss and clamor and dreaming of reigning, if only for one day. Gri¬
gory Novitsky, and after him the Ego-Futurists, issued manifestoes
that surpassed even the placards of provincial cinematographers in

123
their grandiloquent illiteracy. From this crowd, one ought to
single out Boris Gurevich (though by no means for his manifestos
and poems), because he is sincerely carried away by his own theor¬
ies, and his ignorance is learned ignorance. The doctrine of “scien¬
tism” that he is working out is only a vulgarization of the ideas of
Rene Ghil, which have already shown themselves to be unsound.
In pursuit of themes taken from the realm of science, Boris Gure¬
vich has in mind not the living, divinely enigmatic contemporary
man, but some sort of abstract, average one, for whom the poet
proves to be Dante, having substituted knowledge of the exact
sciences for the perception of God. Of course, such a dream is on¬
ly a vestige of the passion for positivism in the Sixties and Seven¬
ties of the last century, but it is characteristic that even the imita¬
tors of Nihilism hope to achieve a revolution in art. Is it possible
there was nothing in Symbolism that would sound to them like
“hands off’? Boris Gurevich deserves no more attention as a poet
than as a theoretician. His poems are unoriginal, slack, verbose and
not infrequently illiterate.

The good poems of the talented Alexander Tinyakov (Odi-

noky), well-known to the readers of Scales, The Crossing and Ap¬
ollo, lose much in a book. Before, it seemed that they were on the
periphery of the poet’s work, that they were only variations on
some others, unread, fully encompassing his dream; now we see
that there is no such dream, and that their glitter is not the glitter
of diamonds, but of glass.
The most important quality in them is that of the themes
(not, however, those inevitable ones that grow up from the depths
of the spirit, but the accidental ones discovered elsewhere). There¬
fore you feel the poems themselves to be the usual children of
days past. Alexander Tinyakov is a student of Bryusov, but how
right was Andrei Bely in saying that Bryusov’s armor crushes the
sickly intellectuals who desire to put it on. Tinyakov is one of
those who have been crushed.

Nikolai Zhivotov’s first book, Ragged Nerves, caught the in¬

terest of many people with the boldness of invention and a certain
strength that show through the unusually careless execution.
Hopes were placed on him as a poet capable of achieving consider¬
able eminence through persistent labor. Nikolai Zhivitov did not
justify these hopes; Southern Flowers is proof of this. We all know

124
that refined taste is a very loose concept and in any case is not the
most valuable quality in a poet, but a total lack of taste makes Ni¬
kolai Zhivotov’s book completely unacceptable. It robs his
thoughts of all inspiration and literally covers his images with the
ulcers of leprosy. Never before, it seems, have I had to read a crud¬
er book of poetry.

Apollo, No. 10, 1912.

XXIX

Vyacheslav Ivanov. Tender Secret: AeTrrd. SPb.: Ory, 1912. —Va¬

dim Gardner. From Life to Life. Moscow: Al’tsiona. —Alexei Skal-
din. Poems. SPb.: Ory. —Sergei Solovyov. Princess’s Flower Bed:
Third Book of Poems (1910-1912). Moscow: Musaget, 1913. —Al¬
exander Roslavlev. Pipe. SPb.: Soyuz. —Yakov Lyubyar. Contra-
dictions. (3 Vols.) SPb. —Vsevolod Kurdyumov. Powdered Heart.
SPb. —Vadim Shershenevich. Carmina. Moscow.

Many poets have stood among the ranks of the Symbolists,

many were proud to bear this name, but at the present time only
two have remained with the standard; the keys of Russian Symbol¬
ism are entrusted to only two. These two are Vyacheslav Ivanov
and Fyodor Sologub.
Vyacheslav Ivanov is a young poet, that is, one who is far
from having completed all phases of his development, but these
phases have ceased to be significant for Russian poetry, they are
necessary and pleasurable only to the poet himself. For others, he
still has the same slogans, undoubtedly true, but, alas, well-known.

...Who has spurned the stage of the Dove

Is named for creeping Serpents...
...As two-faced as the soul of a magnet,
Passion of Flesh is fused with the Grave,
With Birth, Sorrow.

And, finally, as his greatest perception:

...the Secret is tender.

125
 It is perfectly obvious that it is not a matter of slogans, but
of emotional content and the entire case of mind which accompa¬
nies it. Really, one must admit that in no other book has Vyaches¬
lav Ivanov risen to such heights. His verse has acquired the strength
of confidence and impetuosity, his images—precision and color, his
composition—clarity and beautiful simplicity. On every page, you
feel that you are dealing with a great poet who has reached the full
development of his powers. But how far this individual, solitary
development is from that balance of all the capacities of the spirit,
which many dream of now.... Between Vyacheslav Ivanov and Ac¬
meism, there is a gulf which no talent can fill....

Vadim Gardner,1 despite all the inexperience which distin¬

guishes young poets, has written a charming.book of light verse.
Of course, there is still the question whether this is not merely a
seeming lightness, but Vadim Gardner does not ask himself this
question. He fully believed the words of his muse:

You are dear to me because, from tender, serene childhood

Devoted to flowers and dream, you were friends with the streams.

But bashful reverie hides many dangers for the poet. Gardner
did not avoid a single one of them. At times he is insipid, at times
sickly-sweet, at times grandiloquent, and most often, impertinent.
And it is terrible for a talented poet to remain a dilettant forever.

In his poems, Alexei Skaldin^ is Vyacheslav Ivanov’s double, a

poor, shabby double. He selects rhythms, images and themes from
the master diligently and joylessly and stacks them up like some
sort of blocks. This is not an apprenticeship, which is sometimes
so useful. A real student always comes to the teacher with his own
content, and in his apparent humility one can always see the fer¬
vor of future emancipation. The weak will and sluggishness of Ale-,
xei Skaldin’s poems are a bad sign. There is nothing in the book
(not to count his imitative ability) that would make you believe in
him as a poet. But he is not a bad versifier, and he discovered
something in Vyacheslav Ivanov’s laboratory.

There are two great shortcomings in Sergei Solovyov’s

poems:3 they are contrived and for that reason not diversified;
and this contrivance grew out of a very meager fantasy. Sergei So-

126
lovyov is obsessed by schemes: first he investigates the history of
his race and dreams of creating a synthesis from the confusion of
cultures and classes, then, in an utterly scholastic manner, he re¬
duces the new Russian culture to three sources and also hopes to
deduce from this the future Russian Renaissance. Is not such striv¬
ing to summarize every thing .at any price by means of a mathemat¬
ically exact formula evidence that the poet repudiates the signifi¬
cance of our times and does not trust the future at all? For this is
that same notorious mystical anarchism, belief in the imminent
end of the world. Hence the results for poetry are very sad: either
exercises on historical and mythological themes, or a clumsy affec¬
tations of naivete “in the style of’ old poets. With his new book
Sergei Solovyov, a talented poet and the author of many beautiful
stanzas and poems, disappoints those who believe in him.

Alexander Roslavlev ceased being considered among the

ranks of poets long ago. About six or seven years ago people
placed some hopes in him, and thought that, having passed his pe¬
riod of apprenticeship, he would find himself. But it soon became
clear that this apprenticeship was only a crude and incoherent seiz¬
ure of other people’s devices, themes, ideas, experiences. That is
how things stand now. Alexander Roslavlev’s new books, lacking
the freshness of a beginning, are frightening in their “poetisimili-
tude.” Pipe is notable only in that there are more bad poems.

Yakov Lyubyar,4 making his sudden debut with three books,

is more verbose than befits a poet. For the joy of poetry lies
precisely in saying in one or two lines what would take a prose
writer a whole page. Yakov Lyubyar does not know this, just as
he does not know most of the most elementary rules of versifica¬
tion. In sometimes melodious, more often clumsy verses, he
shamelessly tells everything he thinks and feels. Fortunately for
him and for the reader, these thoughts are astute and often quite
serious, the feelings deep and original. The lack of imitation
makes the book even more interesting. One would like Yakov
Lyubyar to master the technique of poetry a bit faster and be¬
come a real poet, and not just an alluring promise.

Vsevolod Kurdyumov’s Powdered Heart is one of the most un¬

pleasant books of the season, because it is so extremely character¬
istic of that reckless esthetic snobbery which has recently found

127
more and more followers and admirers. Its casual treatment of the
Russian language does not even attempt to hide behind the flag of
one of the new schools, which have made some often very risky at¬
tempts in this direction. As in the first book, there are actors’
tricks “near the end of the act.” Where the poet tries to imitate
Kuzmin, his clumsiness reaches an extreme. And strangest of all,
they are contemporary, these poems, they are accessible, and
should appeal to movie-goers, benighted gymnasts and...those who
stroll on Nevsky around eleven o’clock at night. But does litera¬
ture really exist for “them”?

Vadim Shershenevich’s book produces a beautiful impression.

The well-made verse (the rare irregularities are scarcely felt), the
unpretentious but uniform style, the interesting constructions cre¬
ate delight in his poems. He knows how to turn a stanza and not
fall under its power. His refined rhymes do not outweigh the lines.
He is a student of Alexander Blok—sometimes more submissive
than one would like—in his eidolology (the system of images). But
a striving toward clarity and understanding is already perceptible
in his poems, as a revolt against the mood of early German Roman¬
ticism in Russian poetry. It seems to me that taking this path, he
may realize many of the valuable things that already glimmer in
Carmina. And perhaps only then will he free himself from the an¬
tiquated literary tone that sometimes makes his best poems grow
cold.

Apollo, No. 3, 1913.

XXX

Hatchery of Judges II. SPb.: Zhuravl.

The circle of writers ^ who joined together for the publication

of this collection automatically inspires confidence, both by its
undoubted revolutionary character in the area of the word, and by
the absence of petty hooliganism. It devotes its main attention to
review of stylistic problems and strives to restore to the word that
strength and freshness which it lost through long use. Unfortunate¬
ly, the demands of rhythmics and composition are lost sight of in
the pursuit of style; the works therefore do not have that whole-

128
someness which would make them significant.
The selection of authors is not entirely successful. Vladimir
Mayakovksy has much in common with the Ego-Futurists. Elena
Guro- approaches Boris Zaitsev and the neo-impressionists. Bene-
dikt Livshits’s^ tawdry prettiness is sometimes unpleasant. Vladi¬
mir Khlebnikov^ and Nikolai Burlyuk^ can be singled out as the
most interesting and powerful.

The Hyperborean, February, 1913.

XXXI

Valery Bryusov. Nellie’s Poems. Moscow: Skorpion, 1913.—Igor Se¬

veryanin. Seething Goblet of Thunder: Poesies. Moscow: Grif,
1913. —Velimir Khlebnikov. —Osip Mandelstam. Stone: Poems.
SPb.: Akme, 1913. —Count Vasily Alexeevich Komarovsky. First
Landing: Poems. SPb.: Golike and Vilborg, 1913. —Innokenty An¬
nensky. Famira Kifared: A Bacchic Drama. Posthumous publica¬
tion. Moscow: V.P. Portugalov, 1913. —Fyodor Sologub. Collect¬
ed Poems. Vol 13. Pearly Luminaries: Poems. SPb.: Sirin, 1913.

A book has been published at the Skorpion Press which

seems mysterious at first glance—Nellie’s Poems, with a dedication
to Valery Bryusov. 1 Nellie is an indeclinable word, and you do not
know if it is in the genitive or dative case. One critic even thought
that these are Bryusov’s poems, but the latter disavowed them in a
letter to the editor.
The poetic exploit of this book—every book of poems has its
exploit-is profoundly and originally conceived: every image—it
does not matter whether of dream or reality—is to be perceived
with hallucinating clarity, to be felt at its absolute value, not ethi¬
cal but esthetic. A weakness for material culture makes the poet
forget the difference between the temporal and the eternal, for he
wants to perceive both time and eternity as an instant. The circle
of a glade is the same for him as a Persian carpet, the blue dragon¬
flies are like little monoplanes. What difference does it make to
him that dragon-flies were flitting about not only when there was
no man, or that the circle of a glade will see the ruin of all things
living or made by human hand, —he loves life and not the world,
caprice and the mistakes of his consciousness, and not the laws of

129
existence of objects. He is only vaguely aware of this existence,
people and things for him are no more significant and effective
than abstractions. He does not embrace woman, but a “strange
rapture,” and he cherishes a “burst of passion” in cold hands.
When I read these lines, I automatically recall the traditional image
of the mother rocking a doll or a log in place of a dead child....
But a great, irremediable mistake lies at the bottom of every
tragic fate, and the poet recognizes it, bitterly crying: “Your mag¬
ic swells like empty window-dressing...” And on almost ever page
of this book, one senses a door to another real world, where it is
so good to escape from the imprudently cherished and unleashed
nightmares of the everyday: from the Caucasian ottoman, the
count from “El Dorado,” the glass of irrua.... The poet changes
from a reporter into the creator of true reality, true because it is
always being created, into Shakespeare’s Prospero:

There palms toss obediently,

Streams noiselessly murmur;
There zebras with patterned skin,
Raise the sands with their hoofs.
There angels, lowering their wings
To prostrate themselves before the Lord,
Look at giant elephants,
At little whimsical birds.
There eternal Adam, awakened
From a strange, sweet dream,
Looks at Eve, astounded,
And their conversation is silence....

Nellie’s Poems reminds me of Hoffmann’s Golden Vase.^ Just

as in that work all the effects were built on the contrast between
the bourgeois life of a German town and the fiery images of East¬
ern legends, so here the snobbish admiration for the beauties of
city life is compared with the magnificence of the creations of
“Eternal Adam,” awakened from a dream. The only thing one can
hold against the Russian poet is the lack of connection between
these two themes: they in no way proceed one from the other,
and the poet, tempted by the desire to give everything a decisive
blessing, instead of a firm, manly “yes” and “no,” gives both an
indecisive “yes.”

Much has already been written and said about Seething Gob-

130
let of Thunder, the poesies of Igor Severyanin. Sologub gave it a
very unconstrained foreword, Bryusov praised it in Russian
Thought,3 where one would expect it to be condemned.
Indeed, the book is a highly characteristic one, really a cul¬
tural event. Russian society has already long since split into men
of books and men of newspapers, who have almost no point of
contact between each other. The first lived in a world of millenial
images and ideas, spoke little, knowing what responsibility one
must bear for each word, examined their feelings, afraid to betray
the idea, loved like Dante, died like Socrates, and, according to the
others, probably resembled badgers.... The others, brisk and bus¬
tling, forced their way into the very thick of contemporary life,
read the evening papers, spoke of love with their barber and of
brilliantine with their beloved, used only ready-made phrases or
some sort of intimate little words, the hearing of which brought
out a certain feeling of awkwardness in the uninitiated. The first
were shaved by the others, ordered boots from them, dealt with
them through official papers, or gave them promissory notes, but
never thought about them and would by no means name them. In
short, relations were the same as between the Romans and the
Germans on the eve of the great migrations.
And suddenly—oh, this “suddenly” is really indispensable
here—the neo-Romans, the men of books, heard the youthfully
ringing and powerful voice of a real poet, speaking in the Volapuk^
of newspaper men about the “bases” of their strange existence,
unknown until now. Igor Severyanin is really a poet and what is
more, a new poet. That he is a poet is proven by the wealth of his
rhythms, the abundance of images, the soundness of composition,
and his own keenly-experienced themes. He is new in that he, be¬
fore all other poets, insisted on the poet’s right to be candid to the
point of vulgarity.
I hasten to make a reservation. His vulgarity appears such on¬
ly for the men of books. When he wishes to “fervently glorify the
Reichstag and the Bastille, the courtesan and the schematist,^ im¬
petuosity and dream,” the men of newspapers see nothing unnat¬
ural in it. They read about the Reichstag daily, have acquaintance
with courtesans, and readily speak of impetuosity and dream, rid¬
ing bicycles with the young ladies. For Severyanin, Goethe is glori¬
ous not in himself, but thanks to (imagine!) Ambroise Thomas,6
whom he even calls “the glorifier of Goethe.” For him, Pushkin
“became Derzhavin,”7 and at the same time, he himself is “the

131
genius Igor Severyanin.” Well, maybe he is right. Pushkin is not
printed in handbills; Goethe in pure form is scarcely intelligible to
the provincial stage. Even if one hears the firm voice of Kozma
Prutkov,8 for men of newspapers, even Kozma Prutkov is not at
all comical; it is not without reason that one of them took “Vam-
puka” seriously.
We are also already acquainted with another side of Igor Se¬
veryanin. How could one not recognize the schoolgirl joy of
Apukhtin’s “letters” in these lines, for example:

It cannot be, you are lying to me, dreams!

You could not forget me in separation...
I remember when, in a surge of torment.
You wanted to burn my letters...burn them!...you!...

or these:

...The Child was dying. The mother, writing.

And you, like a mother, responded to the voice of torment,
Forgetting that to neither art nor science
Is given the power to steal from death.

But again, the poet is right: such poems move many to tears,
and it is not important that they stand outside art in their cheap
theatricality. That was why universal Ego-Futurism was founded,
to widen the boundaries of art...
I repeat, all this is very serious. We are witnessing a new in¬
vasion of barbarians, powerful in their talent and terrible in their
indelicacy. Only the future will show whether these are “Ger¬
mans” or...Huns, of whom not a trace will remain.

