In Petersburg there appeared a whole group of young novelists who
formed a sort of professional and amicable confraternity and called
themselves the "Serapion Brothers." They were all influenced by
Remizov; they were taught (in the very precise sense of the word--
they had regular classes) by Zamyatin; and explained the general
principles of Art by the gifted and light-minded young "formalist"
critic, Victor Shklovsky. Other writers emerged in all ends of
Russia, all of them more or less obssessed by the dazzling models of
Bely and Remizov.

All the writers of this new school have many features in common. They
are all of them more interested in Manner than in Matter. They work
at their style assiduously and fastidiously. They use an indirect
method of narrating by aid of symbolic detail and suggestive
metaphor. This makes their stories obscure and not easy to grasp at
first reading. Their language is elaborate; it is as full as possible
of unusual provincial words, or permeated with slang. It is coarse
and crude and many a page of their writings would not have been
tolerated by the editor of a pre-Revolution Russian magazine, not to
speak of an English publisher. They choose their subjects from the
Revolution and the Civil War. They are all fascinated by the
"elemental" greatness of the events, and are in a way the bards of
the Revolution. But their "Revolutionism" is purely aesthetical and
is conspicuously empty of ideas. Most of their stories appear on the
pages of official Soviet publications, but they are regarded with
rather natural mistrust by the official Bolshevik critics, who draw
attention to the essentially uncivic character of their art.

The exaggerated elaborateness and research of their works makes all
these writers practically untranslatable; not that many of them are