Imaginism (Russian)

Imaginism was a Russian poetry movement founded in Moscow in 1918 by Anatoly Mariengof, Vadim Shershenevich and, most famously, Sergei Yesenin, holding that the poetic image, rather than sound, meaning or content, is poetry's essential building block, and that a poem is best understood as a chain of vivid, often startling images loosely strung together. Distinct from the earlier English-language Imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, with which it shares only a name and a general interest in the image, Russian Imaginism produced its own manifesto and a body of deliberately provocative, often bohemian poetry, most enduringly in Yesenin's lyric verse of village life, love and personal turmoil. The movement dissolved by the mid-1920s amid internal splits and the tightening Soviet cultural climate, and Yesenin's suicide in 1925 is often treated as effectively marking its end, though his own poetry has remained widely read and loved in Russia independent of the movement's own short institutional life.