Sergei Gorodetsky

Sergei Gorodetsky co-founded Acmeism and outlived every other member of it by decades. He was the son of a St Petersburg official and made his name at twenty-two with Yar, a collection drawing on Slavic paganism that the Symbolists received as one of their own. In 1912 he and Nikolai Gumilev broke with them and founded the Poets' Guild and the movement they called Acmeism: words used in their ordinary senses, the visible world described precisely, craft valued over mystical suggestion. He wrote the manifesto alongside Gumilev's, and his was the more combative - poetry should stop trying to be a religion. His own verse never matched the argument, and the movement's reputation rests on Akhmatova and Mandelstam rather than on him. He spent the First World War in the Caucasus and wrote about the Armenian massacres he saw there, which is the strongest work he did. Then he accepted the revolution and adapted, wrote agitational verse, translated, and made a long career supplying opera libretti - including a rewritten Glinka in which the tsarist plot was replaced with a patriotic one. Gumilev was shot in 1921, Mandelstam died in transit to Kolyma, Akhmatova was unpublishable for years, and he survived all of it and taught at the Literary Institute. He died in 1967, having lived long enough to see Acmeism become respectable again and to be interviewed about it as its last survivor. Being the compliant one is why he is a footnote in the movement he helped to found, and it is also why there was anyone left to ask.

• Lived: 1884 CE – 1967 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: poet