The literary movement of the '9os, dubbed "modernism" by its opponents, had for its principal components aestheticism and individualism. Dmitri Merezhkovsky (b. 1866) (q.v.) was one of the earliest and most influential mouthpieces of "modernism." He did excellent work at first as the interpreter of foreign values. But his .historical novels reveal no creative originality, and as a religious thinker he is a long exploded nonentity. The most important literary expression of the "modernist" movement was the poetry of the Symbolists. In the first stages their poetry was largely derivative from foreign sources. The work of Constantine Balmont (b. 1867) (q.v.) and Valeri Bryusov (1873-1924) (q.v.) has a translated and un Russian flavour. But they contributed a great deal to raising the standards of poetic workmanship and the general level of literary culture. Other poets more creatively original and at the same time more organically rooted in the Russian tradition were Theodore Sologub (1863-1927) (q.v.); Zinaida Hippius (b. 1867) (q.v.), an intellectual poet of great technical originality; Innocent Annensky (1856-1909), whose small posthumous book The Cypress Chest (1910) contains lyrics of the most quintes sential beauty; and Vyacheslav Ivanov (b. 1866), a gnostical metaphysician, a classical scholar, saturated with culture, the master of a magnificently ornate, Alexandrine style (Cor Ardens, 1911), as well as a splendid writer of ornate prose. The younger generation of Symbolists produced the greatest poet of the movement in Alexander Blok (188o-1921) (q.v.). His early mystical lyrics were purely musical and immaterial. Later when he lost his mystical visions, his poetry became more full-blooded and realistic. It is romantic in substance, but instinct with a grim and hopeless irony. His last poem, The Twelve, written immedi ately after the October Revolution, is a sublime symphony made out of realistic dirt. Blok's contemporary Andrey Bely (pseud.
of Boris Bugaev, 1880-1934, see BYELUY) was the most original and "advanced" of the younger Symbolist poets. His poetry is mystical in content, experimental in form and often humorous. Of the minor and later Symbolists there are Maximilian Volo shin (1877-1932), and Vladimir Khodasevich (1886– ).
The exclusively metaphysical character of Symbolism produced a reaction towards more concrete and less sophisticated poetry.
Michael Kuzmin (1875– ) was its first herald. About 1912
it crystallized into a movement whose leader was Nicolas Gumilev (1886-1921). His poetry is a strange mixture of gaudy aestheti cism and manly romanticism. The poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Eng. trans. Twenty-Seven Love Poems, 1927) is also an asser tion of human and concrete emotion as against the mysticism and metaphysics of Symbolism. Osip Mandelstam (The Stone, 1916) is more concerned with cultural than with sentimental values. His technique is a curious combination of classical eloquence with an illogical associationism akin to that of the surrealistes.
Of the elder Symbolists who attempted prose fiction Sologub (q.v.) is easily first. The Little Demon (1907) is one of the greatest Russian novels since Dosto yevsky. Superficially it is a story of Russian provincial life,
in the realistic tradition, but its symbolism has a metaphysical rather than a social significance. Other poets like Bryusov and Kuzmin tried to renovate Russian prose by adopting old and foreign styles. Bryusov's romance of witchcraft, The Fire Angel (1907), for instance, imitates the manner of a 16th century German memoirist. Russian prose was revolutionized by Andrey Bely (see above) and Alexis Remizov (1877– ) (q.v.). They
aimed at the maximum of verbal expressiveness, thus reviv ing the true tradition of Gogol and continuing the work of Leskov. Bely achieves this by a variety of means, among which rhythm, bold metaphor and verbal creation are most prom inent. His novels, from the first, The Silver Dove (1909), to Moscow (first parts 1926), reveal a creative genius of a very rare order. Remizov's Russian is more colloquial; he continues the work of Avvakum and Rozanov of "de-latinizing" the language. His writings present an enormous variety of kind and subject. But most important of all are his stories of provin cial life (The Story of Stratilatov, 1909, and The Fifth Pestilence, Eng. trans. 1927) which introduced a new type of grotesque realism and a new technique. They had a considerable influence on the rise of a new realism which used Russian life not as a peg on which to hang social or metaphysical problems, but as purely aesthetic material. Alexis N. Tolstoy (b. 1882) is the most popular and lively of these writers, the master of an admirable narrative manner, free from any kind of sophistication. His masterpiece is The Childhood of Nikita (1922). Michael Prishvin (b. 1873) is the author of the best animal stories in the language (The Beast of Krutoyarsk, 1913). Eugene Zamyatin
began as a disciple of Remizov, but later developed a compli cated expressionist manner of his own.
The World War did not very profoundly affect Russian literature. The intellectual classes kept aloof from it. The Revolution of March 1917 remained almost equally alien to the Russian imagination, but not the Bolshevik Revolution of eight months later, or the ensuing civil wars. Their external result was the division of intellectual Russia into two hostile camps, which after 1920-21 became a geographi cal division between those who have remained in U.S.S.R. and the émigrés. The older generation of writers is pretty equally divided between the two sides. But the young generation of émigrés have produced no valuable work with the possible exception of the historical novelist, Mark Aldanov (q.v.). In the literature of ideas the emigres have however given birth to the vigorous movement of the "Eurasians" whose leaders are Peter Suvchinsky and Prince Nicolas Trubetskoy. Of the Bolsheviks, Lenin was an orator and a political writer of exceptional genius. Trotsky is a brilliant pamphleteer and his book, Literature and Revolution (Eng. trans. 1925), discussing the literary policy of the Com munist party is of interest. But the strictly literary men of the party are very second-rate. Anatoli Lunacharsky (1875-1933) was a conspicuous mediocrity, and Demian Bedny (pseud. of E. A.