Page:Modern Russian Poetry.djvu/25

Rh Futurism showed no great vitality, and would probably have shared the fate of a fashion, were it not for the revolution. Its unabashed iconoclasm, its plebeian exuberance, may account for its recent vogue. Its mannerisms are noticeable in the work of men who do not strictly adhere to the coterie, such as Oreshin and Marienhof.

It is worth noting that the literature of the revolution is chiefly verse. The surviving representatives of classicism and symbolism, with the possible exception of Andrey Bely, continue their work without developing it. In addition to them and to the irruption of the futurists, there are the peasant poets, headed by Kluyev, and a large body of workman poets. The revolution has extended the class principle to æsthetics and takes special pains to promote the literary expression of the masses. Yet proletarian verse is by no means a new phenomenon in Russia. From 1908 to 1915 fifty volumes of such verse found their way to publication. The crudity and naïveté of the workmen's poetry produced since the revolution is redeemed by a hard-handed grasp on reality. The return to realism is the promise of a new development in Russian poetry. Like all living things, poetry endures only through change.