ABSTRACT
The spring blossoms of Russian modernism, ver sacrum, were sacrificed too early, according to Viacheslav Ivanov’s early (1903) estimate. During the following year, he proclaimed, in “Carmen Saeculare,” a totally new age, to overcome the opposition of silver and gold: the Age of Adamant, of steel and diamond. These ideas and symbols of Ivanov, however, left no trace in the writing of the critics, though they have profoundly affected the historical selfawareness of the younger generation of poets. The only historian of Russian literature who eventually decided to dispense with the old metals of Hesiod, Oleg Maslennikov, as will be shown later, ignored the synthetic concept of Ivanov; but then Ivanov’s admantina proles presupposed also an abolition of the chasm between art and the social being.
