ИСТИНА

The situation of the “great divide” of Russian Revolution is often considered as destructive for the neo-classical tendencies in Russian post-1917 poetry. Nevertheless, the influence of the social change can be observed not only in avant-garde Russian poetry, that was leaning on the revolutionary discourse, but also in the literary schools that referred to themselves as the “successors” of Russian classical poetry tradition. Despite the formal declarations, their poetry was deeply influenced by the revolutionary project of renaming things (that was called by S. Gorodetsky “adamism”). Acmeists changed the concept of lyrical author from the “overman” (used by Russian symbolists) to the “simple carpenter”, who has the power to make a poetic dream into reality. This new concept mirrors the democratic change that was behind the philosophy of Russian October. Opposing Gumilev’s idea of a poet as “self-made man”, Mandelstam speaks of “self-made masses” and rethinks the correlations between poet, people and modernity (“I'm a man of the Moskvoshvei epoch”) – as the post-revolution situation externally imposed the “fulfillment of social demand” and marching with the times. Paradoxically, in order to accentuate “the link of times” Russian acmeists used the legacy of previous cultural epochs, such as French symbolism (revolutionary images of A. Rimbaud’s poetry), victorian poetry of R. Kipling, traditional scansion of Greek poetry (connected with democratic discourse). The impulse of stirring the lines between the classes during the Revolution was also turned to stirring the lines between different poetic traditions – even by the most puristic Russian poetry schools.