Talk:Acmeist poetry

A few factual errors

This entry contains some factual errors and unites several concepts under the name "Acmeism" that should not be confused with one another.

First of all, Acmeism and the "Guild of Poets" (Tsekh poetov) were not the same thing. The first Guild of Poets was begun in the fall of 1911 by Gorodetskii and Gumilev as an effort to unite (mostly young) poets from a variety of poetic schools and aesthetic movements. Attendees of the Guild of Poets meetings included not only future Acmeists (Acmeism had not yet been declared as a movement), but also poets who refused to join the Acmeists, such as Mikhail Lozinskii, Nikolai Kliuev, and Mikhail Kuzmin. Aleksandr Blok and Velimir Khlebnikov even attended occasionally, if only in the very beginning. The Guild of Poets began to publish its members' books in early 1912 and began to publish a journal, Gipeborei, in October 1912. While Gorodetskii and Gumilev fostered a certain orientation towards clarity and balance between the earthly and the heavenly in their reviews, Giperborei was still not an mouthpiece for their ideology. Acmeism (also known as Adamism) was publicly declared as a movement in the January 1913 issue of the journal Apollon with two Acmeist manifestoes: Gumilev's "Nasledie simvolizma i akmeizm" and Gorodetskii's "Nekotorye techeniia v sovremennoi russkoi poezii" (Mandel'shtam's "Utro akmeizma," now often read as the Acmeist manifesto, wasn't published until in 1919). The circle of Acmeist poets included only six: Akhmatova, Gorodetskii, Gumilev, Mandel'shtam, Narbut and Zenkevich.

Defining Acmeism is a difficult thing because these facts in the literary history were not always faithfully recorded even in the contemporary criticism. Certain inaccuracies have been repeated in scholarly criticism throughout the decades, but only in the last few decades have many important facts come to light. As if the confusion regarding names and dates weren't enough, there is a general problem at the root of all assessments of Acmeism: despite what the manifestoes loudly proclaimed, it's difficult to identify a stable theoretical basis uniting the group (though there are common trends in the poets' works). The scholar Oleg Lekmanov has attempted to define the theoretical grounding by claiming that the uniting principle was the ideal of each poet's discrete individuality within the "flowering diversity" (tsvetushchee raznoobrazie). There's truth to that idea, but it's far from the sort of aesthetic ideology one would expect from a literary school. It might be safer to call Acmeism a poetic movement.

It's also misleading to give the name "Acmeism" to the general tendency toward "Apollonian clarity" that could be observed in various strains of Russian post-Symbolist poetry. Kuzmin's "O prekrasnoi iasnosti" (1910) is rightfully mentioned in the current version of the Wikipedia entry as watershed moment in establishing "clarism" (what the entry calls an "Acmeist mood") as an alternative to Symbolism. However, there were followers of "clarism" who were not Acmeists, and the Acmeists did not always embrace this clarity.

There are a few other factual errors. Mandel'shtam's first edition of Kamen' came out in 1913, not 1912. Kuzmin and G. Ivanov never joined the Acmeists, even if they were at times very close.

I don't know if I'm making my points clear enough, but I encourage a future editor of the "Acmeist poetry" entry to read some more up-to-date, solid scholarship concerning Acmeism, such as Oleg Lekmanov's Kniga ob akmeizme or Justin Doherty's The Acmeist Movement in Russian Poetry. Sorry for writing so much. Michaeanto (talk) 01:57, 7 April 2014 (UTC)