[1] Although the Silver Age may be said to have truly begun with the appearance of Alexander Blok's "Verses about the Beautiful Lady", many scholars have extended its chronological framework to include the works of the 1890s, starting with Nikolai Minsky's manifesto "With the light of conscience" (1890), Dmitri Merezhkovsky's treatise "About the reasons for the decline of contemporary Russian literature" (1893), Valery Bryusov's almanac "Russian symbolists" (1894), and poetry by Konstantin Balmont and Mirra Lokhvitskaya.
Realistic portrayal of life did not satisfy authors any longer, and their argument with the classics of the 19th century generated a bundle of new literary movements.
The poetic careers of Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Osip Mandelshtam, all of them spanning many decades, were also launched during that period.
Blok's death and Nikolai Gumilev's execution in 1921, as well as the appearance of the highly influential Pasternak collection, My Sister is Life (1922), marked the end of the era.
The Silver Age was nostalgically looked back to by émigré poets, led by Georgy Ivanov in Paris and Vladislav Khodasevich in Berlin.