Viktor Khlebnikov has still not published his poems in a sep¬

arate book. But he has contributed a great deal to the publications
Hylaea? Studio of the Impressionists10 and so forth, so one can
already speak of him as a fully formed poet. His work falls into
three parts: theoretical investigations along with illustrations, into
the area of style, poetic work and comic verses. Unfortunately, the
boundaries between them are extremely carelessly drawn, and of¬
ten a fine poem is ruined by the admixture of an unexpected and
clumsy joke or by far from well-considered word formations.
Keenly sensitive to word roots, Viktor Khlebnikov deliberate-

132
ly ignores inflections, sometimes discarding them completely,
sometimes changing them beyond recognition. He believes that
each vowel contains within itself not only action but its direction:
thus bik (bull) is that which strikes, bok (side) is that which is
stricken; bobr (beaver) is that which is hunted, babr (tiger) is that
which hunts, etc.
Taking the root of the word and adding arbitrary inflections,
he creates new words. Thus, from the root sme (laugh), he creates
“smekhagi” (“laughomanes” or “laughletes”), “srneevo” (“laugh-
ishly”), “smeyungiki” (“laugherasters”), “smeyanstvovat”' (laugh-
erate”), etc.l 1 He dreams of the simplest language, made only of
prepositions, which would indicate the direction of motion. Those
of his poems like “Smekhagi,” “Pereverten”’ and “Chyornii Lyu-
bir’,” are, to a significant extent, the dictionary for such a “pos¬
sible” language.
As a poet, Viktor Khlebnikov loves nature in a conjuring
manner. He is never satisfied with what is. His deer changes into a
carnivorous beast; at the “private viewing,”^ he sees the dead
birds on the ladies’ hats come to life, the clothes fall off the
people and transform—the woolens into a sheep, the linens into
little blue flax flowers.
He loves and knows how to speak of remote times, to make
use of their images. For example, his primeval man tells us:

...What was with me

Just now?
Beast, with a howl barking
(Terrible leap,
Hot breath),
Face burn.
What a death!
Wild breath.
Eyes glittering,
Huge snout...
But my knife saved,
Or 1 die.
This time
Was trace bruise.

Both in the rhythms and in the tangled syntax you see the
frightened savage, hear his agitated words...
A somewhat naive chauvinism contributed much of value to

133
Khlebnikov’s poetry. He perceives Russia as an Asian land (al¬
though he does not ask her to learn wisdom from the Tatars), af¬
firms her distinctiveness and struggles with European trends. Many
of his lines seem like snatches from some great, never-recorded
epos:

Joking, in a flock, we scratch

The water father’s heels with a laugh.
His simple family
Was with us at Christmas-tide.

Weakest of all are his jokes, which create an impression not

of laughter but of convulsions. But he jokes often and always inap¬
propriately. When Juno’s lover calls her “auntie dear,” when some¬
one says, “my jaw dropped from delight,” it is sad for a poet.
In general, Viktor Khlebnikov has found his path, and by fol¬
lowing it he can become an important poet. So much the worse to
see what a commotion they have raised over his work, how they
borrow not his achievements but his failures, of which there are,
alas, too many. He must learn a great deal more, if only from him¬
self, and those who inflate his still unfirmed talent, risk its even¬
tual bursting.

Osip Mandelstam’s Stone is the poet’s first book, published

some time ago. There are poems in it dated 1909. Despite that,
there are only two dozen poems in all. This is explained by the
fact that the poet moved relatively recently from the Symbolist to
the Acmeist camp, and regards his earlier poems with increased se¬
verity, selecting only those that are really valuable. Thus, his book
falls into two sharply distinguished sections: before 1912, and af¬
ter.
In the first, there are the usual Symbolist virtues and short¬
comings, but even here the poet is strong and original. The deli¬
cacy of fully regulated rhythms, a sense of style, a somewhat lace¬
like composition, are present in full measure even in his first
poems. In these poems, the weariness, pessimism and disillusion¬
ment characteristic of all young poets, which in others produces
only unnecessary tests of the pen, crystallize for Osip Mandelstam
in the poetic idea-image: in Music with a capital M. He is willing to
give up the world for the sake of Music:

134
 Remain as foam, Aphrodite,
And word, revert to music...

renounce nature—

And above the darkening wood

Stood the brazen moon;
Why so little music
And such silence?

and even poetry—

Why is the soul so melodious,

And why are there so few sweet names,
And why is the instantaneous rhythm only chance,
Unexpected Aquilo?^

But a poet cannot live long on a denial of the world, and a

poet with burning heart and spirited love will not want images
which you cannot look at, and which you cannot touch with a ca¬
ressing hand. Already on page 14 of his book, Osip Mandestam
makes an important admission: “No, not the moon, but a bright
clock-face shines at me...” With this, he opened the doors of his
poetry to all the phenomena of life, to those living in time, and
not just in eternity or an instant: to the casino on the dunes, the
parade at Tsarskoe Selo, the restaurant rabble, a Lutheran’s funer¬
al. With purely southern passion, he grew to love northern decor¬
um and even simply the austerity of ordinary life. He is in ecstasy
over that “secret fear” which “the coach, returning home with the
relics of a gray-haired fraulein,” inspires in him: with the very
same love, he loves “the jurist, with a sweeping gesture drawing his
greatcoat about him,” and Russia, which, “monstrous—like a
battleship in dock—rests heavy.” At the Lutheran’s funeral, what
he liked most of all what that “there was a look clouded with a
seemly tear, and the bells rang with restraint.” I do not remember
anyone who could so completely destroy the romantic in himself
and not affect the poet at the same time.
This very love for everything alive and durable leads Osip
Mandelstam to architecture. He loves buildings just as other poets
love mountains or the sea. He describes them in detail, finds paral¬
lels between them and himself, and on the basis of their lines con-

135
structs universal theories. It seems to me that this is the most suc¬
cessful approach to the now fashionable problem of urbanism.
Mandelstam’s Symbolist passions are ended forever, and these
lines sound as their epitaph:

And far better than the ravings

Of an inflamed mind are
Stars, sober conversation,
The west wind off the Neva.

Until now, I have found only one review, superficial and hostile,
of First Landing, a book of poems by Count Vasily Komarov¬
sky,^ which came out at the beginning of autumn. The book was
obviously not a success, and that raises some bitter thoughts. How
could our critics, so indiscriminately tolerant of everything, cele¬
brating all the anniversaries, encouraging all innovations, so con-
certedly turn away from this, a book not of promises (so many of
them have not been fulfilled), but of the accomplishments of an
undeniable poet’s decade of creative labor?
Count Vasily Komarovsky does not force us to follow this
labor. At most, six or seven early, weak poems show us what path
he took to reach the depth and significance of his present thought
and form. All the poems since 1909 are already the poems of a
master, although scarcely those of a teacher. Count Komarovsky,
in all probability, will never be a teacher, the very character of his
work, solitary and spare, preventing him. Beneath many of the
poems, there is the inscription “Tsarskoe Selo,” beneath others, it
can be surmised. And from this, much can be inferred. The poet
was carried away by a little town, lost amid huge parks with col¬
umns, arches, palaces, pavilions and swans on clear lakes, a town il¬
luminated by the memory of Pushkin, Zhukovsky, and in recent
times, Innokenty Annensky, and he gave us not only the special
landscape of Tsarskoe Selo, but Tsarskoe Selo’s sphere of ideas.

Where the bronze visages of Tiberius and Sulla

Remind me of gloomy debauches,
With the last scent of the last mignonette,
The heavy autumn smoke entered all the gardens,
Dulled everywhere the gilded patches of light,
And the black swans’ frightened cries
By the grey shores, revealed thin ice
On the fresh tremor of the dark lilac waters...

136
 Reading these lines, you remember, and remember with plea¬
sure, Henri de Regnier^ and Innokenty Annensky. Kinship of
spirit is still not apprenticeship. And the very idea, so brilliantly
realized—of fusing the French poet’s esthetic power of observation
with the Russian’s tense lyricism—indicates Count Komarovsky’s
creative independence. Besides that, there is in his poems a love
for Byzantium, or rather for the idea of Byzantium, strong, little
revealed as yet, but possessed of the power to enchant. He is of
course speaking of this in these lines:

...The Mother slept. Where in avid flight

Dreams flew to the marriage cypress—
She streamed in the Seven-citied Kingdom
In the yawning dark and icy rizas!^

The lyric-landscape poems are compiled together in the first

section; they are very “Tsarsko-selian,” although sometimes ascribed
to other places at the author’s caprice.
The second section contains the lyric-epic poems, a light¬
hearted excursion through centuries and countries. Rome in three
sonnets, Byzantium again, the Renaissance, and the charming
“Maidservant’s Song,” naturally, a German maid, with her post¬
man on a high coachbox, Fichte^ and Monsieur le baron. In these
poems, one enjoys the fervor and the exact, although scarcely ar¬
cheological, knowledge of the details of everyday life.
The third section—“Impressions of Italy”—is less significant
than the preceding ones, although perhaps more perfect with re¬
spect to rhythm.
The two translations in the fourth section—of Baudelaire’s
“Le Voyage” and Keats’ well-known “Ode to a Grecian Um”^-
are very inexact and suffer from a certain syntactic disorder, al¬
though they are done with great 61an.

Innokenty Annensky’s bacchic drama, Famira Kifared, which

came out this year in an edition of one hundred numbered copies,
is, after The Cypress Chest, the deceased poet’s most significant
book. It is a continuation and completion of his earlier attempts
to revive antiquity, like Ixion, Melannippe the Philosopher, Lao-
damia^ and the treatise “The Ancient World in Contemporary
French Poetry,” important for the depth and novelty of the ideas
expressed in it. Innokenty Annensky, all impulse, all trembling,

137
was equally far from both the Renaissance idea that the world is
not ahead of, but behind us, that is, with the ancient Greeks, and
from the contemporary desire to pillage that strange and beautiful
world, using ready-made thoughts and sonorous proper names. He
has a deep feeling for myth, as a situation existing from the begin¬
ning of time, or rather, as a relation between two intransient uni¬
ties, that is only very superficially connected with the epoch that
discovered it. Only good taste and a striving toward the beautiful
difficulty (he speaks of this, by the way, in the above-mentioned
treatise) prevented him from creating symbolic-allegorical dramas
within a mythical framework. Not for anything did he want to
abandon the present, with its vivid, graphic language and psycho¬
logical nuances, for the sake of dismal abstraction; but in treating
myth a touch of the unusual was indispensable, and he achieved it,
capriciously combining the ancient with the contemporary. His
characters are taken from the ancient world; they do nothing that
would be uncharacteristic for their epoch, but their conversations,
with the exception of the general poetic intensification (the drama
was written in 1906), are strikingly contemporary. Of course, we
do not know how the ancient Greeks spoke, the language of their
poets is not conversational language, but still, it is impossible to
believe that echoes of Balmont and Verlaine could be heard in their
words. Innokenty Annensky does this quite consciously, almost as
though with defiance, as is shown by such anachronisms as Apol¬
lo’s famous violin. In Famira Kifared, there are two musical mo¬
tives, separate, but indispensable to each other: the story of Famira
and the background against which it is played out, the choruses
now crazed maenades, now jovial satyrs. This is the framework of
the story: “Famira or Famirid, the son of the Thracian king Phil-
ammon and the nymph Argiope, was renowned for playing the
cithara; his arrogance reached the point that he challenged the
Muses to a contest, but was defeated, and as punishment, deprived
of sight and the gift of music.” Annensky complicates this scheme
with the nymph’s unexpected love for her son, and portrays him
as a dreamer, for whom love is alien, but who still perishes in the
net of the woman in love with him.20 Fate appears in the image of
the splendidly indifferent muse, Euterpe,2 1 of whom one of the
characters says:

Haughty-when she passes among us,

She gathers up her dress with her hand. Fingers—

138
 And rings are beautiful on her pink
And slender fingers—only, I suppose, her hands
Are cold—and she is always looking at them
With a smile-she is so content...

Famira burns out his eyes with coals and goes off to beg alms;
the guilty mother, transformed into a bird, accompanies him in his
wanderings and draws lots from the useless cithara. They set off,
as if they had hangovers, and behind, the exultant and languorous
call of the maenades still sounds, even more audible in memory:

Evoe, 0 god, they broke our circle,--

O Dionysius!
You see, how, languorously spent, hung
The hoop of hot, of white hands,
O Dionysius!

Fyodor Sologub’s Pearly Luminaries, the thirteenth volume

of his collected works, includes selected poems from thirty years
of poetic work. For the literary historian they will be an invalu¬
able aid, so fully, so clearly do they reflect all the changes in de¬
vice, mood and theme in Russian poetry. Here is the somewhat
sickly-sweet lucidity of the eighties, and the shy estheticism of the
nineties, then the justification of evil, politics, a searching for God,
questions of sex and, finally, the gently irony of a sage of this
world. As a great poet, Sologub is very sensitive to the moods of
the crowd, and while not adapting himself to it at all, lives at the
same pace, which explains his fully deserved popularity. Besides
that, he is an innovator, and if that often prevents his poems from
being contemporary, they gain in the pungency with which they
strike the heart.
There are a few new poems in this book which will always re¬
main in the most exacting, the most selective anthologies of Russian
poetry: “Joseph’s Beauty,” “Again the nighttime silence,” “My
bright house ever higher” and “Dull Green of the Olives” are the
most important.

Apollo, No. 1-2, 1914.

139
 XXXII

Sergei Gorodetsky. Flowering Staff. SPb.: Gryadushchy den’. 1 R.

Anna Akhmatova. Rosary. SPb.: Giperborei, 1914. 1 R 25 k.
Pavel Radimov. Earthly Raiment. Kazan’: 1914. 1 R.
Georgy Ivanov. Chamber. SPb.: Giperborei, 1914.
Vladislav Khodasevich. Happy Home. Moscow: Altsiona, 1914.
Jean Chuzeville. Anthologie des poetes russes. Paris: ed. Cres.

The turning point in Sergei Gorodetsky’s work is Flowering

Staff. Possessing an inexhaustible melodic power (and in this re¬
gard, comparable only with Balmont), bearing a cheerful and light¬
winged spirit, which is readily daring and does not ponder over its
expressions, in short, the curly-headed singer of Russian song, he
finally found a means for the definition of his potential, certain
norms which developed and strengthened his talent. True, owing
to this, his earlier image is lost, the image of the merry-maker and
eccentric, “who runs his fingers over the strings,” sometimes of a
gusli, more often of a balalaika. Now we can expect from his
works a soundness and beauty attainable only by the combination
of three conditions: deep unconscious impulses, a strict under¬
standing of them, and a powerful will in their realization.
This is mentioned in the author’s preface to the collection:
“...being an Acmeist, I was as much as possible simple, direct and
honest in treating the relations between the object and the word,
obscured by Symbolism and unusually fragile by nature. I wanted
to use absolutely no exaggeration, or extended commentary, or
high-flown interpretation. And because of that, the world lost
none of its marvelous complexity, it did not become trivial.”
Flowering Staff consists wholly of octaves, forms first
worked out in France by Moreas.l It is convenient, since it gives
the poet the opportunity to record the most fleeting thoughts and
feelings, which would never crystallize into a real poem. A collec¬
tion of such “octets” gives the impression of a veryunconstrained
diary, and behind it, it is so easy to see the face of the poet him¬
self, to hear the intonation of his voice.
True, his task could have been dealt with in another way:
many ideas have antipodes, so antithetical that you do not even
guess the possibility of a synthesis. Their opposition in two stanzas
of an octet would produce one of the most vivid poetic effects—
surprise. But for that, it would have been necessary to reveal the

140
complex paradoxes of consciousness, to again perceive the world
as dangerous and slightly hostile, and Sergei Gorodetsky has al¬
ready found the means to give his blessing to everything; this ac¬
tive admiration is the finest discovery of the young century.

Lord, how much beauty

In Your omnicelestial world...

he cries, but as an Acmeist, he depicts not the beautiful, but his

sensation of it. For what is beautiful in and of itself, or what can
never be beautiful? The esthetes’ mistake is that they search for
the basis of joyful admiration in the object and not in the subject.
Horror, pain, shame are beautiful and precious because they are so
inseparably tied to the omnicelestial world and to our creative
mastery of everything. When you live life as a lover, in the mo¬
ment of the embrace you do not distinguish where pain stops and
joy begins, you know only that you do not want another.

How damned beloved life is,

What bitter wine
Is given me in a cup of hammered gold
By a beautiful hand!
But I drink, not knowing temptation:
Will the beast of non-existence really
Hold out to me in its ugly paw
A ladle of the honey drink?

“What!” many will cry, “the poet renounces faith in the fu¬
ture life, with heavenly tabernacles, angels and immortality?” Yes,
1 answer, and he is a true poet: heavenly tabernacles are given to
him here on earth, he feels the presence of angels in moments of
inspired labor, and immortality...only poets, and perhaps their
most attentive readers, know how flexible our conception of time
is and what wonders it conceals for those able to control it! An¬
nensky said that “infinity is only an instant, split by the lightning
of torment.” Eternity and an instant—these are not temporal con¬
cepts and therefore can be perceived in any interval; everything de¬
pends on the synthesizing progression of contemplation.
Everything is on earth and everything is accessible to man:

O, beautiful pines, O, peals of summer lightning,

Serve supper to the brethren!

141
 Bring, Sirens, the amber keys
To the red-gold gates.

There are many shortcomings in Flowering Staff, perhaps

even more than permissible in our day for a book by a well-known
poet. Sergei Gorodetsky more often tells than shows, there are
some very unfinished octets, there are even completely frivolous
ones; there are rhythmic defects—an iambic hexameter without a
caesura after the third foot, the same iambic hexameter which
wormed its way into pentameters; the general cliches of Modern¬
ism are not infrequent. But the feelings that created this book are
new and triumphant, and in regard to eidolology, it is a valuable
and extremely timely contribution to poetry.

