ABSTRACT
The poetic generation born after 1885 continued the Revolutionary and cultural work of the symbolists—but ceased to be symbolists. About 1910 the symbolist school began to disintegrate, and in the course of the next few years rival schools came into existence, of which the two most important are the acmeists and the futurists. Acmeism (the rather ridiculous word was suggested with a satirical intention by a hostile symbolist and defiantly accepted by the new school) had its center in Petersburg. It was started in 1912 by Gorodétsky and Gumilëv as a reaction against the symbolist attitude. They refused to regard things as mere signs of other things. “We want to admire a rose,” they said, “because it is beautiful, not because it is a symbol of mystical purity.” They wanted to see the world with fresh and unprejudiced eyes as “Adam saw it at the dawn of creation.” Their doctrine was a new realism, but a realism particularly alive to the concrete individuality of things. They tried to avoid the pitfalls of sestheti-cism and proclaimed as their masters (a queer set) Villon, Rabelais, Shakspere, and Théophile Gautier. Visual vividness, emotional intensity, and verbal freshness were the qualities they demanded of a poet. But they also wanted to make poetry more of a craft, and the poet not a priest but a craftsman. The foundation of the Guild of Poets was an expression of this tendency. The symbolists, who had wanted to make poetry a religious activity (“theurgy”), resented this development and remained (especially Blok) distinctly hostile to Gumilëv and his Guild.
