Serapion Brothers

The Serapion Brothers (or Serapion Fraternity, Russian: Серапионовы Братья) was a group of writers formed in Petrograd, Russia in 1921. The group was named after a literary group, Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brethren), to which German romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann belonged and after which he named a collection of his tales. 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 February 1, 1921, and "as long as their headquarters remained in the House of Arts, met regularly every Saturday."

The group eventually split: some of them moved to Moscow and became official Soviet writers, while others, like Zoshchenko, remained in Petrograd (Leningrad), or emigrated from the Soviet Russia. Hongor Oulanoff wrote, "The Serapion Brothers did not found a literary school. In fact - as it appears from the Serapion 'Manifesto' and from Fedin's words - the Brotherhood did not even intend to found one."