In Anna Akhmatova’s Rosary, on the contrary, the eidololog-

ical aspect is thought out least of all. The poetess has not “created
herself,” has not put some sort of external fact in the center of
her experiences in order to unify them; she does not address her¬
self to something known or understandable to herself alone, and
in this she is unlike the Symbolists; but on the other hand, her
themes are often not exhausted by the limits of a given poem,
much in them seems insubstantial because it is not fully proven.
As with most young poets, in Anna Akhmatova one frequently
finds the words pain, sorrow, and death. This youthful pessimism,
so natural and therefore so beautiful, has been until now the prop¬
erty of “pen testers” and it seems that in Akhmatova’s verse it has
attained its place in poetry for the first time. I think everyone has
wondered at the magnitude of youth’s capacity and willingness to
suffer. Laws and objects of the real world suddenly replace those
former ones which have been pierced through by a dream in whose
fulfillment he believed: the poet cannot help but see that they are in
and of themselves incapable of comprehending himself among
them, of coordinating the rhythm of his spirit with their rhythm.
But the force of life and love is so powerful in him that he begins
to love his orphanhood itself and achieves the beauty of pain and
death. Later, when an “unexpected joy” begins to be revealed to
his spirit, which is weary of always being in the same condition, he
will feel that man can joyously comprehend all aspects of the
world, and from the ugly duckling which he was in his own eyes

142
until then, he will become a swan, as in Anderson’s fairy tale.
To people who are not fated to achieve such a transforma¬
tion, or people who possess a feline memory which attaches itself
to all passed stages of the spirit, Akhmatova’s book will seem ex¬
citing and valuable. In it, a series of beings, mute until now, ac¬
quire a voice-women in love, cunning, dreamy and rapturous, at
last speak their own genuine and at the same time artistically con¬
vincing language. That bond with the world which I spoke about
earlier and which is the destiny of every genuine poet has almost
been realized by Akhmatova, because she knows the joy of per¬
ceiving the external and knows how to transmit this joy to us.

Tightly shut are her dry lips,

Hot is the flame of three thousand candles.
Thus Princess Eudoxia lay
On sapphire, scented brocade.

And, bent low, a mother tearlessly prayed

For her blind little boy,
And a hysterical woman thrashed voicelessly,
Straining to gulp air with her lips.

And from a southern land,

A black-eyed humpbacked old man,
As if at the gate of paradise
Pressed close to the darkening step.

Here I turn to what is most significant in Akhmatova’s poetry,

her stylistics: she almost never explains, she shows. This is
achieved by a carefully considered and original choice of images,
but most important, by their detailed elaboration. Epithets defin¬
ing the value of the object (such as beautiful, ugly, happy, unfor¬
tunate, etc.), occur rarely. This value is suggested by the descrip¬
tion of an image and by the interrelationship of images. Akhma¬
tova has many devices for this. I shall point out a few of them: the
conjunction of an adjective defining color with an adjective defin¬
ing form:

...And thickly the dark-green ivy

Entwined the high window.

or:
143
 ...There, a raspberry sun
Over dishevelled grey smoke...

Repetition in two successive lines, which doubles our attention to

the image:

...Tell me how they kiss you,

Tell me how you kiss them.

or:

...In snowy branches to black jackdaws

To black jackdaws give shelter.

Transformation of an adjective into a noun:

...The orchestra is playing (something) gay...

and so forth.
There are many definitions of color in Akhmatova’s verse,
and most frequently, of yellow and gray, until now very rare in
poetry. And perhaps as confirmation of the nonaccidental nature
of her taste, most of the epithets emphasize that very poverty and
paleness of objects: a threadbare rug, worn-down heels, a faded
flag, etc. In order to love the worled, Akhmatova must see it as
dear and simple.
Akhmatova’s rhythmics are a great help to her stylistics.
Paeons and pauses help her single out the most necessary words in
a line, and in the whole book I did not find a single example of
stress falling on an unstressed word, or, contrarily, of a word
stressed in meaning without stress. If someone were to assume the
task of examining a collection of any contemporary poet from this
point of view, he would be convinced that usually the case is other¬
wise. A weakness and gasping for breath is characteristic of Akh¬
matova’s rhythmics. The four-line stanza, in which almost the en¬
tire book is written, is too long for her. Her periods usually en¬
compass two lines, sometimes three, sometimes only one. The
causal relationship with which she attempts to replace the rhyth¬
mic unity of the stanza does not achieve, for the most part, its
goal. The poetess must elaborate upon her stanza if she wishes to
master composition. A single spontaneous impulse cannot serve as

144
the basis for composition. This is why Akhmatova knows as yet
only the sequence of a logically developed thought or the se¬
quence by which objects fall into her field of vision. This does not
constitute a shortcoming of her poems, but it blocks the path
ahead of her for achieving much that is worthwhile.
In comparison with Evening, published two years ago, Rosary
represents a great step forward. The verse has become more reso¬
lute, the content of each line more solid, the choice of words
chastely spare and, best of all, the incoherence of thought, so
characteristic of Evening, and comprising more of a psychological
curiosity than a feature of poetry, has disappeared.

When Pavel Radimov’s first book came out about two years
ago, he put so much wild passion and unexpectedness in thematic
approach into his Field Psalms that great hopes were immediately
placed on the author. Earthly Raiment is disappointing: we can
conclude from it that we are dealing with a poet who wished to
mark off a small area for himself and not stick his nose out any
farther. It was customary to call poets who voluntarily narrowed
down their work, stylists. I would call them something more of¬
fensive, because it is just as if some evil fate moves them to choose,
of all poses, the most sickly-sweet and affected. The pose in which
Pavel Radimov chose to rigidify is the pose of a man bestowing his
blessing upon the world. That is not so bad! What is bad is that for
him the world is plastered with a thick coating of tinsel.

...The language of inspired nature,

Wise and simple, is intelligible to me,
And in my imperishable soul, I
Merge wih eternal beauty...

he informs us, and so, completely gives himself away. The lan¬
guage of nature really is wise, but not at all simple, at least for
human feeling, and the sensation we derive from the world can
hardly fit into the concept of beauty. To synthesize in this way,
one needs thunderous, Tyutchevian words which pierce the soul
with blue lightning, but there are none in Radimov’s vocabulary.
He is much more enjoyable when he throws off the cardboard
mask of sage, and, like a Realist, describes Bashkiria, village scenes
and pictures of a bazaar. Here, his tenacious eye catches the neces¬
sary, along with the unnecessary, the vivid detail, the amusing

145
analogy. And his descriptions are enlivened by a sly mockery that
is purely Russian, even folklike. It is good to read his long poem in
hexameters “Popiad,” the story of a just-graduated seminarian,
travelling with his father around the neighboring parishes to choose
a bride for himself. It does not excite the reader for a minute, but
throughout his reading he smells grass and lindens, hears dragon¬
flies, church bells, and decorous turns of phrase with the letter o,
and loves all these modest priests’ daughters with light brown
braids a fist thick:

...As dawn, rising to the golden heavens, plays

Its bright smile of sunbeams on the green
meadows and on the distant
Wood, mysteriously blue, so Masha appeared to the guests,
Arousing in Fyodor an exciting trembling with her charming form,
And making Father Alexander, with lucid brow,
Exclaim loudly: “Oh, your daughter is a queen, a princess!...

Realism has many ways, of charming the soul, but there is

nothing for it to say, nowhere for it to beckon.

...O, cat, wandering on the roof,

Your dreams sing in me!...

...the author of Chamber, Georgy Ivanov, has attained self-defini¬

tion. Like Akhmatova, he did not create himself, but rather the
psychology of an idler who readily stops before a gaudily daubed
poster and before a Negro in a red chlamys,^ before an engraving
and before a sensation, an idler, ready to merge with each rhythm
he meets, to merge for a moment without any pleasure or curiosi-
ty-this psychology unites his poems. He does not think in images,
I am very much afraid that he does not think at all. But he wants
to talk about what he sees, and he likes the very art of speech.
That is why his assonances sound like rhymes, his free meters like
strictly metrical ones. For him, the world falls into a series of epi¬
sodes, clear, charply outlined, and if sometimes complex, only in
the manner of Ponson-du-Terrail.^ Chinese dragons over the Neva
strangle a chance passerby; a hunchback, husband of a music-hall
singer, kills a Negro out of jealousy, a Finnish knife is hidden in a
street punk’s boot.... Of course, there is much naive romanticism

146
in all this, but there is also the instinct of a contemplative person
who, above all, desires a spectacle from life.
Georgy Ivanov’s verse combines the dryness of epic and the
energy of ballad. Here, for example, are excerpts from his poem
“Fall Phantom”:

With desperate malice

Distorting his face,
Brandishing his cane,
He came out on the roof...
...Splashing in the puddles,
He strode down the streets,
Hurled curses,
One worse than the next...
...And he could have been a happy,
Gay chatterer,
And committed outrages over beer,
Not knowing any other way.
The fall wind in crude
Flight rent the clouds,
Cold rain ran
Down the drainpipes.
And he rushed with malice,
Twisting his wet mustache,
Stabbing at the puddles
With his splintering cane.

One fears that Georgy Ivanov will grow tired of being just a
poet and desire the greater scope of prose narration. But in that
event, we must remember him as a talented adherent of entertain¬
ing poetry, the poetry of adventure, whose propagator in our lit¬
erature was Vsevolod Krestovsky^—a rare tradition, but deserving
of all possible attention, even if only because Zhukovsky was its
prophet.

Vladislav Khodasevich’s first book of poems came out in 1908, the

second only now. 5 And after six years, he wanted to prepare only
thirty-five poems. Such miserliness is very profitable for the poet.
We do not grow accustomed to his dream or his intonation, he ap¬
pears unexpectedly before us with interesting new words and does
not stay too long, leaving behind him a pleasant feeling of not being
fully satisfied and the desire for another visit. Both Tyutchev and

147
Annensky were like that,6 and how they love them!
Khodasevich has the right to be such a nice guest. He is not
dull; not dull to such an extent that he is not even paradoxical.
When you do not agree with him and do not sympathize with him,
you still believe and admire him. True, one would often like him
to speak more confidently and to be freer in his gestures. A Euro¬
pean in his love for the details of beauty, he is still a Slav in his
sort of peculiar indifferent weariness and melancholy skepticism.
Only hopes or sufferings can excite such a soul, and Khodasevich
voluntarily, even with a certain arrogance, renounced both:

Alas, child! Doesn’t the insatiate soul

Dream an inexpressible dream about you?
Don’t you come in the darkened shadow
With a bouquet of roses, a dagger and wine?
1 watch sharply for your every step.
You fall, you whisper—I sob,
But 1 cannot make out the bitter words
And do not understand the language of shadows.

In Khodasevich’s poems, with their somewhat flaccid rhyth¬

mics and not always expressive stylistics, much attention is devot¬
ed to composition, and that is what makes them beautiful. The
reader’s attention follows the poet easily, as if in a graceful dance,
now dying away, now gliding, going deeper, or rising along the
lines, which end harmonically, and which are new for every poem.
The poet is either unable or does not wish to use all this energy
from the rhythmic motion of ideas and images to create the
temple of a new world-perception; he is for now only a ballet-mas¬
ter, but the dances he teaches are sacred dances.

Jean Chuzeville, who published in Paris an Anthology of Russian

Poets with his own translations, limited his task to the latest period
of Russian poetry, from Vladimir Solovyov to Alexei N. Tolstoi.^
Only one extremely annoying gap crept into the book: Sergei Go¬
rodetsky is not present, and the role of representative of folk
themes in Russian poetry is assigned to Alexei N. Tolstoi, who was
dependent during the entire course of his brief poetic career on
Gorodetsky.
But despite this slip, one must welcome the book not only as
the first fully serious attempt to acquaint France with our poetry,

148
but as an anthology which in its selection of names and works, has
no equal in Russia. Each poet is introduced with an article, which,
in an interesting and sufficiently careful manner, evaluates the
characteristics of his work and his position in literature. And it is
easy to become reconciled to the fact that Bryusov in translation
begins to sound like Viele-Griffln,^ or that Blok turned out very
similar to Maeterlinck. The translator is a poet himself (his book
of poems, La route poudroyee, came out several years ago), and
there is nothing surprising in the fact that he captures the corres¬
pondence between foreign and native rhythms even when this cor¬
respondence is merely imaginary. One must be especially grateful
to him for the boldness with which he replaces rhyme with asso¬
nance, striving to reproduce the image exactly and to express the
peculiarities of speech. Reading this book,you feel that something
has been added to your earlier conception of the poets, and you
begin to believe the paradox that to fully understand any poet it
is necessary to read him translated into all languages.
How fine Vyacheslav Ivanov’s trumpets sound:

Hier encore l’assaut des titans

Ruait les colonnes guerri&res
Dont les larges flancs palpitants
Craquaient sous l’essieu des tonnerres...^

or how astonishing Sologub’s transmitted delicacy:

Elisabeth, Elisabeth
Entends mon voeu!
Je meurs, je meurs, Elisabeth,
Je suis en feu.
Muette, h£las! ta voix, muette;
En vain je prie;
Elle est bien loin, Elisabeth,
Dans sa patrie..J0

and finally, the cunning of Mikhail Kuzmin:

—“Julie, a quoi bon cet aveu?

N’est-ce point assez qu’un tel feu
Vous cause mille ardeurs maudites.”
-“Oui. Mais j’ai vu le camfilia
Qui, hier, au bal, vous rallia

149
 Tel coup d’oeil. —Vous y Ripondltes!”
—“J’en jure, par tous mes aieux,
Que je n’en veux qu'a vos beaux yeux
Aveugles — Et fi d’Amanda!”1 *

The bibliography is extremely incomplete, and for some

poets goes only to 1910. Valery Bryusov’s foreword, concise and
meaningful, while not giving the Russian reader anything new,
beautifully explains to a foreigner the position of Russian poetry
in its recent past. And Jean Chuzeville, who published an article
on the latest Russian Poetry in Mercure de France (November 1,
1913),!- which is interesting, but can be faulted for its extreme
lack of information, thinks that this is already the past.

Apollo, No. 5, 1914.

XXXIII

Maria Levberg. Sly Pilgrim. Petrograd: 1915. 60 k.—Leonid Ber¬

man. Relentless Retinue. Petrograd: 1915.—Mikhail Dolinov. Rain¬
bow. Petrograd: 1915. 75 k.—Alexander Korona. Alladin’s Lamp.
Petrograd. 1 R 25 k.—Chrolli. Gingham. Petrograd: 1915. 25 k.
—Anatoly Puchkov. Last Quarter of the Moon. Petrograd: 1915.
1 R.—Tikhon Churilin. Spring After Death. Moscow: 1915.—Count
Alexander Saltykov. In Old Tracks. Petrograd: 1915. 1 R 25 k.—
Prince G. Gagarin. Poems. Petrograd: 1915.—Vladimir Prussak.
Flowers in the Dump. Petrograd: 1915. 1 R.

Maria Levberg’s poems1 too often reveal the poetic inexperi¬

ence of their author. They contain almost all the Modernist cliches,
beginning with the self-portrayal as a visored night and ending
with the Parisian cafes and restaurants and even flowers in cham¬
pagne. The approximate rhymes in the sonnets, hexameters sud¬
denly popping up among pentameters,-in short, this is not yet a
book, but only the voice of the poet, announcing her existence.
However, one feels in many poems a genuinely poetic experi¬
ence, only one which has not found its real expression. There is
material for poetry here: energy combined with reverie, the ability
to see and hear, and a certain austere and tranquil melancholy,
that is not at all like grief.

150
 ...Once I went out of the house,
Without grown-ups, entirely alone.
I met gnomes
In a garden with many-colored flower-beds.

All with branches of black spruce,

And only one with a staff;
They laughed and sang,
And invited me to their house.

They laughed so ringingly,

As if they found it funny,
Funny that they had feigned
Cheerfulness for a very long time...

These and the last poems in the book show that Maria Lev-
berg is beginning to learn mastery of her material with that con¬
scious persistence and unconscious success, which only fall the lot
of poets.

In his very attractively published book, Leonid Berman ap¬

pears a much more contemporary poet.2 He has his own disposi¬
tion, skepticism in the use of the everyday turning to conscien¬
tiousness of the spirit on higher levels. There is nothing in the
book that is completely bad, and a great many stanzas bring de¬
light with their unexpectedness, precision and melodiousness. One
is disturbed only by the absence of his own themes sufficiently
vividly outlined, of significant experiences, and of the feeling of
tragic doom toward art. The poet is content enough with an inter-
eresting simile, a successful epithet, a ringing line, to make a poem
from this:

Often late on the Neva you

Pass with weary tread;
Melancholy, with indiscreet black.
Encircles the depressions of your eyes.
Not lifting your head,
In silent meditation, you watch
The black ribbons of your shoes
Weave in a triple coil.
Can one really take as lies
Your off-hand confessions
That you live eight lives,

151
 Preserving memories of them all?...

We shall hope that the rather colorless quality of Leonid Ber¬

man’s poems arises only from a noble uncertainty in his powers,
and the desire, at any price, in every case, to gain a victory over
theme.

Mikhail Dolinov has a preconceived idea—to write like the

French poets of the eighteenth century and their Russian imitators.
It is always suspect when a poet wants to be not himself but some¬
one else. One is forced to think that he has no cherished ideas of
his own, no expressions bom for the first time. At best, skillful
needlework results instead of poetry, but usually the Muse, present
at the creation of every rhythmic speech, takes vengeance on those
who have scorned her in some especially offensive way. And that
is how it turned out in this case. Mikhail Dolinov is undoubtedly
cultured and knows how to write verse, but he is a kind of Epikho-
dov in poetry, and failure—she is just as inspired as her sister suc¬
cess-torments him at every step, making him commit a series of
blunders:

Mountain spring of blessed indolence!

