Innokenty Annensky ran out of time. His first collection of poems, Quiet Songs, appeared in 1904, under a pseudonym, when he was fifty. His second, The Cypress Chest, came out posthumously, in 1910. He died on the steps of the Tsarskoye Selo railway station, his heart giving out.
He was born in Omsk in 1855. A classical philologist, director of the gymnasium at Tsarskoye Selo, he translated Euripides — every one of the tragedies — into Russian. That was his great official labor.
The poems were another matter entirely: impressionism, pain, objects as bearers of mood. Akhmatova called him her teacher; so did Pasternak. He was a symbolist who stood between two epochs.
"Among the Worlds," "The Bow and the Strings," "The Old Barrel Organ" — things that do not age.