Serapion Brothers

Serapionsbrüder (Russian Серапионовы братья ) was founded on the model of the Berlin Serapionsbrüder by ETA Hoffmann in Petrograd in 1921 literary group.

History

The history of the Serapion Brotherhood begins in the year 1919. Those days the house of the Arts was opened in Petrograd under the aegis of Maxim Gorky. In the literary club of the new facility young authors had the opportunity to meet, readings and discussions, and attend workshops by experienced writers and poets such as Yevgeny Zamyatin and Nikolai Gumilev. In marked by revolution, civil war and political pressure on the artists time this house was one of the centers of the free spiritual life in Petrograd. In this environment, slowly formed the circle of young writers who come up with a German Romantics of the ETA Hoffmann borrowed name " The Serapion Brothers" called. Officially, the group was founded in 1921, and on the first of February this year, the brothers met for the first time. The Serapion brothers Lew Lunz, Nikolai Nikitin, Mikhail Slonimsky, Ilya Gruzdev, Konstantin Fedin, Vsevolod Ivanov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Veniamin Kaverin, Viktor Shklovsky, Nikolai Radishchev, Vladimir Pozner, Nikolai Tikhonov and Elizabeth Polonskaja. Shklovsky and Gruzdev were literary critic, Tikhonov, Radishchev and Polonskaja, the only Serapion sister, wrote poetry, and the remaining members were prose writers and publicists. The admission of new members was stopped almost simultaneously with the foundation. Many other authors who were close to the Serapion in spirit or as real friends were allowed to attend regular meetings, however, and also have a say. The group had no official offices and no statutes, although meeting minutes have been posted. Often the brothers met in private, mostly in the small room of Slonimsky on Nevsky Prospekt, where the authors presented their works and exchanged views about it. Most members of the group were still very young and lived on the financial support by Maxim Gorky, who patronized the group, although the Serapionen kept the realistic fiction for survived and thus also featured the work of their patron in question.

Literature of Serapionsbrüder

The aim of the Serapion Brothers was the creation of a separate narrative prose, which they regarded as a rejection of the realism of thought of the 19th century. For it was the architecture, the form of storytelling in the foreground, which should form a complex optical system. It was typical for a semantically shifted narrative language and a strong emphasis on storytelling with intricate plot structure and original jumps. This was accompanied by a new formal critique of the prose, which was established by the formalists in the Society for the Study of poetic language ( OPOJAS ). The writers made ​​use of the abundant resources of humor, the fantastic and the grotesque. Basis of her artistic work was the desire to free expression and the passionate interest in stylistic and formal elements. They demanded a right of the poet to his inventiveness and imagination and invented almost with devotion variety of new techniques and tricks; writing they regarded as a craft.

Viktor Schlowski outlining its aesthetics as:

" Psychology is lagging behind, analyzes are abolished, the heroes keep each other no speeches, often even missing intentionally the motivation for their actions, because in the context of having " motivation " overloaded Russian literature an action is especially clear when it directly holds a more follows - the activities are linked only by the dynamics of the narrative. "

The young writer felt quite connected with the revolution. " None of us are against the revolution ," said Shklovsky. But you wanted to not patronize her and be exploited. Zoshchenko said he was neither a monarchist nor a communist, but a "simple Russian". "We have called Serapionsbrüder because we resist the compulsion and the limitations and because we are against that one should write like the others," Lunz said in the so-called manifesto " Why are we Serapionsbrüder ". Every work of art has its own life and should not reflect the current debate in society, because an artist is not a seismograph of the society, Nikitin underlined ibid. Some of the Serapionsbrüder like Tikhonov and Ivanov and those who were influenced by them as Leonov and Pavlenko were even followers of the revolution. They sat down on the idea of ​​revolution also quite personally served in the Red Army, and wanted to participate in the creation of a classless society. They shared the goals of the Communist Party, but were not party members. Often, revolution and civil war were used as subjects for stories, novels and dramas. Later, some of the Serapionsbürder had to admit that a detached from politics artistic creation is not possible and arranged in a certain sense with the power and whose claims to the artists. Nikolai Nikitin, for example, could not resist the over the years ever-increasing pressure, trying to adapt to the spirit of socialist realism but lost by his style and is finally descended literary. Quite different mastered Veniamin Kaverin the situation, as was demanded by the writers that they provided heroic splendor ham. Kaverin filled them without losing his artistic dignity, he wrote the classic of Soviet literature Two Captains.

How Lunz said the authors of the group were very different in their artistic work and their views on literature and its criticism. Lew Lunz, one of the most talented writers of the group, could not realize his creative plans, for he died at the age of 23 years in Hamburg. From him only a few short stories and four plays published. Utopia, satire and fantasy were among the most popular means of Lunz. In a pointed form, this happens for example in the story Send Letter No. 37, in the head of a State Chancellery is transformed through self-hypnosis in an official document to which the bureaucratic operation icon. Actually, each of the Serapion Brothers played his special role Fedin went into the renovation of the novel ahead and continued the realistic tradition, led as a humorist and satirist Zoscenko continues the tradition of Zamjatin. Some, like Lunz and Fedin were based on the Western literature, with its clear subject and thrilling plot structure, others, like Ivanov and Nikitin tended the national tradition and turned rather to the east.

End of the group

After the Serapionsbrüder could publish some works, it went - even the circumstances of the time owed ​​- with the group after a few years of decline. At an anniversary event in February 1926, not all brothers came together. The attempt to revive the group in 1929, failed.