ABSTRACT
The circle is now closed, and the earliest identification of a modern period in the history of Russian poetry with silver has been traced back to 1913, that is, the very year that provided the title and the setting for the chapter of Akhmatova’s Poèma bez geroia, in which she evoked so memorably and so ambivalently the image of the past “silver age”:
Whether that age ended in 1917; or in 1921, with the death of Gumilev and Blok; or in 1930, with the suicide of Maiakovskii; in 1934, with the death of Andrei Belyi; in 1937-39, with the death of Kliuev, Mandel’shtam, and Khodasevich; or in 1940, after the fall of Paris, when Akhmatova began Poèma bez geroia, and Nabokov, having escaped from France, was about to compose Parizhskaia poèma, the émigré counterpart of Akhmatova’s summing up of the age, the designation “silver age” was an outside sobriquet, given either as a wistful and ironically self-deprecato ry reminiscence by the surviving poets, or as an, at best, apologetic, and at worst, scornful, evaluation by the critics, or as a largely meaningless classificatory term, used by the latter-day scholars of literature and historians of art for the lack of a better appellation.
