The revaluation of the literary past was a central preoccupation of the Russian symbolists. Some of these reassessments (Gogol and Dostoevsky in particular come to mind) have remained surprisingly fresh and valid after the passage of more than half a century. It is all the more ironic, then, that for decades the work of the Russian symbolists has been shamefully neglected by the critics. In Russia itself most of these fine poets are hardly mentioned, while a few, such as Blok and Briusov, are presented in such a fashion as to be unrecognizable. Outside Russia there have been valuable contributions to our knowledge of this period (by Mochulsky, Makovsky, Stepun, Tschižewskij, and Setschkarev, as well as Holthusen and other German scholars), but even here there is sometimes undue reliance on doubtful opinions which were formed fifty years ago; Mochulsky, for example, is guilty of this.