Page:Modern Russian Poetry.djvu/181



The story goes that at the beginning of his poetic career Severyanin took his constitutional on the Nevsky Prospekt wearing a yellow shirtwaist, with green roses painted on his cheeks. He enjoys the distinction of having founded the ego-futurist group in Petrograd, which opposed the cubo-futurist group in Moscow. He later betrayed the coterie, but remained faithful to its canons of sound against sense. His insistence on neologisms and words created ex nihilo has produced a style which is becoming a poetic idiom. Yet a genuine musical quality saves some of his intolerably clownish and vacuous verse. His first book, "The Thunder-Seething Cup," was published in 1913 and ran into seven editions in two years, and he has now some ten volumes to his credit. His poetry recitals have diverted both Czarist and Bolshevist Russia.