Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures is the first book-length study of the aesthetic similarities between the French Parnassians, a 19th-century group of poets led by Th ophile Gautier, and the Russian Acmeist poets, including Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, who were active in the second decade of the 20th century. The Acmeists shared with the Parnassians a classical sensibility, an aspiration to state-of-the-art verbal craftsmanship, and...