Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/191

183 the Symbolist "world beyond" has clearly turned into the vision of a communist future heaven on earth. The believers in a religious, celestial heaven, after a series of adventures, realize their mistake. They see


 * that they had been wrong to condemn the earth: washed by revolution and dried with the heat of new suns, it appears to them in a dazzling brightness, in which only we can see life, we, who beyond all the terrors of the day can clearly sense another, marvellous existence.

Several of the Symbolists—-among them Blok, Bely and Bryusov-—were quick to support the new Bolshevik government. For Bely, and particularly for Blok, this was a painful and in a sense suicidal surrender to the "sounds of Revolution". But the fact that this surrender could be made at all shows that the Acmeists were–—from a non-communist standpoint––correct to have drawn back earlier from the "logic" of many of the Symbolists' positions. Acmeism reacted against Symbolism in an opposite direction to Khlebnikov and the Futurists. While Khlebnikov's criticism was that the Symbolists had fallen short of their own promises, Mandel'stam's was that they had made such promises in the first place. Mandel'stam's The Morning of Acmeism was not officially accepted as his movement's manifesto, but it expressed brilliantly the 'political' impulse of Acmeism. Mandel'stam praised the Middle Ages


 * because they possessed to a high degree the feeling of boundary and partition. They never mixed various levels, and they treated the beyond with huge restraint.

The author's promise was that his movement would accept the