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xiv beauty more. What defined the isolation of these poets was the fact that they belonged to the conservative camp.

Foeth developed a great lyrical activity toward the close of his life, in the eighties. Those were years of social stagnation and prolific, pale poetry. It was only in the next decade, when the Yellow Book was blooming on London bookstalls and the sunflowers on London lapels, that the first signs of a literary, and primarily lyric revival showed themselves in Russia. It was preceded by proclamations, somewhat like a king who is not too sure of his welcome. The vanguard of theorists included Volynsky, Minsky and Merezhkovsky. Here, reversing the natural order, poetics came before poetry. The champions of modernism revolted against the traditional subservience of literature to social progress. They asserted the autonomy and primacy of art, and offered the milk of mysticism to the soul starved on positivist fare. Above all they preached an individualism, whose watchword was Fais ce que tu voldras, and which took to its heart Stirner's anarchy and Nietzsche's a-moralism.

Balmont, Brusov and Sologub were the leading poets who initiated the practice of what Minsky and Merezhkovsky had been preaching, and who founded a school, in the loose sense of the term. This was the symbolist, or as some prefer to call it, neo-romantic school. They were clearly inspired by foreign models, and many declared the whole new poetry a warmed-over French dish. Yet the spontaneous and indigenous character of the movement is now beyond question, its studied eccentricity notwithstanding. It was only for a short time that it showed the earmarks of western décadence, although its