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“... When​ Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930, some Soviet writers interpreted it as an act of protest: stifled by political censorship, he couldn’t go on. In the decades since, the suicide of the great poet of the Revolution has been seen as the Soviet Union’s point of no return. This is the view taken by the Swedish scholar Bengt Jangfeldt in this biography, the first significant non-Soviet Life of the poet: ‘The bullet that penetrated Vladimir Mayakovsky’s heart also shot to pieces the dream of communism and signalled the beginning of the communist nightmare of the 1930s ...”

“... It also takes in significant but less well-known figures, such as the formidable critic Vladimir Stasov, whose efforts did a great deal to shape the cultural scene. The portraits are drawn from the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the first museum dedicated to Russian art, amassed by the wealthy merchant collector Pavel ...”

“... write nihil on anything that has been done before,’ declaimed the Bolshevik poet-enthusiast Vladimir Mayakovsky. As to the fate of this urge, Gay accepts the more or less standard view that Modernism lost its momentum and inspiration as it was absorbed into the mainstream. When modern art could be found in the corridors of power, when theatre of ...”

“... 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 these ...”

“... In Vladimir Sorokin’s novel The Queue, one of the protagonists is struggling with a crossword: ‘1 Across – Russian Soviet writer.’ Suggestions come from people next to him in the long line that is the book’s setting and subject – Sholokhov, Mayakovsky? – but are rejected, because neither fits both adjectives at the same time ...”

“... public statement which would have been expected from the other novel. Stichomythia run wild, Vladimir Sorokin’s The Queue consists solely of one-line exchanges between members of a queue – the longest in Moscow – which, some two thousand strong, winds its way up and down the alleys and streets of a suburban district in pursuit of some ...”

“... and Lenin jokes, taking it as an indication of the kinship between the Lenin and Pushkin cults. Mayakovsky, in Vladimir Ilich Lenin, written soon after Lenin’s death, begins by expressing his fear lest      processions and mausoleums an established statute of devotions should cover with sickly-sweet unction ...”

“... of employment, designed in part to cut the huge cost of the theatrical army. The business manager, Vladimir Kokonin, defeated him in a fashion unthinkable in Soviet times. ‘People are going to have to start justifying their salaries,’ Kokonin announced. ‘We don’t want time-serving civil service types.’ Grigorovich has gone with dignity: not so Oleg ...”

“... that the ‘ “majority” should not cross the threshold of poetry’. He could never say, in Mayakovsky’s words, ‘the more poets – good ones and varied – the better.’ He strongly objected to ‘a multiplicity of people working in art’, because this inhibited ‘the emergence of someone ... who will redeem their plurality with his ...”

“... and crime. Mikhail Gernet, an academic who had taught at Moscow University and worked at Vladimir Bekhterev’s Psychoneurological Institute before the Revolution, was the leading figure here. Like Leibovich, he seems to have been neither a Marxist nor a Party member, but his career prospered under the Soviet regime: he helped found the State ...”

“... of Sheremetievo airport and the ring-mail burnished rust of the ceiling’s empty pilchard tins. Vladimir Stabnikov is waiting for us. I have met him before, in England and in the Soviet Union. Small, thick-set, black-eyed, densely-bearded, restlessly rubbing his hands, inexplicably powerful, grinning indefatigably, he wafts our party into the VIP ...”

“... a treble clef. ‘I am not a man, but a cloud in trousers,’ Balanchine would often say, quoting Mayakovsky. ‘Sometimes I would like to be one of the sounds created by Tchaikovsky,’ Ivanova once wrote, ‘so that sounding softly and sadly, I could dissolve in the evening mist.’ Affinity is a kind of lyricism, fluid, intangible – the cloud in ...”

“... had disappointed them.’ Many people didn’t even bother to sell them. ‘Volumes of Gorky and Mayakovsky piled up in the dumpsters. People would drop the complete works of Lenin off at the paper recycling centre.’ For people who still identified with Soviet values, it was an agonising time. ‘I’ve fallen behind,’ one woman said, invoking the old ...”

“... 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 Bakhtin; Propp. Political science, sociology, economics, literary history were another ...”