Acmeism

Definition

Acmeism (Акмеизм) was a current in Russian poetry of the 1910s. The acmeists proclaimed materiality, concreteness of theme and image, and precision of the word; they defined their own work as the cult of concreteness, 'the art of precisely measured and weighed words.' The name derives from the Greek ἀκμή ('flowering, peak of something'). English-language references date the movement's emergence to c. 1911 or 1912 and describe its ideals as compactness of form and clarity of expression. Its centre was St. Petersburg (Petrograd).

History

Organisational origins

Its formation is closely bound up with the Guild of Poets (Цех поэтов). There were three associations of that name in St. Petersburg. The first Guild of Poets was founded by Gumilev and Gorodetsky in 1911 and lasted until 1914; its first meeting was held on 20 October 1911 at Gorodetsky's flat. The name, modelled on the craft guilds of medieval Europe, stressed the members' view of poetry as a profession and a craft; its head was called the 'syndic' (синдик), and the official syndics were Gumilev, Gorodetsky and Dmitri Kuzmin-Karavaev. The Guild published collections of its participants' verse, and members' poems and articles appeared in the journals Giperborei and Apollon.

At first the Guild's participants identified with no literary current and sought no common aesthetic platform, but in 1912 they declared themselves acmeists. Members included Akhmatova (the Guild's secretary), Mandelstam, Zenkevich, Narbut, Kuzmina-Karavaeva, Lozinsky, Vasily Gippius, Maria Moravskaya and Vera Gedroits; in the early period Kuzmin, Piast and Aleksey Tolstoy also took part. Contemporaries sometimes mocked the founding of the Guild.

Publication of the programme

The Acmeist programme was first publicly announced on 19 December 1912 at the Stray Dog (Бродячая собака) cabaret in St. Petersburg. The term 'acmeism' was advanced in 1912 by Gumilev and Gorodetsky; on their account a new current was emerging to succeed a Symbolism in crisis, synthesising the experience of their predecessors and leading the poet to a new creative peak.

The name and the uncertainty of its etymology

According to Andrei Bely, the name was chosen in the heat of polemic and was not well grounded: Vyacheslav Ivanov mentioned 'acmeism' and 'adamism' (адамизм) jokingly, and Gumilev picked up the chance words and christened the poets close to him 'acmeists.' Contemporaries offered other readings. Vladimir Piast traced the term's origin to Anna Akhmatova's pen name, which sounds like the Latin akmatus, and others pointed to its link with the Greek ἀκμή ('sharpness'). An etymological dictionary (Shansky) treats it as a coinage of Gumilev's from 1912.

Characteristics and lineage

Russian-language sources summarise the features of Acmeism as the self-sufficient value of the individual thing and of every phenomenon of life, the purpose of art as the ennobling of human nature, and a striving for the artistic transformation of imperfect life. Its mood was first announced by Mikhail Kuzmin in his 1910 essay 'Concerning Beautiful Clarity.' The acmeists contrasted the ideal of Apollonian clarity (hence the name of their journal, Apollon) with the 'Dionysian frenzy' preached by Symbolists, and preferred 'direct expression through images' to 'intimations through symbols.' Mandelstam defined the movement as 'a yearning for world culture' and, as a 'neo-classical form of modernism,' placed Pope, Gautier, Kipling, Annensky and the Parnassian poets among its predecessors.

The movement was established in the theoretical work of Gumilev ('The Legacy of Symbolism and Acmeism,' 1913), Gorodetsky ('Some Currents in Contemporary Russian Poetry,' 1913) and Mandelstam ('The Morning of Acmeism,' published 1919), and in the poetic practice of Akhmatova, Zenkevich, Georgy Ivanov and Kuzmina-Karavaeva.

Organ

Giperborei was the Guild of Poets' 'Monthly of verse and criticism'; ten issues appeared in 1912–1913, the last a double number. Its founding was led by Gorodetsky and Gumilev, and its publisher and editor was the poet and translator Mikhail Lozinsky. The title came from the Hyperboreans of Greek myth, so the title itself was a declaration of the Acmeist programme. In 1914 it was converted into the Giperborei publishing house, which lasted until 1918.

