ABSTRACT
The text has been lost, but enough is known of it to show the speaker echoing the Symbolist notion of the poet as a high priest articulating, through his own special form of utterance, the collective subjective impressions of humanity as a whole. The poet predicts that 'They who last night as children fell asleep/Shall rise at dawn today'; and they shall rise, it soon turns out, in a world shrouded in 'northland's blue-grey, orphaned, dirty rain'. Whatever terminology may be employed, he is asserting the poet's right to develop his images along 'stream-of-consciousness' lines. They have organized a trust of pan-Russian mediocrities; they are traitors, renegades, impostors and cowards; they are spreading malicious rumours about poets outside their faction. The purpose of Relinquimini's challenge is to establish which of the two poets, he or Heine, is the more authentic.
