Serapion Brothers
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Serapion Brothers (or Serapion Fraternity, was a group of writers formed in Russia in 1922. The group was named after a novel by 19th Century German romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann called Die Serapions-Brüder (1819-1821). Its members included Nikolai Tikhonov, Veniamin Kaverin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Victor Shklovsky, Vsevolod Ivanov and Konstantin Fedin.
Leon Trotsky and the Serapion Fraternity
The Fraternity are perhaps best known through the brief analysis of them by Leon Trotsky in the second chapter of his Literature and Revolution (1924). Trotsky characterises the group as young and naive; he is not sure what might be said about their coming maturity. He writes that they 'were impossible without the Revolution, either as a group, or separately.' He repudiated their claimed political neutrality 'As if an artist ever could be "without a tendency", without a definite relation to social life, even though unformulated or unexpressed in political terms. It is true, that the majority of artists form their relation to life and to its social forms during organic periods, in an unnoticeable and molecular way and almost without the participation of critical reason.' But, only two years after their foundation, he admitted that his analysis was hardly likely to be definitive: 'Why do we relegate them to being "fellow-travelers" of ours? Because they are bound up with the Revolution, because this tie is still very unformed, because they are so very young and because nothing definite can be said about their tomorrow.'