Dissolution and dispersion

The first Guild dissolved in April 1914; the second operated in 1916–17 under Ivanov and Adamovich and was no longer focused on Acmeism; the third began in 1920 under Gumilev and then Adamovich and lasted two years (issuing three almanacs, the first titled The Dragon, 1921). After participants emigrated, groups of the same name were formed in Berlin (which reprinted the third Petrograd almanac in 1923 and published a fourth) and Paris; in Tiflis Gorodetsky founded one on 11 April 1918 that lasted about four years (some 30 members; the 1919 almanac AKME), and in Baku one lasted less than a year from 1920. The Moscow group ran in 1924–25 and issued the 1925 collection Styk.

Repression and divergent fates

The Soviet regime regarded the acmeists with suspicion because of their preoccupation with form and their 'ivory-tower aloofness.' Nikolay Gumilev was arrested on 3 August 1921 on suspicion of involvement in the conspiracy of the 'Tagantsev Petrograd Combat Organisation.' The Petrograd Cheka resolved on 24 August that 61 participants in the conspiracy be shot and announced on 1 September that the sentence had already been carried out; in 2014 archival researchers established that Gumilev and 56 others were shot on the night of 26 August (the infobox also records a 25 August variant). The place of execution and burial is unknown. Russian-language sources state that active participation in the conspiracy was not confirmed and that he was rehabilitated posthumously by a decision of the USSR Supreme Court on 30 September 1991.

Akhmatova was silenced during the most productive years of her life, and Britannica writes that Mandelstam died either in or en route to a Siberian labour camp. Gorodetsky, by contrast, took the path of accommodation with the Soviet system.

Distinctions

Relation to Symbolism

Acmeism emerged as a reaction against Symbolism's mysticism, but it was not a complete break. Gumilev, Akhmatova and Mandelstam rejected Symbolist vagueness yet continued the Symbolist tradition of incorporating mythical and biblical figures into verse. Their sense of time was also distinctive: time was transparent to the acmeists, so that past, present and future met in their lines and the Hellenistic age encroached on twentieth-century Russia.

Variations in style

Even among the acmeist poets, style was interpreted differently: Akhmatova wrote intimate lyrics on love and relationships, while Gumilev wrote narrative verse. Acmeism is thus understood in terms of 'variations in style.' Major poets include Mandelstam, Gumilev, Kuzmin, Akhmatova and Georgy Ivanov.

Adjacent schools

Acmeism must be distinguished from later and adjacent schools. English Wikipedia's 'See also' lists the Tagantsev conspiracy, Imaginism, Imagism and Symbolism. Imaginism (Имажинизм) was a 1918–1925 literary association of Russian poets, founded in 1918 in Moscow by Marienhof, Shershenevich and Yesenin among others (the name may have been influenced by Imagism); it issued a manifesto in January 1919, broke up in 1925 and was officially liquidated in 1927. It is also distinct from Anglophone Imagism.

Examples

Mandelstam's Stone (Камень)

Stone was Mandelstam's first collection, published in 1913 and reissued in 1916 and 1923 (the reissues were in effect different collections). The 1913 first edition was issued at his own expense in a small print run (300 copies) by the Petersburg publisher 'Akme'; its original title was The Shell (Раковина), it contained 23 pieces from 1909–1913, and fellow acmeists Gorodetsky, Narbut and Gumilev reviewed it. A second edition appeared in December 1915 (dated the following year on the cover) from Giperborei in 1,000 copies with 67 pieces, and a third in July 1923 from Gosizdat in 3,000 copies with 76 pieces. Britannica and the Poetry Foundation also record Stone, his first collection, as 1913, so English Wikipedia's presentation of Stone (1912) as 'the movement's finest accomplishment' is a single, likely erroneous claim. Mandelstam took part regularly in the Guild of Poets' meetings from November 1911, was elected temporary syndic on 21 October 1914, and joined the acmeist group at the end of 1912.

