Mikhail Kuzmin - Legacy

Legacy

Contemporary poet and critic Alexei Purin thinks the openly "tragic," socially oriented tradition of Russian literature has been exhausted and it needed to reorient itself along the more personal and artistic tradition exemplified by Kuzmin and Vladimir Nabokov. He quotes Innokenty Annensky as saying it was important to avoid "the persistent embrace of the 'like everyone'" and writes: "It is precisely the poetry of Annensky and Kuzmin that at the beginning of the twentieth century took the first and decisive step away from this 'like everyone' — in the direction of psychologically interpreted details and the everyday word, in the direction of living intonation — a step to be compared, perhaps, only with the Pushkin revolution. All succeeding Russian lyric poetry is unimaginable without it."

Mandelstam, in his 1916 review "On Contemporary Poetry," wrote:

Kuzmin's classicism is captivating. How sweet it is to read a classical poet living in our midst, to experience a Goethean blend of "form" and "content," to be persuaded that the soul is not a substance made of metaphysical cotton, but rather the carefree, gentle Psyche. Kuzmin's poems not only lend themselves easily to memorization, but also to recall, as it were (the impression of recollection after the very first reading), and they float up to the surface as if out of oblivion (Classicism)...

And in his essay "A Letter about Russian Poetry" (1922), he said "Kuzmin brought dissident songs from the Volga shores, an Italian comedy from his own native Rome, and the entire history of European culture insofar as it had become music—from Giorgione's "Concert" at the Pitti Palace to the most recent tone poems of Debussy."