“... do. Ilya Zbarsky’s poignant, laconic memoir is partly an account of how his opportunist father Boris came to head the laboratory responsible for keeping Lenin’s body in perfect condition. It is also an account of the fate of Soviet science under Stalin and his successors. The stories run in parallel. What comes across strongly in the book, written with ...”

“... scepticism a dangerous deviation to the Right. Silence, rather than acquiescence, was what saved Boris Pasternak. Being outspoken or indiscreet, more than being relevant, was what lost Osip Mandelstam. Padilla, who had lived in Moscow, chose to be both poets at the same time. He could write a poem deriding Fidel Castro and keep it quiet, playing a safe ...”

“... place where Scriabin (to whose museum Stravinsky made a pilgrimage in 1962), Kandinsky, Malevich, Pasternak and Mayakovsky lived. After the Revolution, ‘it became the Soviet capital, the cultural centre of the state, a city of modernity and of the new industrial society the Bolsheviks wanted to build.’ Tatlin designed a monument, never built, to express ...”

“... Jews, he had been particularly loyal to the regime throughout the war and the purges, and unlike Pasternak and the Mandelstams, he had spoken its language and known it from within. He strikes one, ironically, as a native member of the Nomenklatura, just as Tolstoy was a native of the aristocracy: both have the common touch, in the particular sense of ...”

“... generally remained – Bunin, Aldanov, Nabokov were the exceptions, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak the rule; not to speak of those who sided with the revolution (Platonov, Babel, Mayakovsky) – the human sciences were badly affected. Of those who stayed, the Formalists and their kin survived best: Shklovsky, Tynyanov, Eikhenbaum; Voloshinov and ...”