Akhmatova

Akhmatova (born 11 (23) June 1889 in Odessa, died 5 March 1966 at Domodedovo, Moscow region) became a Russian and Soviet poet and a classic of Russian verse. She published under the name 'Anna Akhmatova' from 1911, and with the collections Evening (Вечер, published by the Guild of Poets, 300 copies) in March 1912 and Rosary (Чётки, published by Giperborei, 1,000 copies) in spring 1914 she became the movement's leading poet. From 1922 her books were subjected to censorship corrections, and in 1925–1939 and 1946–1955 her poetry was not printed, except for poems from the 1950 cycle 'Glory to the World!' (Слава миру!); poetry began to be printed again only in 1955. In 1946 the Organisational Bureau decision of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of 14 August 'On the Journals Zvezda and Leningrad' criticised her as 'a typical representative of empty and ideas-less poetry alien to our people,' and that decision was revoked as erroneous at a Politburo meeting of the CPSU Central Committee on 20 October 1988. Her central work Requiem (1935–1940) recorded the grief of the wives and mothers of 'enemies of the people'; long unpublished, it circulated in samizdat and appeared in Munich in 1963 and in the USSR in 1987.

Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam (born Iosif Khatskelevich) was born on 2 (14) January 1891 in Warsaw into a Jewish family and died on 27 December 1938 at the Vladperpunkt transit camp in Vladivostok. After his first arrest in May 1934 he was exiled to Cherdyn; he was rearrested on 2 May 1938 and, sentenced on 2 August by the Special Board to five years' forced labour, was transferred to the Far East on 8 September. He was a victim of the Stalinist repression; the 1938 case was rehabilitated in 1956 and the 1934 case in 1987, and the location of his grave is unknown. He was rearrested on the night of 2 May 1938 at the Samatikha sanatorium and taken to Butyrka; the indictment was approved on 20 July and the Special Board passed sentence on 2 August. His body lay unburied until spring and was then placed in a common grave; the provisional burial site is the area of the old Krepostnoy rov (Sapyornaya embankment) in the old town of Vladivostok, and the exact location is unknown.

Gorodetsky: a case against a schematic reading

Sergey Gorodetsky (born 5 (17) January 1884 in St. Petersburg, died 7 June 1967 in Obninsk; the source also records an 8 June variant) was a Russian and Soviet poet, translator and educator. In the 1910s he parted ways with the Symbolists and in 1912 became, with Gumilev, one of the organisers of the Guild of Poets. He later took the path of accommodation with the Soviet system (socialist realism, poems praising party congresses and cosmonauts) and died in 1967. His case refutes the simple formula that most members of the movement were repressed.

Kuzmin

Mikhail Kuzmin (born 6 (18) October 1872 in Yaroslavl, died 1 March 1936 in Leningrad, buried in the Literatorskie Mostki of the Volkovo cemetery) was a Russian writer, poet, translator, editor and composer, a figure of Silver Age Petersburg literary life. With his 1910 essay 'Concerning Beautiful Clarity' he set out the precursor programme of Acmeism and took part in the Guild of Poets and in Giperborei.

Relations

The Guild of Poets was the parent organisation that announced the Acmeist programme in 1912; its central figures were Gumilev, Akhmatova (the Guild's secretary) and Gorodetsky, and members' poems and articles appeared in the Guild's Giperborei (1912–1913) and in Apollon (1909–1917). Figures associated with Acmeism include Gumilev, Gorodetsky, Mikhail Kuzmin, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Georgy Ivanov, Mikhail Zenkevich, Elizaveta Kuzmina-Karavaeva, Vladimir Narbut and Mikhail Lozinsky.

The Guild of Poets left groups of the same name beyond St. Petersburg in Moscow (1924–1925), Tiflis (11 April 1918 to about 1922) and Baku (1920, less than a year), and, after the emigration, in Berlin and Paris, showing the geographical spread of the Acmeist network and its dispersion in emigration. The Tiflis Guild had about 30 poets and later declared itself acmeist, whereupon some members left.