The writer Sergei Gorodetsky is noted for working in diverse genres: poetry, prose, translation, drama, criticism, and memoirs. His widespread popularity, however, is associated with a short period in the latter half of the 1910s; thereafter it began to diminish. Yet, Russian poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century would be impossible to imagine without Gorodetsky's early books.

Sergei Mitrofanovich Gorodetsky was born 5 January 1884 in St. Petersburg. In 1893, when Gorodetsky was nine, his father, Mitrofan Ivanovich Gorodetsky, a writer and high-level bureaucrat, died of tuberculosis. Afterward the family--Gorodetsky's mother and her five children--fell into poverty. Two of Gorodetsky's brothers, Boris and Aleksandr, later attained a degree of fame: the former became an ethnographer and bibliographer, while the latter became an artist and amateur poet, participating in the first volume of the Futurist miscellany Sadok sudei (A Hatchery for Judges). Aleksandr suffered from mental illness and died at...