I bent my shaggy knee...

...and only then does it become clear that the subject is not a man
but a faun.

I am bewitched by fables,
I dream by the will of Phoebus:^
That roses became birds
And flew off to the heavens fast!

...in this stanza, which is not at all bad, the word “fast” produces a
sharply comic effect and, alas, one not foreseen by the poet.

Alas, I do not remember the date in May,

And lie around all day like a blockhead...

Your white marble is twined round with roses,

And with a chain four posts stand joined../*

I was not being selective at all, and in almost every line there

152
is something similar. And the really successful stanzas, which show
that it is impossible not to call Dolinov a poet, drown in this sea of
blunders:

...Or in the damp shadow of the copse,

With his beloved girl, just the two,
He reads acknowledged poets,
Looking at himself in the reservoir...

Alexander Korona’s book produces first of all an impression

of great brazenness. It is called Book of Songs. In the first two
poems, Pushkin’s famous rhyme “zarema-garema”6 is repeated
five times. In the songs of Sulamith, reworkings of The Song of
Songs are mixed with his own poems. Almost all the rest is too ob¬
viously inspired by Pierre Louys^ and Kuzmin’s Alexandrian
Songs. & The epithets are accidental and careless, there is not even
a trace of love for the sound quality of the word, and still, where
the poet goes beyond his artificial themes of free love and daring
sailors, he reveals, if not individuality, then at least talent.

Narcissus

Why, tender youth,

Do you rush to the banks of the river,
Where the cold wind, at midday
Flies into the reeds?
Why, tender youth.
Yielding to solitude, do you hurry,
Steadfastly to solitude
Do you fly with the light bird?
Why, bending in solitude
Over the limpid water, do you wait for someone?
Tender youth, into the incomprehensible,
You sing and do not sing.

This poem shows that Alexander Korona has “melodic pow¬

er,” but it appears only when he does not force it to serve other
people’s images and ideas.

In Chrolli’s poems^ there is both an easily accessible melo¬

diousness and effectiveness, but approximate epithets and conven¬
tionally beautiful images. They undoubtedly satisfy the average

153
requirements for writing poetry now. However, it does not follow
that many write like this. Some, at the price of frequent failures,
strive for greater originality and significance, others, unable to at¬
tain even this level, carry new movements to an extreme to some¬
how camouflage their impotence. Chrolli’s poems are not at all
bad, they are only hopelessly uninteresting, like something heard
a long time ago, and not from Bryusov or Blok, but from their
chance imitators. A poet like Chrolli must wait for some violent
shock, some great joy or sorrow, some highly significant meeting,
for his sluggish tongue to learn its words and for his fettered soul
to create a really valuable world for itself. And until that time, his
lot is crudely correct rehashings, as for example:

The Ship Sailing in

The rapture of discovery and attack intoxicated her,

The gales, the battles, the troubles in an unknown land,
And a foreign genius called her to peace on the sea,
And she boldly made foam of the submissive water.
Oh, what mortal combat, what groaning, grating,
She has survived the crack of masts and sails in the deep,
Last prayers, stifled crackling
And the fierce pressure of indomitable powers!

Anatoly Puchkov is an excellent example of a non-poet. He

has absolutely nothing to say, and he becomes tangled in words
and rhythms as if in some strong snares. It is difficult to make out
where metaphor ends and misunderstanding begins in his poems.
The rarest, most sonorous rhymes turn dull in them, for example
“rozi-gryozi.” One often finds Futurist words in the book, and
one of the sections is designated the second notebook of “the Rus¬
sian Symbolists.” But we are not going to guess what he is, Futur¬
ist or Symbolist. His poems are outside these designations, because,
first of all, they do not belong to poetry.

Tikhon Churilin’s poems ^ stand on the boundary between poetry

and something else very significant and enticing. Since ancient
times it has been held that prophets include their revelations in
poems, moralists—their laws, philosophers—their conclusions. It is

154
a characteristic fact that almost all madmen begin to write poetry.
Any valuable or simply original attitude strives to be expressed in
poetry. It would take too long to explain the reasons for this in
this short note. But, of course, in most cases, this striving bears no
relation to poetry.
Tikhon Churilin is a happy exception. In terms of literature,
he is tied to Andrei Bely, and more remotely, with the Cubo-Fu-
turists. He often manages to turn poems around so that ordinary,
even well-worn words acquire a certain primordial wildness and
novelty. His theme is the man approaching madness in real earnest,
sometimes even the madman. But while real madmen describe
little birds and flowers incoherently, there is in his poems the se¬
vere logic of insanity and truly delirious images.

They shaved Kikapa—for the last time.

They bathed Kikapa—for the last time.
With bloody water the basin
And his hair
Where to, ma’am?
Then you’re his sister?
Stay with him until morning if you like...

The theme of suicide as a means of escaping from the inex¬

pressible suffering of life also attracts the poet. He is indebted to it
for the best poem in the book.

End of the Clerk

My pen, write, write,

Scrape, scrape in the muffled silence.
You, fall wind, dry
The salt of my tears-blow, blow.
My pen, write, write
You, heart, brace all your force.
Brace, brace. Scrape, scrape,
My pen, buy me that thing.
My happy hour will come—
Go up, hopeless mole,
And the gold piece—oh, I’m a terrible spender—
I’ll give it—and the salesman will take it.
And I’ll take that thing, take it,
Clutch it to my heart.

155
 So quietly, quietly I’ll clutch the trigger,
And find peace and darkness.

One would like to believe that Tikhon Churilin will remain in

literature and apply his keen sense of the word as material to less
narrow and specialized themes.

Prince G. Gagarin^ 1 is a sort of improved Ratgauz. Is it pos¬

sible that, side by side with the other traditions, there exists a tra¬
dition of lack of talent, lack of mental and poetic strength? And is
it possible that this tradition continues to pose as some sort of cel¬
ebrated “old school”?
In Prince Gagarin’s work the verse is more melodious, the
themes more varied than those of his prototype, but similarly, the
main parts of every sentence consist of metaphors absolutely de¬
void of content. There is no internal link between words; they ad¬
here only because they are printed one after the other. It is pos¬
sible to remember them only if you cover your ears with your
hands and cram, cram, as high-school students used to do. And it
is well known that easy memorability of poems is one of the most
unquestionable signs of their merit.

My thoughts are a restless sea;

With the borders of life in unceasing strife
The surf beats and groans.
Naked crags, barren cliffs,
You raise in me an echo of harmony,
Echo of the deep sea.

I included this poem in its entirety so that people would not

criticize me for unfounded statements.

Count Alexander Saltykov^ is probably very pleasant com¬

pany. He has read a great deal, travelled, and is unquestionably ed¬
ucated. At worst we would expect from him a book of travel notes,
a paper on ancient Italian religion, or finally, even a short story,
nice in its old-fashioned sentimentality. But he should not write
poetry at all. He gets helplessly muddled in meter and rhyme, his
expressions are awkward, and his thoughts weak within the steel
armor of the sonnet, his favorite form. He cannot manage without
cliches, and his cliches are the most worn, the most dismal ones.

156
 ... On the shore, scarcely a sound ... deserted; solitary,
Quiet is the expanse of sea .. . The mists float there,
Both the sea and the land are deep in thought;
The bright Riviera gave itself up to quiet dreams.

It would seem difficult to attain a greater measure of dishar¬

mony of speech and inexpressiveness of image.
The most interesting section in the book, “Holy Year,” is
written in the form of a greatly simplified garland of sonnets, de¬
voted to the description of the religious significance of the twelve
months. But for some reason, the author has them introduce them¬
selves, which is always somewhat comic. What is more, they are in¬
troduced in some sort of preposterous hodge-podge of Russian and
Latin:

I am Juno Sospita, I am Juno Populona ...

Iuturna of Janus and also Dea bona.
I, Mars’ Neroi, I, Fauna of early days . ..

No commentary will make such verses seem like poetry.

Count Alexander Saltykov’s book is a misunderstanding, arising
from the fact that so few of us understand the essence and limits
of poetry.

If we remember Andreev’s story “In the Fog,”^ a great deal

will be cleared up in Vladimir Prussak’s poems. ^ Otherwise, it is
incomprehensible why he puts on such airs, first posing as a snob
with bad manners a la Igor Severyanin, then a musical-comedy rev¬
olutionary proclaiming that art is higher than life and filling his
poems with the names of his favorite authors. Why doesn’t he
write about what he has thought out instead of what he has
thought up, if he wants to be a poet and not a filibuster in poetry
—but is that perhaps what he really wants? Apart from the nervous
debility, the thinness and weakness of spirit, the inability to
choose and fight for what he has chosen, qualities he has in com¬
mon with Andreev’s hero, Vladimir Prussak seems to have an idea,
very wide-spread among young poets, and extremely pernicious
for them—the desire to be unlike other people, more petty and vul¬
gar, perhaps, only not like other people. But, alas, only by follow¬
ing the common path of all men can one find one’s individuality;

157
there is no stinking comer of thought where some cockroach-think¬
er is not already sitting, twitching his whiskers.
A dump?—there are as many dumps in literature as you
please. The seduction of high-school girls?—and you will not find
as many high-school girls as they have seduced in poetry and prose.
Light-hearted strolls with prostitutes have been sung about hun¬
dreds of times. All this seems new only because it is easily forget-
ten. It is only some three or four years ago that Ego-Futurism ap¬
peared, and how old and dull it seems already. Vladimir Prussak
must first dispel the cloud of cliches in his poems, before he can
be spoken of as a poet.

Apollo, No. 10, 1915

XXXIV

Georgy Adamovich. Clouds: Poems. Petrograd: Giperborei, 1916.

Georgy Ivanov. Heather: Second book of Poems. Petrograd: Al-
tsiona, 1916.
Mikhail Lozinsky. Mountain Spring: Poems. Petrograd: Altsiona,
1916.
Osip Mandelstam. Stone: Poems. Petrograd: Giperborei, 1916.

In his first book, Clouds, Geogry Adamovich 1 is an unestab¬

lished poet in many respects. He has neither enough technical ex¬
perience nor enough skill to guess when a feeling has ripened
enough for its realization. The book contains completely insignifi¬
cant poems, and poems which are saved by a single brilliant image,
a single successful stanza. However, thoughout, we sense good
training and proven taste, and sometimes glimpse an independence
of thought which could grow into a special style or even a world¬
view.
I am speaking now of the gift of suitably adorning the coarse,
gray cloth of everyday experiences and impressions with the gol¬
den threads of legend. Hearing the gramophone, where the police-
officer seems to be grieving and the priest’s wife’s teeth aching, the
poet remembers “how, hearing the night whistle, the Trojan ves¬
sels set sail with their marvelous spoils for the East.” In an insipid,
typically adolescent poem, without any development, telling how
he is sailing somewhere, not on a river or on the sea, but, most like¬
ly, on life, the poet suddenly exclaims: “Or the magic boat will

158
stop at the golden walls of Babylon.”
But he does not love the cold splendor of epic images, he is
searching for a lyric treatment of them and for that reason tries to
see them illumined with suffering. To speak of the Sirens, he has
to pity them, as voiceless:

In hundred-colored steep ships

The clouds do not sail the heavens,
And the shores are covered with sand,
And the glass river has dried up.

But in the silence the stars still shine blue,

And the sunken garlands wither,
And the humpbacked grayhaired old men
Freeze in the ruined tent.

And the sirens, voiceless, dream,

That from out the tent in silks and pearls,
With a captivating smile on her lips,
Comes the Shamakhian queen.

This sound of a tinkling string is the best thing in Adamo¬

vich’s poems, and the most independent.
I mentioned this last poem because from time to time in the
book you find rehashings of lines from Akhmatova, and for one
poem it was even necessary to take an epigraph from Innokenty
Annensky’s “Ballad,”3 they coincided so much in their images.

Georgy Ivanov’s new book falls into two sections: Heather

proper, and poems from the book ChamberI will deal only with
the first, since I have already spoken of Chamber in the pages of
Apollo.
Heather has a unifying purpose—the desire to apprehend and
portray the world as a changing series of visual images. And a striv¬
ing toward beauty inevitably brings the poet to retrospection and
the description of works of art. Reading him, we seem to find our¬
selves in an antique shop. Here is an old portrait of Vasily’s great-
great-grandfather, crude, immaturely flat work, fit only for repro¬
duction in Capital and Country-seat$ (just like the poem). A
stuffed clown with a stuffed dog. A beaded tobacco pouch-and
the author gives an exact description of it, as in a catalogue.

159
“Coffee-pot, sugar-bowl, saucer,” and so forth—in short, a whole
tea service, and the poet even enumerates in detail who drank
from it and when. And finally, an album of old colored litho¬
graphs, which are so nice to look over, and certainly with a mag¬
nifying glass. One is unlike the next, one more unexpected than
the next, and they all make us happy with their reminder of life
and nature, fully captured in line and color. In these works, Geor¬
gy Ivanov shows himself both a skillful master of verse and a sharp
observer. He is able to create a whole from petty details and to in¬
dicate his attitude towards verse by its movement:

How fine and sad to remember

Flanders’ inhospitable people:
Father and son have dinner—and mother
Serves potatoes on a flat plate.

Green water shines in the window,

The bank is yellow with seine and boat.
Though there is no sun, I feel
Its gentle flush so clearly.

Subdued spirit above a life of work,

Tranquil and alluringly rugged—
In a land where the air, smelling of pitch,
And the fishermen do not part with their pipes.

Georgy Ivanov’s poems captivate with their warm texture and

with a reality that, although limited, is unquestionable at first
glance.
However, there are not only poems, there is the poet. And so
it is sad not to find in Heather his earlier sweet and simple little
songs, slightly “imitation Verlaine,” reading which you do not
know if feeling is so easily fettered by rhythm or whether rhythm
itself engenders feeling, while the rhymes ring just like the clap¬
ping of children’s hands in time to a simple dance. Three love
poems at the end of the book, very much in the manner of Kuz¬
min, scarcely improve the situation. Why is that? Why does the
poet only see, but not feel, only describe but not speak of himself,
alive and real? But he hears the rhythm as before, that creative will
of verse. An example is the splendid and rare combination of
iambs and choriambs in the following poem:

160
 The fishermen returned from fishing,
And the boulders grew dim,
On the straw roof lay
The rosy-gray shine of the moon.

Pricked-up ears
Listen to the slow surf:
The sea laps rhythmically, hollowly,
Like the ancient striking of a clock.

And above troubled waves,

In the darkening air, pale—
Behind the restless branches,
The moon rises.

I would like to end this short essay with a question, so that

the poet will answer it for me with his next book. This is not a
prediction. I have no basis for judging whether Georgy Ivanov
wants and is able to seriously consider whether it is for him to be,
or not to be, a poet, that is, to be always moving forward.

Mountain Spring is a good name for Mikhail Lozinsky’s

book,^ because it is just as homogeneous and comes up from the
depths in just the same way, but tells nothing of those depths....
Mikhail Lozinsky intensely, passionately attempts to realize his
very distinctive and secluded world, and his poems are only rough
notes which help him in this work.
With this same fate they also await the reader, to whom it
will seem important and necessary to examine them, like a frayed,
hand-drawn map of a distant island, full of smudges and blots.
Such expressions as “hoary shroud of the incinerated past,” “light
of unanswered portents,” “to the inexplicable city of the compo¬
nent order,” “ash of instant,” “blade of flashing pain”—all of
these are carelessly devised, conventional symbols for designating
perhaps genuine experiences, and, above all, they are in need of
translation.
This idea that one must speak of the enigmatic enigmatically,
of the unknown in expressions unknown until now, links Mikhail
Lozinsky with some of our poet-Symbolists: Maximilian Voloshin,
Yury Baltrushaitis, Vladimir Gippius.
However, having deciphered Lozinsky’s cryptograms, you see

161
that you have not spent time in vain. What he speaks about is sig¬
nificant and beautiful; and the feat which only he tried to accom¬
plish is a lofty feat. He wanted to remember the “unrememberable
word,” and at times we really believe that it has already tormented
his lips:

Meadow and heavens were lost

In the damp and whitened haze.
I heard the women’s voices
Growing distantly weaker.
To my senses everything was
So inexpressibly familiar
As if now I would understand
What was before, somewhere at home...

or:

Today all day I

Heard the voice of invisible bees,
Like a fiery canopy
Of lace, stirred by the heat.

There are many words and songs

For hearts obedient to sun-beams.
They hear news of the distant,
The stillness of aerial meadows....

