Russian avant-gardes

Between 1900 and 1930, Saint Petersburg and Moscow produced in thirty years as many schools as the rest of Europe: symbolists, acmeists, futurists, imaginists, each with its review and its manifesto. Mayakovsky shouted his verse in factories, Khlebnikov invented a language from before words, Blok marched twelve Red Guards through the snow with Christ at their head. The revolution first gave these poets platforms, then broke them: Mandelstam died in transit, Akhmatova wrote her Requiem outside the prisons of Leningrad.

works 8

• PoetrySilentium!Fyodor Tyutchev · 1833Eighteen lines published in 1833, in which a poet commands silence to anyone who would speak themselves, and gives his reasons.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryA Cloud in TrousersОблако в штанахVladimir Mayakovsky · 1915A long poem of 1915: a woman's refusal turns into revolt against art, society and God.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelPetersburgПетербургAndrei Bely · 1916A novel of 1916: in St Petersburg, in October 1905, a student receives a bomb meant for his father, a senior official.Literature
• PoetryThe TwelveДвенадцатьAlexander Blok · 1918A poem of 1918 about a patrol of twelve Red Guards in revolutionary Petrograd.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryTristiaOsip Mandelstam · 1922Collection of 1922 in which Rome, Greece, the exiled Latin poet and the Petersburg of the revolutionary years answer one another.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryZangeziЗангезиVelimir Khlebnikov · 1922A dramatic poem in twenty planes, published in 1922 a few weeks after the death of its author.Literature
• NovelDoctor ZhivagoДоктор ЖивагоBoris Pasternak · 1957A novel completed in 1955: a poet-physician swept away, with those he loves, by war, revolution and their aftermath.Literature
• PoetryRequiemРеквиемAnna Akhmatova · 1963A cycle of poems written mostly during the Great Terror, and first published in 1963, in Munich.Literature