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
History of aesthetics before the 20th century refers to Greek philosophers as the earliest source of formal aesthetic considerations. Plato believed in beauty as a "form" in which beautiful objects partake and which causes them to be beautiful. He felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts. Similarly, in the "Metaphysics", Aristotle found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry, and definiteness. From the late 17th to the early 20th century Western aesthetics underwent a slow revolution into what is often called modernism. German and British thinkers emphasized beauty as the key component of art and of the aesthetic experience, and