Became the ‘Avvakumites ’ of Leningrad.

The first post-World War II generation of Soviet Russian writers was faced with a crisis of language even more pervasive and serious than the “Crisis of Symbolism ” at the beginning of the 20th century: the level of abstraction and formulaic speech used in public venues had become such that words and phrases could only gesture helplessly in the direction of mysterious meaning. Due to the traditional status of poetry in Russian culture and to various other factors explored in this dissertation, the generation of poets coming of age in the mid-1950s was in a unique position to spearhead a renewal of language. Among those who took up the challenge was a group of four friends in Leningrad: Dmitry Bobyshev, Joseph Brodsky, Anatoly Naiman, and Evgeny Rein. Because of the extreme position this group adopted regarding the use of language, I refer to them in this work not as “Akhmatova’s Orphans”—a term commonly applied to the quartet—but as literary “Avvakumites, ” a name Anna Akhmatova suggested that invokes the history of Archpriest Avvakum, who by rejecting reforms in church ritual founded the Orthodox sect now known as Old Believers. In a similar fashion, the “Avvakumites ” of Leningrad eventually became exemplary for their generation in their creation of an alternative cultural space that simply ignored the demands of Soviet literature, cleaving instead to the much olde