It is gradually becoming clear why Lozinsky, as a poet, is de¬

void of visual and aural memory. He strains his memory so persis¬
tently, recalling heavenly melodies and aerial meadows, that he has
no time and no desire to listen attentively to earthly sounds, to
look carefully at earthly things. For him, our life is a dungeon, and
he does not even favor it with condemnation, but merely stares in¬
tently upward, and phantoms of blue sky and dazzling rays at
times vaguely flash before his gaze, weary from the strain.
This leads him to a Romantic arrogance, and almost every
one of his poems could pass for a monologue of Manfred, Lucifer,
Cain^ and other splendid masks of late Romanticism. He also can¬
not do without newer literary reminiscences, principally from Bal¬
mont, and “Song of the Ships” reminds one of “Dead Ships.”8

162
 For about ten years now, Osip Mandelstam had been known
and appreciated in literary circles. But the recently published
Stone is his only book, because the little brochure of the same
name^ sold out quickly and scarcely reflected the complex paths
of its author’s work.
It is important to note first of all the complete independence
of Mandelstam’s poems. You rarely meet such complete freedom
from any sort of outside influences. Even if he comes across a
theme which has already appeared in another poet (which rarely
happens), he reworks it to the point where it is completely unrec¬
ognizable. His only sources of inspiration have been the Russian
language, whose most complex turns of speech he has had to learn,
not always successfully, and his own seeing, hearing, palpating,
eternally sleepless thought.
This thought reminds me of the fingers of a typist, so rapid¬
ly does it fly over the most diverse images, the most fantastic sen¬
sations, extracting the fascinating tale of an unfolding spirit.
The first period of Mandelstam’s writing, from approximately
1908 to 1912, goes under the emblem of Symbolism, insofar as
that elusive word explains anything for us. The poet strives toward
the periphery of consciousness, to prehistoric chaos, into the king¬
dom of metaphor, yet he does not harmonize it according to his
own will as do those who believe in all the doctrines; rather he is
only frightened by the incompatibility between it and himself.
“Silentium,” with its bewitching invocation of pre-existence—“re¬
main foam, Aphrodite,/ And word, return to music”—is nothing
but an audacious amplification of Verlaine’s L’Art poetique. In
the enigmatic he senses a genuine danger to his human “self” and
fears this with an animalistic terror:

What if, over a modish shop,

Eternally twinkling,
Into my heart like a long pin
The star were to suddenly drop?

Even his metaphor “Oh, the pendulum of souls, strict,/ Is

swinging silent, straight” acquires an almost zoological existence.
However, he is not yet perspicacious, he lives in half-sleep, and he
himself defines his condition so correctly with the exclamation:

163
 Is it possible that I am real,
And will death actually come?

The crisis comes in this poem:

No, not the moon, a bright clock-face

Shines at me, and why am I at fault
For feeling the frail stars’ milkiness?
And the arrogance of Batyushkov repels me:
What time is it, they asked him then—
And he answered, bemused: eternity.

From this moment the poet becomes an initiate of the liter¬

ary trend known by the name of Acmeism. He beautifully puts to
use the knowledge that not a single image has independent signifi¬
cance, and that it is necessary only in order to reveal the poet’s
soul as fully as possible. Now he speaks of his human thought, love,
or hatred and precisely defines their objects. By force of circum¬
stance, as a city dweller, he became a poet of the contemporary
city, although he never wonders, like a visiting bumpkin, at the
automobiles and streetcars, and, visiting the library, he does not
sigh over how much people have written, but simply takes the nec¬
essary book.
An approaching funeral, an old man who looks like Verlaine,
Petrograd in winter, the Admiralty, janitors in heavy fur coats—
everything rivets his attention, engenders in him thoughts that are
so diverse, and yet unified by a single attitude.
For him, everything is pure, everything is a pretext for a
poem; a book he has read, whose contents he retells in his own
way (“Domby and Son”), the cheap romanticism of a movie sce¬
nario (“The Cinematographer”), a Bach concerto, a newspaper ar¬
ticle on Imyabozhtsy, country-house tennis, etc., etc.
Although all the same he is most frequently concerned with
architecture, with the ponderous masses of Notre Dame and the
Hagia Sophia, and this is the avid gaze of a disciple'upon the work
of a master, of a disciple who dares to exclaim: “From the malig¬
nant heaviness I will someday create something beautiful.”
But man has the characteristic of reducing everything to a
unity; in this way, for the most part, he arrives at God. Osip Man¬
delstam has arrived at an idol-in love with reality, but not forgetting

164
his trembling before eternity, he has been captivated by the idea
of the Eternal City, Caesarean and papal Rome. There he carries
his dreams, tired from eternal wanderings, and from there he hears
the chorus of archangels proclaiming Glory to God in the highest
and on earth peace, good will toward men:

... And the dove does not fear thunder

Which is the church’s voice:
In apostolic chorus: Roma!
It alone makes the heart rejoice.

I repeat the name

Beneath the heavens’ eternal dome,
Though he who spoke to me of Rome
He disappeared in holy dusk!

However, Rome is just a stage in Mandelstam’s work, just the

first symbol that came to mind of the power and magnificence of
the creative spirit. The poet is already finding less common and
more effective images for expressing the same feeling:

... Theater of Racine! A mighty veil

Divides us from the other world;
With its deep wrinkles undulating,
A curtain hangs between it and us:
Classicism’s shawl falls from its shoulders;
Fused by suffering, its voice grows stronger,
seared with indignation, its style
Achieves a sorrowful tempering...

I came too late to celebrate Racine!

All this is related to questions of artistic vision. Problems of

artistic creation are outlined in the profound and beautiful poems
“The grain is poisoned, the air drunk up,” and “I never heard the
tales of Ossian,” not to mention the earlier “Why is my soul so
melodic.”
I have pointed out only a few tendencies in the work of Osip
Mandelstam, but I think even this is sufficient to show what a sig¬
nificant and interesting poet we are dealing with. In Stone, there

165
are shortcomings, weak and confused poems, ear-splitting mistakes
in language, but one does not wish to think or speak of this when
reading a book of such rare value.

Apollo, No. 1, 1916.

XXXV

Mikhail Struve. Flock: Poems. Petrograd: Giperborei, 1916.

Here are poems of real mastery. Reading them, you forget

that Mikhail Struve 1 is a young poet and that Flock is his first
book. The decisive style of speaking, precise images and well-bal¬
anced composition make you accept his poems without reserva¬
tion. One can sense his lack of great poetic experience only
through indirect signs. In the first place, almost all the poems are
written in iambs. Of course the iamb is simple, mobile, sonorous,
and with its help the poet can cut thought nicely, like a diamond
on a wheel. But the fact that all the themes and gusts of feeling fit
easily into the iamb proves their uniformity. The poet has not yet
heard the trochaic violins, the dactyllic gong, the anapestic bell
and the rhythm of the sacred dances inherent in the amphibrach;
he has no words it is necessary to stress in intervallic meters.
And what is more, most of the poems begin with a descrip¬
tion of nature, a reference to some object. The lyrical emotion is
too weak to burst out spontaneously, it is searching for a cause, al¬
most an excuse. Besides that, too few themes are touched upon in
this book. The clearly circumscribed impressions from the land¬
scapes are somewhat meager, perhaps precisely because of this
clarity and indisputability. The theme of a diseased conscience,
one of the most curious traditions in Russian literature, going
from Nekrasov and Dostoevsky to Leonid Andreev, is more inter¬
esting, but Mikhail Struve for the present has not found his solu¬
tion to the questions it raises.
All of the above can serve neither as a reproach nor as a warn¬
ing. Every poet develops according to laws he himself created, or
rather, that arose with him, and here, haste is simply harmful. Let
us remember that deep rivers always have a slow current.

The Stock-Exchange Gazette (morning edition), 30 September

1916.

166
 XXXVI

Konstantin Lyandau. At the Dark Door: Poems. Moscow: Pashu-

kanisa, 1916.

This book is the book of a man refined in the culture of verse,

who has become introspective, reflective, melancholy, dreamy, but
scarcely a poet. ^ For the poet is always the master of life, creating
from it, as from precious material, his own image and likeness. If it
turns out to be horrifying, agonizing or sad, it means he wanted it
that way. The poet rejoices even in the riddles of life, just as a rid¬
er does in the horse’s sudden leaps.
For Lyandau, everything is incomprehensible or unclear:
there are more question marks in his book than in any other.What
can he tell the world, he who even asks why “the fatigue of com¬
plete sin is trying?” For this is the limit of an inability to under¬
stand creatively. “To walk like a lifeless phantom” is scarcely the
occupation of a poet, —if Pushkin, Hugo and Byron are poets. “I
am afraid to say what I want”—this admission is so annoying that
it even ceases to be moving.
There are naive critics who suppose that this is a special kind
of poetry, pensive, tender, fragile. They should not be too lazy to
go through all the collections of verse for the last hundred years in
any language. A good half of them are written in precisely the
same way, and no one has the strength to remember the names of
their authors. What is so easily and completely forgotten possesses
the gift of always appearing new. Konstantin Lyandau has still ren¬
dered a great service: in two lines he has explained to us the psy¬
chology of such work:

In the nighttime silence, the scratching of the pen

On the somnolent whiteness is tempting...

We can listen to the ringing of Apollo’s lyre or the trills of

Pan’s flute—what good is the humble scratch of a pen?

The Stock-Exchange Gazette (morning edition), 30 September

1916.

167
 XXXVII

Two Obituaries: Konstantin Mikhailovich Fofanov and Victor Vic-

torovich Gofman. ^

1. Konstantin Mikhailovich Fofanov is dead. With him Rus¬

sian poetry has lost the last prominent representative of that move¬
ment which is characterized by the names of Golenishchev-Kutu-
zov, Apukhtin, Nadson, Frug and others. In the era of calm in the
Eighties and Nineties he spoke of a world of good, of Spring, May,
nightingales and lilies of the valley, and he made himself listen. His
images, placid, unobtrusive, were quietly beautiful, although they
resembled the kind of landscapes that were painted in those years.
But sometimes he burned with a strength of expression and depth
of thought. Such are his poems: “To the Decadents,” “The Mon¬
ster,” and “The North Pole.”2
2. He was a true poet, but one of those modest poets Long¬
fellow dreamed on in his celebrated poem on the eve of renoun¬
cing “the grandiose poets, the bearers of great names, whose moans
still echo in the hollow corridors of time.”3

1. In Paris Victor Victorovich Gofman shot himself. The de¬

ceased wrote many stories and articles, translated much from Ger¬
man, but still the two books of poetry that remained are his most
valuable literary legacy: A Book of Preludes and Trial. The first
was especially successful in literary circles. A thing almost unprec¬
edented—it immediately put the poet in the forefront and forced
one to reckon with him, as with an unquestionably eminent figure.
A free and singing verse, a passionate admiration for the beauty of
life and dream, boldness of devices and a luxuriant variety of im¬
ages, first outlined by him and subsequently turned into poetry—
these are the distinctive traits of this book.
In the second book these qualities give way to a more
weighty and resilient verse, to greater concentration and clarity of
thought.
With these two books, despite an early death, Victor Victoro¬
vich Gofman insured himself a place among the poets of the sec¬
ond stage of Russian Modernism.

Apollo, No. 7, 1911.

168
 XXXVIII

(Count Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoi)^

-1 -

Alexei Tolstoi himself described his life in a letter to the Ital¬

ian professor, de Bubernatis, which we include below. It is neces¬
sary for us only to add a few details.
Alexei Tolstoi’s parents were Count Konstantin Petrovich
Tolstoi and Anna Alexeevna Perovskaya, the natural daughter of
that well-known personage, Alexei Kirillovich Razumovsky. Their
marriage was unhappy, and a few weeks after the birth of the child,
the couple was separated forever.
The poet was broadshouldered, somewhat heavy, and was dis¬
tinguished by his iron constitution and great physical strength: he
bent copper five-kopek pieces in his hands and braided forkprongs
like a woman’s plait. In his youth, his features recalled Lev Tolstoi,
to whom he was only very distantly related. He had a gentle char¬
acter that yielded easily to female influence, first the influence of
his mother, clever and power-seeking, then of his wife Sophia An¬
dreevna Miller, Nee Bakhmeteva, one of the most educated women
of her time. A love of philosophy and comprehension of the se¬
crets of existence were distinctively interwoven in him with a good-
natured but pointed and refined humor.
He lived about half of his life abroad, for the most part in
Germany, which, like many Russians of the middle of the last cen¬
tury, he was ready to consider his second homeland.
He died on the 28th of September, 1875, as a result of poi¬
soning from the morphine to which he was forced to resort be¬
cause of asthma.

- 2-

In the forties, when Alexei Tolstoi embarked on his literary

career, the heroic period of Russian poetry, characterized by the
names of Pushkin and Lermontov, had ended. The new generation
of poets, Tolstoi, Maikov, Polonsky, Fet, possessed neither the
genius of their predecessors nor the wide range of their poetic in¬
terests. Contemporary Western poetry did not exert any appreciable

169
influence on them; the lucidity of Pushkin’s verse became facile¬
ness in them, Lermontov’s fever of soul—simple warmth of feeling.
Alexei Tolstoi’s work is notable for its heightened joie de
vivre. In his lyrics we see not only experiences, but their frame¬
work, the circumstances which engendered them; his historical bal¬
lads contain not only a description of events but an evaluation of
them, often original, elucidating their significance for us. A
staunch champion of freedom, an expert on European culture,
Tolstoi loves to recall the Kievan period of Russian history, the
civic spirit and intrinsic independence of the Kievan Rus, its con¬
stant and lasting tie with the West. The Moscow period arouses his
horror and indignation, and its echo in the present—a pointed and
bold ridicule. Because of this it was forbidden to stage his plays or
to publish his poems. But this did not bring him the sympathy of
the progressive youth on whose good opinion the poet sincerely
prided himself, although he could not and did not wish to assume
their taste. On the contrary, in a series of poems, he fought the
then-prevailing materialist attitude toward life, proclaiming him¬
self a devotee of pure beauty and a supporter of art, which did not
please the progressive criticism of the time, and provoked not a
few attacks on its part. He himself very correctly defines his posi¬
tion between the two poles of Russian social thought:

Not a warrior of two camps, but only a chance guest,

I would be happy to raise my good sword for the truth,
But dispute with both was until now my secret lot,
And not one could draw me to a vow;
There will not be full union among us—
Unbought by anyone, beneath whatever banner 1 stand,
Unable to endure the biased zeal of friends,
I would try to vindicate the honor of the enemy’s banner.

-3-

Alexei Tolstoi first appeared in print in 1841 with the story

“Vampire,” published under the pseudonym Krasnogorsky. At
that same time he began working on a long novel about the epoch
of Ivan the Terrible, Prince Silver, which was fated to appear in
print only in the sixties. From 1854 on, the poet published con¬
tinuously. In the course of ten years, almost all his lyrics and the

170
greater part of his long poems appeared. To this period belong his
jokes and parodies under the pseudonym of Kozma Prutkov, writ¬
ten jointly with his cousins, Alexei and Vladimir Zhemchuzhni-
kov.“ Then follows the work of many years on the dramatic tril¬
ogy The Death of Ivan the Terrible (1866), Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich
(1868), and Tsar Boris (1870), interrupted by the writing of his¬
torical ballads. A drama on life in Novgorod, The Governor, was
not finished, because the poet’s wife disapproved of the beginning.
It appeared only after his death.
The novel Prince Silver enjoyed the greatest circulation, print¬
ed in dozens of editions, and translated into all European languages.
His poems and trilogy were also republished many times.

Printed as the foreword to the first volume of A.K. Tolstoi’s Se¬

lected Works (Berlin-Petrograd-Moscow: Grezhbin, 1923),
ed. Nikolai Gumilev. Only the first volume was completed.

XXXIX

(On Nekrasov)

(Gumilev’s answers to a questionnaire sent out by Kornei Chukov¬

sky1 in 1921 to the prominent poets of the time, from Merezh-
kovsky to Mayakovsky—on their attitude towards Nekrasov and
his poetry.)

1. Do you like Nekrasov’s poems?

Yes. Very much.

2. Which of Nekrasov’s poems do you consider the best?

The epic-monumental type: “Uncle Vlas,” “The Widow¬
er Admiral,” “General Fyodor Karlych von Shtube,” the de¬
scription of the Tarbagatai^ in “Grandpa,” “Princess Trubets¬
kaya,” and others.

3. How do you regard Nekrasov’s verse technique?

Remarkably deep breath, power over the chosen image,
remarkable phonetics, continuing Derzhavin over Pushkin’s
head.

171
4. Was there a period in your life when his poetry was more pre¬
cious to you than the poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov?
Youth: from 14 to 16.

5. How did you regard Nekrasov in childhood?

I almost did not know him, and what I knew, I despised
because of the estheticism.

6. How did you regard Nekrasov in your youth?

Nekrasov awakened in me the idea of the possibility of
the individual’s active relation to society.

7. Does Nekrasov’s influence show in your work?

Unfortunately, no.

8. How do you regard Turgenev’s famous assertion that in Nek¬

rasov’s verse “poetry didn’t even stay the night”?
A prosaist is no judge of a poet.

Printed in Annals of the House of the Literati, No. 3, 1 December

1921. Akhmatova, Blok, Gippius, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Kuz¬
min, Mayakovsky and Merezhkovsky also answered the ques¬
tionnaire. It was later expanded, sent to a dozen more poets
and printed in Chukovsky’s Nekrasov: Articles and Materials
(1926).

XL

Leaders of the New School

Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, Fyodor Sologub

Russian poetry had a splendid past. Such poets and Pushkin,

Baratynsky, Tyutchev, Lermontov, Nekrasov, allowed it to catch
up with the poetry of other European peoples. But changing con¬
ditions of life, the growth of cities, the flowering of philology, the
discoveries of Western poetry, all this remained alien to it for a
very long time. Only around the beginning of the twentieth cen¬
tury does it flourish anew and, one would like to believe, for a
long time.

