to the poetic gatherings which took place every Wednesday at his famous "Tower".
In this way, Khlebnikov's arrival in St. Petersburg proved the start of a temporary but close personal association with many of the leading Symbolists of the period. Among others to influence him was probably Gorodetsky, whose primitivistic volume "Yar" was much in fashion.[1] Khlebnikov's own love of Russian folk-lore, however, had begun much earlier. In the Autumn of 1909 Ivanov's group began calling themselves the "Academy of Verse". In October they published the first issue of "Apollo", their luxuriously-printed and expensively-illustrated journal which brought together the European-oriented "elite" of Russian writers and artists and survived until 1917. With its reproductions of paintings and drawings tending heavily toward Grecian columns, fauns, nymphs, satyrs and classical nudity[2], it would be hard to think of a publication more different in appearance or content from those in which Khlebnikov's future works would appear. But in letters to his family written in October and November, the student repeatedly expressed his anticipation that his own works would be published in Apollo.[3] On several occassions he read his verses to the
- ↑ Nadezhda Mandel'stam writes that the upper-class intelligentsia was acutely aware "of the sickness of the age" and "was desperately anxious to find a remedy for the crisis, for the weakness that was debilitating it. All kinds of ideas were put forward, a particularly popular one being that the present could be revitalized by paganism as embodied in the ancient Russian gods such as Perun. It was taken for granted that pagans were strong and handsome, exuding power and health. An earlier attempt to bring back the Greek gods had hardly been a success, yet the people who now dragged out the ancient Russian ones were welcomed with open arms. In such an atmosphere, Gorodetsky, with his wife Nympha and his "Yar", hit the bull's-eye. The first to give his blessing was Vyacheslav Ivanov; it was at the "Tower" that Gorodetsky met Khlebnikov"; (Hope Abandoned, London 1974, p 57).
- ↑ Clarence Brown, Mandel'stam, Cambridge 1973, p 42. This description applies particularly to the later editions of the journal, however, when it had become the central organ of the 'neoclassical' Acmeist school.
- ↑ SP v pp 286–88.
