Serapion Brothers

Its members included Nikolai Tikhonov, Veniamin Kaverin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Victor Shklovsky, Vsevolod Ivanov, Elizaveta Polonskaya, Ilya Gruzdev, Mikhail Slonimsky, Lev Lunts, Vladimir Pozner, Nikolay Nikitin and Konstantin Fedin.

The group formed during their studies at the seminars of Yuri Tynyanov, Yevgeni Zamyatin (whose 1922 essay "The Serapion Brethren" gives insight into the early style of several members), and Korney Chukovsky and the Petrogradsky Dom Iskusstv (Petrograd House of Arts).

The group was officially organized at its first meeting on 1 February 1921, and "as long as their headquarters remained in the House of Arts, met regularly every Saturday.

Zamyatin and other writers lived there as a small community of intellectuals, as their lifestyle and artistic atmosphere was later described in their memoirs and letters.

However, Zamyatin's famous statement that "True literature can be created only by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics" was largely misunderstood.

Yuri Tynyanov supervised the studies and publications of Serapion Brothers since he met them at the "House of Arts" in St. Petersburg.

They lived as a fraternity commune in a nationalized former palace in Petrograd and used among other sources the financial support of Maxim Gorky, even though the group considered the realistic novel and the style of socialist realism to be outdated and therefore called the works of their benefactor into question.