172
 If one does not speak of precursors, three names character¬
ize the beginnings of this dawn [s/c] .*
Konstantin Balmont proved to be foremost among them. He
traveled a great deal, translated a great deal. The collected works
of Shelley, Calderon, Shakuntala, Snow-Leopard Skin 1 (the Geor¬
gian national epos), etc. —these are his gifts to Russian literature.
But his chief service lies not in these translations—it lies in his
poems. Many now dispute the merit of his poems. They find them
too beautiful, too inexact in expression, too meager and affected in
thought. This may be true, but he did not write that way twelve
years ago. His three books of that period, Burning Buildings,
(1900), Let Us Be Like the Sun (1903) and Only Love (1903) will
remain forever in the memory of everyone who has read them, de¬
spite the fact that even they contain weak poems.
Konstantin Balmont was first to guess the truth, plain as day,
old as time, but very difficult to understand, that in the end,
poetry consists of words, just as painting consists of colors, music
of an alternation of sounds. He also guessed that words pro¬
nounced for the first time live, pronounced for the second time
exist and finally, pronounced for the third time, only are.
He burst violently into the peacefully grazing flock of old
words, all those “fallings in love, hopes, faiths, maidens, youths
and dawn,” with new words: “devils, hunchbacks, cruelties, per¬
versions” —everything that he himself picturesquely called “scimi¬
tar words.” True, behind them one can hear only the rustling of
paper, and not the distant rumble of life, but his rhythms are so
fascinating, his expressions so unexpected that one instinctively
wants to begin a study of the new Russian poetry with him. And
it is so pleasant to suddenly meet a woman of whom it is said:

She has sea-colored eyes,

She has a faithless soul

or a hunchback:

*A spelling mistake in the Russian. Gumilev uses the Russian word for dawn
“rassvet" instead of the word for “flourishing” or “flowering”-“rastsvet. ”

173
 Look—the hunchback
Has such a mocking face,
That strange spine,
Satanic ring.

And he instinctively smothers a laugh

And rejoices like a snake,
Because secret sin is
A distortion of being—

and many others, but most of all, the poet himself, as he appears
in one of his best poems:

Why is it so stifling, why is it so dull?

I’ve completely cooled toward dreams,
My days are uniform, my life monotonous,
I stand on the last line.
Only an instant is left, only a fleet-winged instant,
And I’ll go off from pallid people,
Why do I linger before the open grave.
Not hurry into obscurity sooner?
I am not the ancient merry demigod, inspired,
I am not the genius of melodious dream,
I am the sullen hostage, the miserable captive,
I stand at the last line.
Only an instant is left, and the soul, like an albatross,
Flies off into the unknown gloom.
I am tired of moving from question to question,
I am sorry that I lived on earth.

An unfinished article begun in Paris in 1917, or in London in 1918.

The passage was first published in an article by G. P. Struve,
“From the Archives of Nikolai Gumilev: Unpublished mate¬
rials for a biography of Gumilev and the history of literary
trends,” in Tests (New York), No. 1, 1955, pp. 181-190.

174
 A NOTE ON SOURCES

All of the essays and reviews in this volume are translated from Nikolai
Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, ed. G. P. Struve i B. A.
Fillipov, Washington, D.C. “Kamkin,” 1*968. Volume 4.

FOOTNOTES

THE LIFE OF VERSE

1. (c. 675-749). Gumilev may be alluding to his defense of ikon-worship or his

revision of the Greek Orthodox Church’s hymnbook.
2. Francois Coppee (1842-1908), French poet and playwright, known as the
poete des humbles, contributor to the Parnasse contemporain (1866).
Sully-Prudhomme (1839-1907), French poet, Nobel Prize winner in 1901. In his
later career his poetry favors the themes of the Parnassians.
Nikolai Nekrasov (1821-78), Major poet and influential editor, known primarily
for his civic verse and advocacy of reformist and radical causes.
3. Herodiade (1869), a dramatic poem, in which the heroine symbolizes the
cold, sterile solitude of the esthetic life.

175
 4. “The Critic as Artist; with some remarks upon the importance of discussing
everything: a dialogue.” Intentions (1891).
5. Semyon Nadson (1862-87), popular poet, also inspired by civic themes, whose
verse, according to D.S. Mirsky, “marks the low-water mark of Russian poetic tech¬
nique.”
6. Charles Asselineau (1820-74), critic and novelist known for elegant and eru¬
dite reviews, and his L ’Histoire du Sonnet.
7. Pierre de Ronsard (15247-85), best known for his Sonnets pour Helene (1578).
8. Turgenev’s “A Quiet Backwater” is a short story (1854) in which the reading
of Pushkin’s poem “The Upas Tree” precipitates the suicide of Maria, who is hopelessly
in love with a talented but frivolous man.
9. “The Poor Knight”: a poem by Pushkin (1829); the knight has a vision of the
Virgin Mary, takes a vow to fight for her, but in his fanatic devotion to the female image,
fails to pray to God. Therefore the devils try, successfully, to take him to Hell. Aglaia
Epanchin in The Idiot (Part II, Chap. 7) sees the knight as a man capable of blind faith
in an ideal; she draws a parallel between the poem, Myshkin and Nastasya Fillipovna.
10. Sologub’s “Night Dances: A Dramatic Tale in Three Acts,” based on a fairy¬
tale from the famous Afanasiev collection. The role and power of the poet is a major
theme. Fyodor Sologub (1863-1927) was a major Decadent, or Symbolist, poet and
prose writer. Though best known abroad for his novels The Petty Demon and The Cre¬
ated Legend, connoisseurs of Russian poetry prize him for his elegant lyrics.
11. The Horae, goddesses of the Seasons in Greek mythology, are associated with
many dieties, including Helios, but only as subordinate companions (whence Ivanov’s
“Heliads”). They number either three or four.
The Eridanus is a mythical river with the Electrides (Amber-) Islands at its mouth.
12. Transparence (Moscow: Skorpion, 1904) was Vyacheslav Ivanov’s second
book of poems. Gumilev reviews his Cor Ardens (part I in XIX, 1; part II in XXV) and
Delicate Secret (XXIX), and discusses individual poems (XIII; XIX, 2; XXXII).
13. Kuzmin’s Chimes of Love (Moscow: “Skorpion,” 1910), Mikhail Kuzmin’s
(1875-1936) musical pastorale in verse. Kuzmin was a composer, poet, dramatist, novel¬
ist, critic and translator; his essay “On Beautiful Clarity” (Apollo, 1910) is often seen as
one of the first statements of Acmeist ideas. Translations into English include his homo¬
sexual novel Wings: Prose and Poetry (Ann Arbor, 1972) and the play Venetian Madcaps
in Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 7 (1973).
14. The Scales ceased publication in 1909, several months before “The Life of
Verse” appeared in Apollo. Part IV of this article was apparently included by mistake.
The poetry in The Scales is also discussed in XIII.

ACMEISM AND THE LEGACY OF SYMBOLISM

1. The reader should not think that with this phrase, I am burying all extreme
trends in contemporary art. In one of the up-coming issues of Apollo, an article will be
devoted to their examination and evaluation, [author’s note]
2. Sedan, French city of great strategic importance on the Meuse River. Gumilev
refers to the decisive battle of the Franco-Prussian War, fought there on 1 September
1870, which resulted in the surrender to the Prussians of 100,000 men under the com¬
mand of Napoleon III.
3. Theophile Gautier (1811-72), French poet and novelist, forerunner of the Par¬
nassian school.

176
 THE READER

1. Paul Fort (1872-1960), French poet and dramatist. The poems of his forty
volumes of Ballades franQaises and Chroniques de France (1897-1951) are usually
printed as prose paragraphs.
2. Theodore de Banville (1823-91), French poet and dramatist, member of the
Parnassian school and contributor to the Parnasse Contemporain (1866).
3. The singer of psalms, that is, Solomon. The references are to the Song of
Songs, v, e.g. 4:11,5:13, 14.
4. Edward Bellamy (1850-98), American novelist and reformer, best known for
his utopia. Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888).
5. Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938), Italian decadent writer, whose heroes
are mainly concerned with developing a refined ability to experience sensual pleasure.
The title character of his drama La Gioconda is a model for a brilliant sculptor who
eventually deserts his wife for her, the true inspiration of his art.
6. Apparently, both this article and “The Anatomy of a Poem” were to be
worked into a book on theory of verse that Gumilev planned during the last years of his
life.

THE ANATOMY OF A POEM

1. Alexander Potebnia (1835-91), Russian philologist whose attempts to describe

the nature of poetic creation in linguistic terms anticipated the linguistic or semiotic
orientation of the Slavic formalist studies.
2. L’Awaye. A group of French writers and artists, named for the house in Cre-
teil they shared for 14 months (1906-07). Influential in spreading the ideas of Unanim¬
ism, introduced to them by Jules Romains, the group included Georges Duhamel, Pierre
Jean Jouve and Charles Vildrac.
3. Dionysius the Areopagite, an Athenian mentioned in Acts xvii, 34 as con¬
verted by St. Paul’s preaching in Rome. Works ascribed to him include 10 letters and a
Liturgy.
4. Basil of Caesarea (Cappadocia) (c. A.D. 330-79), organizer of monastic com¬
munities in Asia Minor for which he composed ascetic rules, and later Bishop of Caesa¬
rea. His letters and sermons are among the best of the epistolography and rhetoric of his
time.
5. Archpriest Awakum (1621-82), a leader of the Old Believers, famous for his
autobiography (1672-75).

ON TRANSLATIONS OF POETRY

1. Ermil Kostrov (c. 1755-96), poet and translator of Apuleius, Homer, Ossian,
Voltaire and others. His translation of eight books of the Iliad was very popular even
after publication of Gnedich’s translation in 1829.
2. Jose Maria de Heredia: see note 7, section XIV.
3. William Morris (1834-96), English artist, designer, poet and founder of the
Kelmscott Press.
4. Jules Laforgue (1860-87), French poet associated with th Symbolists and an
early experimenter with free verse.
5. This collection included articles by F.D. Batiushkov, Kornei Chukovsky and
Gumilev. The text translated is from the second edition of the book (Petersburg, 1920).

177
 I

1. Ancient Semitic goddess of fertility, beauty and love.

II

1. Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868-1927), Polish poet and novelist. His novel

Homo Sapiens was written in German (1895-98), and translated into Polish by the
author (1901).
2. Sologub’s poem “The Star Mair” (“Zvezda Mair,” 1898).

Ill

1. Arion, Greek poet and musician (fl. c. 700 B.C.). According to legend, he was
cast into the sea by mariners, but carried to Taenaros on the back of a dolphin.

IV

1. Evgeny Baratynsky (1800-44) and Nikolai Yazykov (1803-46) were, after

Pushkin and Lermontov, the outstanding poets of the period.
Anton Delvig (1798-1831), one of Pushkin’s closest friends, editor of the alma¬
nac Northern Flowers (1825-31).
Yakov Polonsky (1819-98), poet and translator, noted for his Romantic lyrics.
Apollon Maikov (1821-97), lyric poet who attempted to continue the Pushkin
tradition, dealing with nature and Classical themes in refined poetic forms.

1. Herman Cohen (1842-1918), one of the founders of the Neo-Kantian Marburg

school of philosophy.
Hiram, King of the rich and ancient city of Tyre, friend of David and Solomon
(fl. 950 B.C.).
2. Ashes. SPb: Shipovnik, 1909. Cup of Blizzards. SPb., 1908.
3. Vladimir Benediktov (1807-73). Lev Mei (1822-62). Karolina Pavlova (1807-
93).
4. The paeon is an antique four-syllable meter consisting of one long and three
short syllables. The variations of the paeon are numbered as follows: (1) /-(2) - / —
(3) - - / - (4) — /. In tonic verse, the term is used to indicate a combination of two feet,
in one of which an accent has been dropped.

VI

No notes in this section

178
 VII

1. Valerian Borodaevsky’s collection was also reviewed in Apollo, No. 1, 1909

rVIII). He published one other collection in 1 914

VIII

1. Boris Sadovskoy 11881-19451, poet and short-story writer, began publishing

in 1901. This was the first of several collections of poems, dealing mainly with stylized
genre pictures of Russian life.
2. Ivan Rukavishnikov (1877-1930j, minor poet, novelist, associated with the
Symbolists. His novel Accursed Race, 1912, enjoyed considerable success. He published
his works in 20 volumes (SPb., 1901-251. Gumilev refers to him again (XV) as a standard
of bad taste.

IX

1. Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852i, lyric poet, voluminous translator and immedi¬

ate poetic predecessor of Pushkin.
2. After the poem “Rolla” by Alfred de Musset f 1810-571, which appeared in La
Revue des deux mondes, 15 August 1833.
Peter Petrovich Potemkin (1886-19261, writer, playwright, critic and translator.
A permanent contributor to the satirical magazine Satiricon after 1908, and later one of
its editors. He emigrated in 1920.
4. Oblomov, lethargic hero of Ivan Goncharov’s novel of that name, whose idyllic
childhood was filled with food and frequent naps.
5. The references are to the heroines of Lermontov’s Denvjn (1839i and Push¬
kin’s narrative fragment Cleopatra, or the Egyptian Nights (begun 1825, resumed 1835l-
6. A Rehours (Against Nature, 1884i, a novel by the Decadent Joris Karl Huys-
mans (1848-19071 of des fcsseintes’ search for release from debilitating ennui in the ex¬
quisite and the perverse.
7. See above section V, n. 4.
8. Pavel Sergeevich Sukhotin (1884-19351, published three more collections of
verse and several children’s books.
9. Saint Petersburg shop owned by an assimilated French family. Originally Tart.
10. Sergei Krechetov (pseudonym of Sergei Alexeevich Sokolov, 1879-19361 emi¬
grated after the Revolution, founded the “Medny Vsadnik” Press in Berlin, and pub¬
lished a literary almanac of that name.
11. Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-19491, Belgian-French poet, dramatist, essayist,
Nobel laureate (19111.
12. Vladimir Lensky, the name of Pushkin’s Schilleresque poetaster in Eugene
Onegin, was the appropriately chosen pseudonym of Vladimir Yakovlevich Abramovich
(1877-19261.
13. Alexander Stepanovich Roslavlev (1879-19201 is discussed disparagingly in
XIV and XXIX.
14. Diary of Events.

1. The Scales, a monthly Symbolist literary journal published in Moscow (1904-091

179
by “Skorpion” Press. Publisher, S.A. Polyakov (1874-1948). Editor, Valery Bryusov.
2. Ellis (pseudonym of Lev Lvovich Kobylinsky, 1879-1947), contributor to
Scales, close friend of Andrei Bely and something of a Pushkinist. He emigrated to Swit¬
zerland before World War I.
3. The Island, a Petersburg almanac.
4. Camelots, Fr. “street-vendor.”

XI

1. Northern Flowers, literary almanac (named after Delvig’s St. Petersburg publi¬
cation, 1825-32). Only five issues were published (1901-05) by the “Skorpion” Press,
Moscow. Editor, Valery Bryusov. Initially including the works of Bunin, Chekhov, Roza¬
nov, and unpublished writings of earlier writers-A.S. Pushkin, Tyutchev, Turgenev, Fet
-it had become, by 1903, almost entirely a Symbolist publication.
2. Gumilev gave a much more favorable evaluation of Fofanov’s work in the
obituary that appeared in Apollo just over a year later (XXXVII).
3. Vasily Cholba and the other poets Gumilev mentions in this article apparently
never published collections of their works again.
4. Iosif Simanovsky published his first collection of verse, Zakatu, in 1909 in an
edition of 100 copies. It was printed, of course, in Bobruisk.
5. Bobruisk, rail junction in Belo-Russia, population 58,256 in 1890.
6. Toga praetexta, the official garment of the higher Roman magistrates, a toga
bordered with purple. This title appeared on the dust jacket of the book by Rem and Si¬
dorov.
7. Jacques Louis David (1748-1825), court painter to Bourbons and Bonapartes.
Genrikh Ippolitovich Semiradsky (1843-1902), minor Russian painter.

XII

1. Gerard Walch (1865-1931). Anthologie des po'etes francais contemporains:

morceaux choisis, accompagnes de notices bio- et bibliographiques, et de nombreaux
autographes. Paris: Delagrave, 1906. The immensely popular anthology gave its readers
a survey of the poetic development of France in the second half of the XIX Century.
The first three small 8V0 volumes of approximately 550 pages each, contained works of
over 250 poets.
2. Marie Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, baronne d’Aulnoy (c. 1650-1705),
author of stories and novels including Les Contes de Fees (1697) and Nouveau Contes
(1698).
3. Anna Comnena Ducaena (1083-after 1148), daughter of Alexius I (reigned
1081-1118), wife of Nicophorus Bryennius, author of the Alexiad, the biography of her
father from the start of his career through the struggle for the throne that followed his
death, and the only Byzantine history written by a woman. The passage Gumilev men¬
tions reads:

For all my desire to name their leaders (the Crusaders), I perfer not to do so. The
words fail me, partly through my inability to make the barbaric sounds-they are
so unpronounceable-and partly because I recoil before their great numbers.
—pp. 324-25, Chapter X, The Alexiad of Anna Comnena, translated by E.
R.A. Sewter, Penguin Books, 1969.

4. Daniil Maximovich Ratgauz (1869-1937) published collections of his mediocre

180
verse with ruthless regularity from 1900 until the Revolution. Later, he printed at least
one collection in Berlin.
5. Poltava (1828-29), Pesn’ 2, 11. 268-69. Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, Vol. 5, p.
43.

