Ksenia

Xenia ( Greek: ξένια "gifts to guests", singular ξένιον from ξένος "guest") - in ancient and new European poetry, short humorous or complimentary poems addressed to any persons.

The word "Xenia" ( dr. Greek Ξένια , lat. Xenia ) was headed by the Roman poet Martial (I century BC.) XIII-th book of his "Epigrams". This book contained short feast poems in elegiac distichs , written as an accompaniment to his various gifts and foods for friends and guests - with praise or censure of gifts.

Goethe used this Martial name in an ironic sense for the epigrams that he composed with Schiller . In addition to the name, the size of Martial was taken as a sample: the size of xenia is German elegiac distich. In epigrams, poets ridiculed literary opponents, the state of then-German literature as a whole, and also generally the phenomena of the then German life, to which the authors reacted negatively. A total of 414 xenia were created, however, the authorship of Goethe and Schiller for each of these epigrams is not obvious, their correspondence is the main source of its establishment. The first “Xenia” were published by Schiller in his “Almanac of Muses for the Year 1797” ( German: “Musenalmanach für 1797” ). Goethe later publishes a collection of rhymed epigrams called Meek Xenia ( German: Zahme Xenien , 1820 ).

Karl Immermann chose the designation "Xenia" for his polemical epigrams directed against literary opponents. Heine published his xenia in 1827 as an appendix to the second part of Travel Pictures.

Later, Yaroslav Ivashkevich had a collection of “Xenia and Elegy”, a book of poems “Xenia” was written by Arkady Dragomoshchenko .