Igor Severyanin

Mirsky, "the moment came when vulgarity claimed a place on Parnassus and issued its declaration of rights in the verse of Igor Severyanin".

That year, Severyanin (his pen name means "Northerner" in Russian) brought out a collection entitled The Cup of Thunder (Громокипящий кубок), with a preface written by Fyodor Sologub.

The poet "captured the popular imagination and reached stardom with his slick pomaded hair parted in the middle; his melancholy, darkly circled eyes; his impeccable tails; and an ever-present lily in his hands".

[1] Severyanin's poems treated such extraordinary themes as "ice cream of lilacs" and "pineapples in champagne", intending to overwhelm the bourgeois audience with a riot of colors and glamour associated by them with high society.

After the Soviet occupation of Estonia, 1940 Severyanin continued literary activities, and later died of a heart attack in the German occupied Tallinn in 1941.