Scorpion (publishing house)

[1] Scorpion was founded in 1899 by the philanthropist and translator Sergey A. Polyakov, poets Valery Bryusov and Jurgis Baltrušaitis.

Scorpion's initial agenda was two-fold: to meet the already well-developed demand for the so-called 'decadent' brand of literature and to form its own readership, interested in the "new art" of Russian modernism.

The first foreign book published by Scorpion in March 1900, was Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken, translated by Polyakov and Baltrušaitis.

Closely associated with Scorpion were miriskussniki Léon Bakst and Konstantin Somov, as well as Victor Borisov-Musatov, Modest Durnov and Nikolai Feofilaktov, among others.

Scorpion, which had neither commercial success nor any academic background, proved to be instrumental in uniting the Russian symbolists into one single movement.