were still taking an active part in literary life. The conditions of émigré life in this second stage present special difficulties for beginning writers, for example, Gaito Gazdanov, Iurii Fel'zen, and Vladimir Nabokov, all of whom became adults in Europe. As discussed above, émigré critics were troubled by the weakened ties with the Russian language and the Russian literary tradition that came about in the absence of any dialogue with Russia since the late 1920s. It was during this period that

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... the Russian diaspora forged valuable contacts with contemporary European literature and culture, French in particular-contacts that would reanimate the literary discourse within the Russian emigration. As Gleb Struve writes, "The flourishing of émigré literature coincided, as strange as it may seem, with the time of the most embittered arguments about its very existence and purpose." 1 The journal Chisla (Numbers), the organ of the younger generation of writers that promised to change the emigration's conservative attitude toward contemporary literature, began taking an active part in these debates in 1930. The journal's artistic design and format recalled the prerevolutionary journal Apollon, which obliged the new publication to strive 1 G. P. Struve, Russkaia literatura v izgnanii, 199.