The Serapion Brothers (or Serapion Fraternity, ) was a group of writers formed in Petrograd, Russian SFSR 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." Yevgeni Zamyatin and the Serapion Brothers Yevgeni Zamyatin became associated with the Serapion Brothers in 1921, when he was appointed lecturer of the "House of Arts" (Dom Iskusstv) where the members of the Serapion Brothers studied and lived. The institute was located at a prestigious building on Nevsky Prospect in the former Palace of the St. Petersburg Governor. Writers, including the Serapions, had occupied the wing of the palace from Nevsky along the Moika river embankment. That location had originally inspired the phrase "Dom na naberezhnoi" (House on the embankment). 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. At that time, Zamyatin fearlessly criticized the Soviet policy of Red Terror. He had already completed We and worked as an editor with Maxim Gorky on the "World Literature" project. Shklovsky and Kaverin described Zamyatin's lectures as provocative and stimulating. However, Zamyatin's famous statement that "True literature can be created only by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics" was largely misunderstood. The Serapion Brothers remained neutral, withdrawn and eventually became