XIII

1. World of Art, luxuriously illustrated, beautifully designed bi-weekly, later

monthly journal of the arts and letters published in St. Petersburg (1899-1904) by Sergei
Diaghilev and Alexander Benois. Its literary contributors included Zinaida Gippius, Me-
rezhkovsky, Minsky, Rozanov, Bely and Bryusov.
2. Minsky (pseudonym of Nikolai Vilenkin, 1855-1937), an early proponent of
esthetic evaluation in Russian criticism.
3. New Path, literary journal published in St. Petersburg (1903-04), founded by
three former members of the World of Art circle—Gippius, Merezhkovsky and D.V. Fi-
losofov (Diaghilev’s cousin, 1872-1942).
4. Skorpion, Moscow publishing house (1900-1916) owned by Sergei Polyakov
(1874-1948). It was the first house in Russia to publish the new Western literature, in¬
cluding Verlaine and Verhaeren, and the books of the Russian Symbolists Bely, Bryusov,
Gippius, Sologub, Ivanov. Skorpion produced the literary almanac Northern Flowers
(1901-05) and the journal Scales (1904-09). It paid great attention to the artistic aspect
of its publications, employing artists from the World of Art group, including Somov,
Bakst, Sudeikin.
5. Urbi et orbi: Poems 1900-1903. Moscow: “Skorpion,” 1903. Garland (Ste¬
phanos): Poems 1903-1905. Moscow: “Skorpion,” 1906.
6. Henri Farman (b. 1874), pioneer French aviator and inventor. In 1909 he set
a world record for flight duration and altitude.

XIV

1. Maenades, also Bacchae or Thyiades, women inspired to ecstatic frenzy by

Dionysius.
2. Andromache, in the Iliad, the daughter of Eetion, King of Thebes, and wife of
Hector. She appears in Euripedes’ The Trojan Women and is the heroine of his Andro¬
mache.
3. Echafaudage, Fr. “scaffolding.”
4. Alexander Roslavlev’s first book, In the Tower, was published SPb., 1907;
after this review, he published only two “tales in verse” in 1915.
5. Mikhail Artsybashev (1878-1927), novelist and playwright. The frank discus¬
sion of sex in his novel Sanin (1907) created a sensation.
6. Evgeny Kurlov (1876-?) published only one other small collection of poems in
1915.
7. Jose" Maria de Heredia (1842-1905), Cuban French poet best known for Les
Trophees (1893) which includes 118 sonnets.
8. Alexander Rotshtein. These Sonnets are his only collection.
9. Marcel Schwob (1867-1905), essayist, poet, novelist. His last book and mas¬
terpiece, Vies imaginaires (1896) is a collection of re-created lives of nearly forgotten
philosophers and writers.
10. Vasily Knyazev (1887-1937 or 38) became an important satiric poet after the
Revolution, and although he took part in the proletarian literary movement, was “re¬
pressed” in the late 1930s, and died at Kolyma. Posthumously rehabilitated, 1956.

181
 11. Dmitry Minaev (1835-1889), poet, publicist and translator.
12. Otto Weininger (1880-1903).
13. Vasily Stepanovich Kurochkin (1831-1875), poet of revolutionary spirit,
editor of The Spark.
Peter Veinberg (1831-1908), poet and translator of Heine, Schiller and Shake¬
speare.

XV

1. Nedotykomka, the dusty demon that harasses Peredonov in Sologub’s novel,

The Petty Demon, 1907.
The poem “The Star Mair.”
2. Lord Ravenswood’s son Edgar is the hero of Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lam-
mermoor (1819), which was the basis for Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor
(1835).
3. Alexei Apukhtin (1840-93), lyric poet popular in the 1880s. Many of his lyrics
were set to music by his old school friends Tchaikovsky and Moussorgsky. Gumilev men¬
tions him disparagingly later in this essay and in XXXI.
4. Nikolai Morozov (1854-1946) spent twenty-five years in Schlusselberg Fortress
for revolutionary activities (1881-1905), during which time he wrote twenty-six manu¬
script volumes on the natural sciences, and a number of poems, published (SPb., 1906)
under the title Out of the Walls of Bondage.
5. Rene Ghil (1862-1925), Flemish French poet, systematized his conception of
“scientific poetry,” according to which each consonant and vowel possesses a particular
timbre or musical value. His scientific concepts and musical technique are applied in his
Oeuvre (1889-1909). He was in correspondence with Bryusov, and contributed to Scales,
and later Apollo and Russian Thought.
6. Tatiana’s letter to Onegin, 11. 22-23. (Chapter III, following Stanza XXI).
7. Nikolai Brandt published two more collections of poems (Kiev, 1912 and
1913) after this, his second book.
8. The anthropoid mandrake, said to scream when uprooted.
9. Sergei Gedroits (pseudonym of Vera Ignatevna Gedroits?). Despite the scath¬
ing review, Flight, a small collection of poems by S. Gedroits, appeared in 1913, pub¬
lished by Gumilev’s Guild of Poets, and both appeared in Almanac of the Muses in 1916.

XVI

1. This posthumous collection of Yury Sidorov’s poems was his first.

2. Vladimir Benediktov (1807-1873), minor poet and favorite of parodists.
3. Yaldabaoth. The meaning and origin of the word are unclear. In gnostic writ¬
ings, it refers to the malevolent false god who created the material world. He was the off¬
spring of rebellious Sophia (knowledge).
4. lurii Verkhovsky (1878-1956), poet and translator of Bocaccio’s Ninfale fieso-
lano and other works of Renaissance poets.
5. The reference is to Zhukovsky’s philosophical poem “Theon and Aeschines,”
1814.
6. Penates, guardian gods of the family, household gods. Alphea, a river in the
Peloponnesus.
7. The second edition (1912) of Negin’s “dramatic epic” was a larger printing.

182
 XVII

1. Modest Druzhinin continued publishing until the Revolution. The three books
referred to are all entitled Poems, 1909 and 1910.
2. Antonov’s 36-page collection was published in 1910 in 120 copies. It is his
only published work.
3. Vladimir Gessen (1868-1919): a famous lawyer’s only book of poems.
4. Baron N.A. Vrangel. Poems (Stikhotvoreniia, 1911) is his sole published work.
5. Sergei Alyakrinsky published a second collection, Cactuses (Kaktusy, 1912).
6. Alexander Fedorov (1868-1949) prolific poet, prose writer and translator. Gu¬
milev apparently refers to the second edition of his Stikhotvoreniia (1909).
7. Imatra, a picturesque waterfall frequented by Romantic poets, on the Wuoksi
River, the largest and longest in Finland.
8. Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky (1890-1939 or 1941), the famous literary historian
and critic, published no more verse.
9. E. Astori’s sole published work.
10. E.I. Shtein’sbook is entitled I (la, 1910).
11. Sofia Semenovna Dubnova (b. 1885) published a second book Mother {Mat’,
1918).
12. Emelyanov-Kokhanovsky (pseudonym of Alexander Nikolaevich Emelyanov,
(7-1900). His book. Bared Nerves {Obnazhennye nervy), was published in three editions
(1895, 1903, 1904). To the second and third were added a portrait, an autobiography
and an “especially funny section” entitled “Tears of a Balding Devil.”
13. Anastasia Verbitskaya (1861-1928), writer of tremendously popular novels for
women, dealing with sex, free love, and contemporary problems in lengthy melodramatic
plots.
14. Severyanin has made an adjectival form from the pejorative “mek” (Menshe¬
vik), and added a Russian ending to the French word “grisette.”
15. Fyodor Kashintsev continued to write abroad after the Revolution.
16. F. Lado-Svetogorsky’s book is entitled Songs of the Bright Land {Pesni o svet-
loi strane, 1911).
17. Sergei Klychkov (pseudonym of Sergei Antonovich Leshenkov, 1889-1940),
continued writing both poems and novels. Dubravna was published in 1918.
18. Elisabeth Bohm (1843-1914), minor Russian painter. Her sentimental illustra¬
tions of Russian proverbs, with cherubic, pink-cheeked children in Russian costume,
were popular around 1910.
19. Modest Lyudvigovich Gofman (1890-1959), had previously published a collec¬
tion Ring (Kol'tso, 1907).
20. Hatchery of Judges, 1910 almanac in which the group of poets later tailed Fu¬
turist (Khlebnikov, Kamensky, the Burlyuks, Elena Guro) appeared for the first time.
The title, Khlebnikov’s invention, is ambiguous. As translated, it suggests that the book
is a cradle containing the new judges of Russian criticism; but another translation is Trap
for Judges, meaning that the critics are sure to misjudge it. Although Kamensky and Bur-
lyuk insisted the book was a sensation and marked the dawn of a new era, only about 20
copies went on sale because the authors could not pay the printing bill. Gumilev dis¬
cusses Hatchery of Judges II (1913) in XXX.
21. Alexei Mikhailovich Remizov (1877-1957), novelist and essayist.
22. Marsyas, a Phrygian peasant or satyr who picked up the flutes Athena had
thrown away because they distorted her features. He was so successful that he challenged
Apollo to a contest, which he lost. Marsyas was flayed alive for his presumption.
23. Maria Bashkirtseva (1860-84), diarist and painter, began The Journal of a
Young Artist, for which she is famous, at age 12.

183
 XVIII

1. Vladimir Kulchinsky’s only collection of poetry is compared to Vasily Tredia-

kovsky’s verse translation of Fenelon’s Telemaque (1766), famed for its tediousness and
ineptitude.
2. Konstantin Bolshakov (1895-1940), minor Futurist poet.
3. Alexander Diesperov no longer published after this, his first book.
4. Golden Fleece, a heavily illustrated monthly art and literary journal (Moscow,
1906-09), in which Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Georgy Chulkov took a leading role.
For the first six months, it was published in Russian with the French en regard.
5. The Pass, anthologies published irregularly between 1924 and 1928 (six issues
appeared), by the circle of writers of the same name.
6. “GriF’-an important publishing house.
7. Vladimir Narbut (1888-1938?), later one of Gumilev’s fellow Acmeists, and a
literary bureaucrat after the Revolution, he died in the purges.
8. Lev Zilov (1883-1937) published sixteen books of poetry for children (through
1929).
9. Boris Zaitsev (1881-1972), prose writer, dramatist, translator, biographer of
Russian writers, his first story was published in 1901, his first collection in 1906. He
emigrated in 1922, and lived most of his life in Paris, where his translation of the Divine
Comedy was published (1961).

XIX

1. Eugene Onegin, “Fragments from Onegin’s Journey,” 9. 2-5.

2. Ghazal, also gazel, ghazel, ghasel, ghazul, a form of lyric poetry of Near Eastern
and Central Asian peoples, composed entirely of couplets with a recurring rhyme: aa, ba,
ca, da, etc., and limited to five, ten or fifteen stanzas.
3. Vitold Frantsevich Akhramovich (Ashmarin) (d. c. 1938).
4. Poems (Stikhotvoreniia): Elegies, Odes and Idylls, SPb, 1909, discussed in
VII, VIII.
5. Maximilian Voloshin (-Kirienko) (1877-1932), poet, translator, painter, friend
of all the major Symbolists.
6. Kimmeriitsy lived near the straits connecting the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea.
There was an important Greek colony founded there by the Meletians which during the
Persian Wars became an independent, half-Greek, half-barbarous state, later destroyed by
the Scythians.
7. Samuel Kissin (1888-1916), prolific poet, short-story writer, dramatist, began
publishing under the pseudonym “Muni.”
8. Songs (Pismi), Altsiona Press, Moscow, 1911; discussed in XVII.
9. Sergei Raevsky apparently never published a collection of poems.
10. Georgy Rachinsky (1853-1939), associated with religio-philosophical circles in
Moscow.
11. Semen Rubanovich never published a collection of poems.
12. Sergei Ryumin apparently never published again.
13. Margarita Vladimirovna Sabashnikova (b. 1882), painter and poet, advocate of
anthroposophy, wife of Maximilian Voloshin, she published her memoirs in Germany.
14. Niva, illustrated weekly (SPb., 1870-1918) with a wide circulation (275,000
by 1917). From 1894 to 1916, there were monthly literary supplements containing the
complete collected works of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Leskov and other Russian writers.
15. Lyubov Stolitsa (1884-1934). Her best known work is her novel in verse Elena
Deeva, published in four editions (1916-1923). She emigrated to Bulgaria.

184
 XX

1. Konstantin Somov (1869-1939), painter, book fllustrater. contributor to The

k'orid of Art. He is famous for his covers of Symbolist publications including Balmont’s
Firebird 11907), Ivanov’s Cor Ardens < 1911), and the first edition of Blok’s dramatic
works < 1907).
2. Jayadeva, Indian poet (XII Century, A.D.), probably Bengali, author of the
lyrical dramatic epic Giiagominda. the story of the love of Krishna for the beautiful
shepherd Radga.
3. Letters of a Rustier Traveler c 1 "90-91) by Nikolai Karamzin (1766-1826).
4. D. Navashin never again appeared in print.

XXI

1. Skorpion, cf. XIII n_ 4.

2. /rie'rj. Paris. 1910.
3. Terza rima. iambic tercets rhyming aba. bcb, etc.; invented by Dante.
4. Graal Arelsky > pseudonym of Stepan Petrov, 1889-?), one of the founders of
Ego-Futurism.
5. Burning Buddings A Lyric of the Contemporary Soul was first published in
Moscow in 1900.
6. S. Konstantinov, despite the favorable review, neveT published another book.
This collection, printed in Rostov-na-Do nu. is the only published work of S.
Tartakover. who is rather better known as a chess-player.
8. Haim-Nakhman Byalik (187 3-19341. Jewish poet, novehst. translator, publisher
in Odessa. Berlin. TeTAviv. b. Kishinev .
Sholom-Ash Sholem Aceh. 1880-1957) was born in Poland and emigrated to the
Lured States in 1910 to become one of the most prominent .American Jewish novelists
and playwrights. His first success was God of Vengeance, produced by Max Reinhardt in
Berlin. 1910.
Some of the early works of both writers were in Yiddish.
9. This is Konee's only publication, and be seems to have vanished altogether.
There is even seme confusion about the spelling of his name (cf. Tarasenkov, Russkie
Poet) XX veka Bibbogrtfitt. Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatei'. 1966. p. 450 ''kenge." p. 128
“Kengs~i
10. Mikhail Dohnov published another collection. Rainbow (Raduga. 1915), dis¬
eased in XXXIII.
11. Lev Vasdevsky < 1876-1936* began writing poetry in 1902. He later published
only one short piece, m 1912.
12. Alexander E. Kotomkm emigrated after the Revolution and continued to
write mdifferent dric verse in Prague.
13. Yury Zubovsky (1890-7) never published another collection of verse.

XXII

1. Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov (1836), patriotic historical epic inspired by

the reign of Ivan the Terrible, written by Mihail Lermontov (1814-41).
2. Ilya Muromets and Alesha Popovich, together with Dobrynya Nikitich were
the principal heroes of the Kievan cycle of epic songs (bylory). Dyuk Stepanovich, a bo-
garvT of famga name and naif-Russian origin, was in some accounts from India. Karelia
or Vofey-nia.

185
 3. Nikolai Klyuev published his first two collections in 1912: Chime of the Pines
and Fraternal Songs, discussed in XXV.
4. Archistrategos, Greek, “chief commander,” epithet for Michael, the angel of
the sword and conqueror of Satan.
5. Luke, 11, 14.
6. According to one tradition, Adam, fashioned of baked earth, was somewhat
overdone.
7. Klysty (Flagellants), a mystical religious sect formed in the mid-seventeenth
century, during the Schism.
8. Francois Villon (1431-?) author of Le Grand Testament (1461). His popular¬
ity in the late nineteenth century as a picaresque hero was based on colorful and for the
most part legendary episodes in his life.
9. Romances sans paroles (1874) and parts of Sagesse (1880) are the most Rim-
baudian of Verlaine’s poems.
10. Memoires d'un Veuf (Notes of a Widower, 1886) is the only prose work Gumi¬
lev discusses in his “Letters on Russian Poetry.”
11. Vadim Shershenevich (1893-1942), poet and translator, author of a dozen col¬
lections of poetry (between 1911 and 1926), Symbolist, Ego-Futurist, and eventually
the main theorietician of the Imaginists.

XXIII

1. Cythera, island off the south coast of Laconia, where Aphrodite was said to
have landed after her birth in the sea.
2. Mikhail Zenkevich (b. 1891), minor Acmeist poet, translator of Shakespeare,
Whitman, Hugo, F’reiligrath and Njegos.
3. Commodus (Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus), 161-92, Roman emperor
(180-92), son and successor of Marcus Aurelius. He vaunted his strength in the arena and
decreed he would be worshipped as Hercules Romanus.
Ahura Mazda (also Ormazd), in Zoroastrian scripture, the triumphant leader of
the forces of good in the war against evil.

XXIV

1. Cf. Gumilev’s review in XVII.

2. Pavel Radimov (b. 1887). His second book, Earthly Raiment (1914), is re¬
viewed in XXXII. He published two collections after the Revolution.
3. J.H. Rosny aine' (pseudonym of Joseph Henri Ilonore Boex, 1856-1940).
French novelist, among the original members of the Goncourt Academy. Until 1909, he
collaborated with his brother Seraphin Justin Francois Boex (1859-1948).
4. Charles Marie Rene Leconte de Lisle (1818-1894). French poet, leader of the
Parnassians. His collection Poemes harbares (1872) established his reputation.
5. Francis Jammes (1868-1938). French poet and novelist. His pastoral poems
describe his native region of the Pyrenees.
6. Vsevolod Kurdyumov published five more collections of verse before the Rev¬
olution. With the exception of Powdered Heart (1913), which is reviewed in XXIX, they
were printed in editions of 80 copies or fewer. In 1924 he published satirical propaganda
pieces.
7. Anatoly Burnakin worked for the reactionary St. Petersburg daily The New
Time (1868-1917) until the Revolution. This was his single collection of verse.
8. Sasha Cherny (pseudonym of A. M. Glikberg, 1880-1932) wrote satirical verse

186
and children’s stories; worked with Mayakovsky on The Satiricon (1906-17, a magazine
devoted to political and social satire;. He emigrated to f-ranee in 1920.

