Most studies of the lyric sequence (or “cycle,” as it is most commonly referred to in the Russian critical tradition) situate its origins in the Romantic period, and its period of greatest flowering in the Silver Age. More and more frequently, however, scholars have come to question this assumption, suggesting that the phenomenon has its roots in the eighteenth century, perhaps even earlier. This claim would appear, at first glance, to be suspect. The aesthetics of neoclassicism did not encourage— indeed, to the best of our knowledge, did not even recognize—the production of lyric sequences. Russian poets of the eighteenth century have nothing to say about them, nor are they acknowledged as such by readers or critics.