Abstract

Its script resembles Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-AidAcid Test. A countercultural commune, engaged in a desultory and obscurely antisocial search for forms of altered consciousness, ostentatiously celebrates its marginality through a series of minor and largely ineffectual scandals. Boris Poplavskii's Apollon Bezobrazov describes one of interwar Paris's lost generations, young Russian emigres who possessed only a schoolboy's knowledge of their native culture and a still uninformed-and unformed-fascination with France.' Poplavskii belonged to this class of exiles, and understood that marginal literacy and the possibility of bicultural confusion posed a special threat to the emergent Russian writers of his time. At the fore of the Paris emigration stood the luminaries of Silver Age Russia. In the 1920s, Merezhkovskii, Gippius, Bunin, Balmont, Zaitsev, and Berdiaev effectively made Russian Paris the literary peer of Moscow and Petrograd. Their aesthetic already mature, these artists pursued successful writing careers in France, and a few, like Teffi, Khodasevich and Remizov, produced their best work in exile. The next generation was stillborn. Names like Antonin Ladinskii and Anna Prismanova survive as footnotes to the history of Russian literature, or-in the case of Vladimir Varshavskii or Iurii Terapiano-are chiefly associated with important memoirs of the period. Between the two generations there was much socializing but little productive contact. Zinaida Gippius's Zelenaia Lampa (Green Lamp) gatherings, begun in 1926, largely offered the younger writers a chance to observe the quarrels of their elders, and the Kochev'e (Nomad Camp) group, founded by Marc Slonim in 1928 as a young writers' reaction to the hegemony of Zelenaia Lampa, was initially snubbed by the older generation. Nikolai Otsup's journal Chisla (Numbers), inaugurated in 1930, was the first periodical to publish the work of both groups, but until the founding of Krug (the Circle) in 1935, the year of Poplavskii's death, the Paris

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