XXV

1. Ivanov’s Cor Ardens (The Ardent Heart Moscow: “Skorpion,” 1911; was
published in two parts. Part 1 Cor Ardens Speculum Speculorum is reviewed in XIX.
Part II lxrve and Death Rosarium (Rose Garden).
2. Maya, a term in Hindu Vedantic philosophy.
3. Perseus, hero of ancient Greece, slayer of the Gorgon Medusa, savior of An¬
dromeda, founder of the Perseids.
4. Basiieus, Persian Emperor, fifth century, B.C.
5. Chime of the Fines (1912; is discussed in XXII.
6. Cf. Luke X, 40-42.
7. The subtitle of Klyuev’s Fraternal Srjngs is Songs of the Golgothian Christians.
8. Kunstkammer, literally “art chamber”; in Russian, a cabinet of curiosities.
9. The first edition of Narbut’s Hallelujah (1912; was confiscated by the censors.
10. Count Peter Bobrinsky printed another collection Fandora (1915;.
11. Feelings are normally carried “in the heart” in Russian; pregnant women carry
children beneath the heart (“pod serdtsem”;.
Armor may be zazuhrennyi (jagged, notched;, but so can multiplication tables
and lists of Latin verbs (learned by rote;.
12. The Sphinx, first published June 11, 1894, but really dating from his Oxford
days, was little more than an experiment with words. He delights in rhyming sarcopha¬
gus, catafalque and obelisk with Tregolephos, Amenalk and basilisk.

XXVI

1. Pierrot, Piero, Pedolino, aCommedia Dell’ arte character dating from the second
half of the seventeenth century. A charming and unusually trustworthy valet dressed in a
white shirt with long sleeves, heavily powdered and maskless, he was often the rival of
Harlequin for the love of an artful serving maid, usually Columbine.
2. Pushkin’s (javriiliad, April, 1828.
3. Dante’s Vita Nuova (c. 1293;, a short work containing his early sonnets
and canzoni with prose commentary.
Ronsard’s Sonnets pour Helene (1578;, one of his last works.
Goethe’s Die IMden des jungen Wert hers (1774;.
Baodelaire’s Let Fleurs du Mai (1857;.
4. F^arth in Snow Third Collection of Verse. Moscow: Zolotoe Runo, 1908.
Sight Hours Fourth Collection of Verse. Moscow: Musaget, 1911.
These were combined in the third volume of the 1912-13 collection of Blok’s
verse under the title Snowy Sight.
5. Sets (Moscow: “Skorpion,” 1908; was Kuzmin’s first collection.
6. Hafiz (Shams-ud-din Muhammed, c. 1300-89;, Persian lyric poet whose collec¬
tion, The Divan of Hafiz, includes more than 500 ghazals.

XXVI!

1. Bybny, epic folk songs relating the deeds of the bogatyrs and set against the
background of the court of Prince Vladimir Svyatoslarich of Kiev.

187
 2. Vladimir Bestuzhev (pseudonym of Vladimir Vasilevich Gippius, 1876-1941)
had earlier published a collection under the name of Vladimir Neledinsky (Vspyshki,
1905); literary critic and translator.
3. Poe’s sonnet “Silence” (first published April, 1840 in Burton’s Gentleman’s
Magazine).

XXVIII

1. Boris Abramovich Gurevich’s book was confiscated by the censors. He had

earlier published another collection To My People, 1913.
2. Alexander Ivanovich Tinyakov (Odinoky), 1886-1922, a contributor to vari¬
ous Modernist journals. Two collections of his verse were published after the Revolution.
3. Nikolai Nikolaevich Zhivotov published several other collections, all in the city
of Ananiev.

XXIX

1. Vadim Danilovich Gardner (1880-?). This was Gardner’s second collection. He

emigrated to Finland after the Revolution.
2. Alexei Skaldin (1889-1943). This is his only collection of poems.
3. Sergei Solovyov (1885-1941), nephew of the poet and philosopher Vladimir
Sergeevich, friend of Bely and Blok. This is the fourth of five collections published be¬
fore the Revolution. His April (1910) is reviewed in XV.
4. Yakov Lyubyar (pseudonym of Alexei Lozino-Lozinsky, 1888-1916) pub¬
lished two more small collections of verse in 1916.

XXX

1. Hatchery of Judges II was published by the Hylaea group (cf. XXI n. 9), but
as in the first Hatchery of Judges, the name did not appear because of Guro’s objections.
The collection appeared in February, 1913, and opens with a manifesto (as in A Slap in
the Face of Public Taste).
2. Elena Guro (Notenberg, 1877-1913), Futurist poet, writer and painter; she
signed only some of the early Futurist manifestos, contributed to their publications, but
rarely participated in their public appearances.
3. Benedikt Konstantinovich Livshits (1887-1939), Futurist poet and translator.
His first collection The Flute of Marsyas (1911) is reviewed in XVII. He also wrote a
book of memoirs. The One-and-a-HalfEyed Archer on the history of Futurism.
4. Velimir (Viktor Vladimirovich) Khlebnikov (1885-1922). His contributions to
various publications are discussed in XVII and XXXI.
5. Nikolai Burlyuk (1890-1920), Futurist prose writer and poet, brother of
David Burlyuk.

XXXI

1. It soon became an open secret that despite his repeated denials, Bryusov was
the author of the Nelli Poems.
2. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale “The Golden Bowl” (“Der Goldene Topf,” 1814).
3. Russian Thought, scientific, political and literary journal, published monthly.

188
Moscow. 188 >1918. In the 1910* Biymor L-nikd the literary section, and Zinaida Gip-
pms the critical material
4. Vobpok. artificial international '^r.rj>r? based on Wecem European langu¬
ages. created m 1%“9- Although there were ray Volapuk societies in die 1880s publish¬
ing journals, textbook.! arse zra.rrr.2n. the languaze’s popularity had sharply fallen by
1895.
5. Schematise Russ Skhtmmk), a monk who has taken the vows of schema, the
strictest monastic rule in the Orthodox Church.
6. Ambroue Thomas <1811-1 s96). French operatic composer. His triumph Mig-
nor, 11866 /. given over a thousand performances in less than thirty years, was based on
Goethe’s novel bilkelm Sfenters Lehrjchre.
7. The quotation is from Severyanin s brochure “Prologue of Ego-Futurism”
i November, 191 lj. where he suggests that Pushkin is ol&fadooned by comparing him
with Gamia Derzhavin (1743-1816). perhaps Russia's best eighteenth-century poet.
8 Kozina Pratko ■. a joint pseudonym of A.K.. Tolstoi and his cousins Alexei and
Vladimir Zbemchuzhnicov for their satirical sene and parodies.
9 Hylaea. the Greek name of Scythian lands near the black Sea, chosen by Be-
nedikt Livshits and the Buriynks as the name of the literary circle that was to become
the Futurists. Khlebnikov. Kamensky, Gore, and soon Mayakovsky and Kruchecykh
joined them. The coup became known as the "Cubo-Fiaunits' m 1913, but Hy iaea”
w as not abandoned.
10. Studio of the Impressionists 'published SPb-, February . 1910, about two
months before Hatchery of Jutges) contains several poems by the Futurists David and
Nicolai Bariyuk and Vcfinir KhlefcnScov.
11. The words are all from one of Khlebcatov'j best known poems “Incantation
by Laughter,” published in 1910 m Studio of the Impressionists.
12. “Private viewing.'' Russ, temhezh. from the French iemniage-varnish mg.
varnishing day. the opening day of an art exkirinon.
13. Aqudo-L. the North wind, the wind-
14 Count Vasily Komarovsky 11881-1914). began puthshmg only in 1912, with
fire poems and a short story n ApoOo. Gunnkv discusses his only collection- The rest of
his works, short stories, lyrics, a narrative poem and a novel, remaned unpublished.
Count Komarovsky suffered periodic attacks of madness.
15. Hetxri de Reemer 11864-1936), French poet, novelist and critic. Under the in¬
fluence of Jose Mara de Heredia, his late; works combined rjassaral form with occuh
themes and the sumptuous deco lameness retained from his early association with Mal-
fame.
16. Constantinople. like Rome, was bait on seven hifls.
Riza. metal covermg of an ikon which allows only the face and hands of the image
to show.
17. Johann Gottheb Fichte • 1762-1814). German philosopher, later remembered
more as a patriot and hberaL
18. “Le Voyage” was one of the three poems added to the second edition of La
Fleurs du Mai in 1861. It is the last poem of the book.
19. Three plays on cfassaral themes:
King Loon Tragedy in fire acts with named interludes- SPb.: M.P Frokmx.
1902
Melamppe the Philosopher Tragedy. SPb.: M_P. Frolovoi. 1901.
Laodamia Lyric tragedy tn four oca with mussed tntechnics. SPb.: 1902.
20 Annensky’s play a loosely based on a myth concerning Pbnammon. poet and
musaran of the pre-Homcric period, said to be the son of Apollo, and closely associated
with the woniup of that god at Delphi, and with the muse of the athara. The theme of
a mnsacal contest between man and god is found mdse legend of Many as <cf. XVII n_ 20).

189
 21. Euterpe, the muse of music.
22. Evoe or Evohe, the Bacchanalian cry.

XXXII

1. Jean Moreas (Iannis Papadiamantopoulos, 1856-1910), Greek-born French

poet and prose writer, came to Paris in the mid-1870s. He wrote two volumes of Sym¬
bolist verse, but later founded the Ecole Romane, calling for a return to classic forms.
2. Chlamys, a short mantle worn by men in ancient Greece.
3. Pierre Alexis, vicomte de Ponson du Terrail (1829-71), French popular and
prolific novelist.
4. Vsevolod Krestovsky (1840-95), poet and novelist.
5. Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939), regarded by some as one of the greatest
Russian poets of the century. He wrote his best verse after emigrating to Paris in 1922,
where he became a central figure in emigre literary circles.
6. Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-73), lyric poet. His small body of works consists of
about 400 poems, which rarely run more than 20 lines.
Similarly, Innokenty Annensky (1856-1909) published only two collections of
verst-Quiet Songs (1904) and The Cypress Chest (1910). The latter is reviewed in XIV.
7. Alexei Tolstoi (1883-1945), poet, playwright and journalist. He published two
collections of verse before the Revolution: Lyrics (1907), and Beyond the Blue Rivers
(1911), but he is best known for his historical novels, including the trilogy The Road to
Calvary (1918-23) which earned him the Stalin Prize in 1942.
8. Francois Viele-Griffin (1863-1937), American-born French poet, associated
with the Symbolists. A master of vers libre, he wrote of the beauties of Touraine in a
number of early collections. His later works reflect his interest in Hellenic and Medieval
Germanic legend.
9. The first lines of the opening poem of Ivanov’s first collection Pilot Stars
(1903).
10. The first lines of the poem “Elisaveta” from Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1913).
11. From a lyric by Kuzmin.
12. The article to which Gumilev refers is “Lettres russes. Les Poetes. Futurisme,
Akmeisme, Adamisme, etc.” (Mercure de France, 1 November 1913, pp. 201-204).

XXXIII

1. Maria Evgenevna Levberg (1894-1934), poet and translator; published no

other collections of verse.
2. Leonid Lvovich Berman also published New Troy (Novaia Troia, 1921).
3. Phoebus, one of the epithets for Apollo.
4. The Russian tumba is used jocularly to refer to a clumsy, fat person, much as
post can by used as a type of lifelessness, stupidity or ignorance.
5. Alexander (“Sandro”) Akimovich Korona (7-1967), published no other collec¬
tions. He emigrated after the Revolution to Italy, France and finally the USA.
6. From a Tatar song in Pushkin’s The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1822), 11.131-
34.
7. Pierre Louys (1870-1925) French novelist and poet of the Parnassian school,
classical scholar.
8. Alexandrian Songs appeared first in the July, 1907 issue of Scales. The com¬
plete series was included in Kuzmin’s first book of verse, Nets (1908), and issued in a
separate collection only in 1921. English translation in M. Kuzmin, Wings: Prose and

190
Poetry (Ana -Arbor, 1972).
9. Chrolh pseudonym of Konstantin Fastovich Tarasov) published a second cob
lection. Son of Faun (1916).
10. Tikhon Churflin <c. 1890-1944). His second collection was published in 1918.
In 1940 a small book of his poems appeared in Moscow.
11. Prince G. Gagarin- This was his last published work. For Gumilev’s uncharit¬
able comments on Daniil Ratgauz. to whom he is compared, see XII.
12. Count .Alexander A. Saltykov, publicist in Germany after the Revolution. This
is his only collection of poems.
13. This passage contains the shards of Saltykov’s considerable classical learning:
Sosptta savion is a standard epithet for Juno, whilePopulona (from populo—to ravage,
destroy) is not. luruma. a nymph, sister of Turn us. King of the Rutuh, and originally a
goddess of a spring near Lavinium. was later associated with a fountain in the Forum of
Rome, where the Temple of Janus stood, etc_ etc.
14. Leonid .Andreev i1871-1919). short-story writer and playwright. "In the Fog”
deals with a student who contracts syphilis, kills the prostitute who infected him and
then commits suicide.
15. Vladimir Prussak. His second collection was published in Irkutsk in 1917.

XXXIV

1 Georgy Adamovich fb. 1894), minor poet associated with the Acmeists. He
published other collections of verse, including Purgatory (1922) and In the West (Paris.
1939).
2. Shemakha, ancient city in Azerbaijan, important in the silk trade in the six¬
teenth century, destroyed by earthquake in 1902.
3. Ballad" was published in The Cypress Chen (1910) under "Funereal Trip¬
tych,” p. 31.
4. Georgy Ivanov’s first coDectkmChamber < 1914), is reviewed in XXXII.
5. Capital and Country-seat-a Russian version of Town and Country.
6. Mihail Lozinsky < 1886-1955). minor poet associated with the Acmeists, and
voluminous translator of Dante. Moliere. Corneille, Shakespeare. His single collection of
poems. Mountain Spnng. appeared in two editions (1916, 1922).
Principal characters in Byron's Faustian tragedy Manfred (1817) and his dra¬
matic poem Cain, a Mystery (1821).
8. Balmont's "Dead Ships" appeared in the cy cle Silence (Tishina, 1898).
9. Stone. SPb: Akme. 1913. 34 pages. 2nd edition. Petrograd: Giperborei, 1916.
91 pages.

XXXV

1. Mikhail Strtrve (1890-1948), member of the Acmeist circle Guild of Poets,

and friend of Gumilev•. He emigrated to Paris.

XXX VI

1.1 was unable to find any record of other books by Konstantin Lyandau.

191
 XXXVII

1. The obituaries appeared under separate title immediately after Gumilev’s reg¬
ular “Letter on Russian Poetry” (XIX in this volume).
2. Compare the critic’s evaluation of Fofanov’s work here with the much less
complimentary review in XI.
3. Longfellow’s poem “Day is Done” (Fall, 1844),printed as the proem to The
Waif (1844). The passage reads:

... The bards sublime.

Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.

XXXVIII

1. Printed as the foreword to the first volume of A.K. Tolstoi’s Selected Works
(Berlin-Petrograd-Moscow: Grezhbin, 1923), edited by Gumilev. Only the first volume
was completed.
2. Alexei Zhemchuzhnikov (1821-1908) and his brother Vladimir (1830-84). In
addition to collaborating with A.K. Tolstoi, Alexei Zhemchuzhnikov also wrote some
civic poetry at the turn of the century.

XXXIX

1. Kornei Chukovsky (1892-1969), literary critic, writer of children’s books,

translator. Before the Revolution, he was very active in avant-garde literary circles.
2. Tarbagatai, mountain range in Central Asia, on the border of Kazakhstan and
Sinkiang Province.

XL

1. Balmont’s numerous translations include: Shelley’s closet drama Prometheus

Unbound (1820)-issued in SPb.: Znanie, 1904. The collected works of Calderon. Mos¬
cow, 1900-12. 3 vols. Shakuntala, a play by the fifth century Indian poet and dramatist
Kalidasa. M. and S.: Sabashnikov, 1915. The Georgian epic Bearer of the Snow-Leopard
Skin. Moscow, 1917.

192
 Gumilev was bom in Tsarskoe Selo,
near St. Petersburg, attended the celebra¬
ted Pushkin lycee there, and published his
first book of poems-The Path of Con-
quistadores—in 1905. His first three or
four collections were influenced by Sym¬
bolist and Decadent poets, but received
many good reviews. He became one of
the leading figures in the Guild of Poets
(begun in 1911) and the school known as
Acmeism (or Clarism, or Adamism), one
of the most important movements bom
in reaction to Symbolism. The acmeists
emphasized referential clarity and formal
precision. Craftsmanship and compre¬
hensibility are virtues praised by Gumilev
in his critical writing.
Gumilev married Anna Akhmatova
in 1910, but they were divorced in 1918.
During that time Gumilev published wide¬
ly (poetry and essays on poetry), travel¬
led to Africa twice, enlisted in the army
in 1914, and was repeatedly decorated
for valor in battle. Though a monarchist
he returned from Paris to Russia after
the Bolshevik coup and engaged in trans¬
lating and teaching. He was executed for
alleged involvement in an anti-Soviet plot
in 1921. Very little is known about this
episode.
Gumilev’s last—and best—book—
Pillar of Fire— was published in 1921, but
he has not been published in the USSR
since the early twenties. His Collected
Works in Four Volumes, in Russian,
were published in the United States
(1962-68).

David Lapeza’s translations have

appeared regularly in Russian Literature
Triquarterly, and he is one of the transla¬
tors of The Unpublished Dostoevsky. His
translation of Vladimir Voinovich’s Ivan-
kiada will soon appear. Most recently Mr.
Lapeza has been doing research on 19th-
century Russian literature in the USSR.