In the last years of his life, from 1898 to 1904, the chamberlain of His Imperial Majesty's court, chamberlain, and editor-in-chief of the Government Bulletin, Konstantin Konstantinovich Sluchevsky, gathered young poets on Fridays. Among them were Merezhkovsky, Gippius, Bryusov, Balmont, Sologub, Fofanov, Minsky and many others. Translator and poet Friedrich Fiedler described Sluchevsky's apartment in detail in his diary. He was impressed by the abundance of antiques and called it an "antique museum". Konstantin Konstantinovich was a member of the Society of Antiquities Lovers (Fiedler Friedrich. Aus der Literatenwelt: Charakterzuge und Urteile: Tagebuch. Gottingen. 1996. S. 246). Despite the fact that the 62-year-old Sluchevsky was declared the "king of Russian poets", and his Fridays-the " Academy of Verse "(Bryusov V. Ya. Diaries 1891-1910. Moscow, 1927. p. 54), for Fiedler and other visitors to Fridays, the owner himself, the poet-chamberlain, was, in general, part of its antique collection, representative of a different era. This seemingly strange rapprochement between the modernists and the privy councilor, who had been writing poetry since 1858, demonstrates Sluchevsky's unique role in the history of Russian literature and his unquestionable influence on subsequent generations of Russian poets. The young D. Merezhkovsky wrote in 1892 that the characteristic feature of "future ideal poetry" is "greed for the untried, the pursuit of elusive shades, for the dark and unconscious in our sensitivity", and stated "three main elements of the new art: mystical content, symbols and expansion of artistic expressiveness" (Merezhkovsky D. S. On the causes of decline and new trends in modern Russian literature / / L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Eternal Satellites, Moscow, 1995, p. 536). It was in the 90-ies that the popularity of Sluchevsky's poetry increased, in which the character of- page 17 These three elements of" new art " have been present since the 60s. His first poems ... Read more