Society and culture in Saint Petersburg to St. Petersburg to haunt other characters as well as other fantastical elements, creating a surreal and abstract image of St. Petersburg. 20th-century writers from St. Petersburg, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Andrey Bely, Yevgeny Zamyatin with his apprentices Serapion Brothers created entire new styles in literature and contributed new insights in the understanding of society through their experience in this city. Anna Akhmatova became important leader for Russian poetry. Her poem "Requiem", focuses on the tragedies of living during the time of the Stalinist terror. Another notable 20th-century writer from St. Petersburg is Joseph Brodsky, recipient of the Nobel Prize
20th-century music gestures and formlessness of late Romanticism which revived the balanced forms and clearly perceptible thematic processes of earlier styles. There were three distinct "schools" of neoclassicism, associated with Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and Arnold Schoenberg. Similar sympathies in the second half of the century are generally subsumed under the heading "postmodernism". A compositional tradition arose in the mid-20th century—particularly in North America—called "experimental music". Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage (1912–1992). According to Cage, "an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen", and he was specifically interested in completed works that performed an