mainstream, among other, more innovative and experimental literature. Zamyatin became disillusioned with teaching them, and moved on. Yuri Tynyanov and the Serapions Yuri Tynyanov supervised the studies and publications of Serapion Brothers since he met them at the "House of Arts" in St. Petersburg. He supported their soft non-conformism, their quiet opposition to the official Moscow-based Soviet literature. Ironically, many of them ended up making their careers in Moscow, as ranking members of the Union of Soviet Writers. Most members of the Serapion Brothers gradually conformed to official socialist realism. Kornei Chukovsky and the Serapions Kornei Chukovsky was a lecturer at the House of Arts, along with Zamyatin and Tynyanov. The Serapion Brothers attended most of the seminars of all three lecturers, albeit not for a long time. Eventually some members of the "Serapion Brothers" had followed Chukovsky in Moscow. There they continued their careers under his wing, and became established within the official Soviet socialist realism. His daughter Lydia Chukovskaya and Evgenia Lunts, sister of Lev Lunts, were best friends at school until the Lunts family moved to Hamburg, where Lunts died in 1924. Leon Trotsky and the Serapion Fraternity Leon Trotsky gave a brief analysis of the Serapion Fraternity in the second chapter of his Literature and Revolution (1924). Trotsky characterises the group as young and naive; he is not sure what might be said about their coming maturity. He writes that they 'were impossible without the Revolution, either as a group, or separately.' He repudiated their claimed political neutrality: 'As if an artist ever could be "without a tendency", without a definite relation to social life, even though unformulated or unexpressed in political terms. It is true, that the majority of artists form their relation to life and to its social forms during organic periods, in an unnoticeable and molecular way and almost without the participation of critical reason.' But, only two years after their foundation, he admitted that his analysis was hardly likely to be definitive: 'Why do we relegate them to being "fellow-travelers" of ours? Because they are bound up with the Revolution, because this tie is still very unformed, because they are so very young and because nothing definite can be said about their tomorrow.' Maxim Gorky and the Serapion Fraternity Most of the members of the Fraternity had no regular income and often were hungry and poorly clothed. They lived as a fraternity