(Gr. acme, “utmost,” “a pinnacle of”). A school in modern Rus. poetry. In 1910, A. Akhmatova, S. Gorodetskij, N. Gumilëv, M. Kuzmin, and O. Mandelstam—a group of young Rus. poets gathered about the magazine Apollon —set out to chart a new course in Rus. verse writing. The acmeists spurned the esoteric vagueness of symbolism (q.v.), which then dominated the Rus. literary scene, with its vaunted “spirit of music,” i.e. the tendency to achieve maximum emotional suggestiveness at the expense of lucidity and sensory vividness. They strove instead for “Apollonian” clarity, for graphic sharpness of outline, and sought to convey the texture of things rather than their inner soul. To the acmeist, the poet was not a seer or a prophet but a craftsman (hence the name of the principal literary association of the acmeists, the “Guild of Poets”). These tenets found expression in the semantically dense and phonically saturated poetry of Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), which combines classical themes with “modern” compactness of imagery, and in the sparse, intimate verse of Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), one of modern Russia’s finest lyric poets. Nikolay Gumilëv (1886-1921), who, as a leading theorist of the school, preached neoclassicism, often tended in his own poetry toward the flamboyantly exotic and romantic. A. produced much distinguished poetry, but as a literary movement it proved short-lived. Efforts to revive it after the Revolution were hindered by Gumilëv’s tragic death in 1921 and by the unhospitable cultural climate, with the official Soviet critics accusing the acmeists of aloofness from social problems and the bulk of the literary avant-garde scorning their alleged aesthetic conservatism. Mandelstam’s complex poetic evolution led him well beyond the confines of the initial acmeist poetics of lucidity and precision. Nevertheless, all the surviving members of the acmeist group, with the exception of Gorodetsky, persisted in calling themselves acmeists even as they sought to reinterpret a. as a distinctive moral and cultural stance
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