Mayakovsky poems in english
- •
An Insatiable Thief in his Soul: Mayakovsky A Biography by Bengt Jangfeldt
On 24 November 1935, five years after the death of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lili Brik – for twenty years his muse, lover, mistress and confidante – wrote a long letter to Josef Stalin. ‘Almost six years have passed since Mayakovsky died’, she wrote.
[H]e has no successor, but was and remains the greatest poet of our Revolution… No one is thinking of preserving his memory for future generations. I am not able myself to overcome the lack of interest and the opposition on the part of officialdom, and so after six years I am turning to you, as I see no other possible way of ensuring the Mayakovsky’s enormous revolutionary legacy is taken care of.
As Bengt Jangfeldt writes in Mayakovsky: A Biography, newly translated into English from the Swedish, ‘few letters have played such a decisive role in deciding a poet’s posthumous fate than this one.’ Stalin – not the only dictator to have a past as an amateur poet – scrawled his response in red pen diagonally across the letter. ‘Mayakovsky was and remains the best,
- •
Visual culture and the Moscow Metro
All Articles
James Andrews first rode the Moscow Metro in the 1980s as an undergraduate student studying in the former Soviet Union.
Now after 35 years, the metro is taking him on a new journey: documenting how its iconic public spaces reveal the story of Moscow itself as the city evolved under Joseph Stalin and his Soviet and post-Soviet successors.
This May, Andrews, professor of history, gave a public lecture on his new research project at the Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C. The Kennan Institute is part of the Woodrow Wilson Center, where Andrews was a former senior resident fellow.
James Andrews presents “Narrating the Soviet Metropolis: Visual Culture in the Moscow Metro” at the Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C., on May 17, 2016.
The talk, which has been made available on YouTube, was so well-received that Andrews immediately received an additional invitation to present at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University.
What makes the Moscow Metro a fascinating subject for a
- •
.
.
Description
J.V. Stalin’s life and work are generally treated as a phantasm. Instead of going back and looking at the trajectory of his history-making personality in its full development, through the Great October Socialist Revolution, the industrialization and collectivization, his succession of Lenin, the Great Patriotic War, the postwar reconstruction, etc., many self-styled experts who, in fact, know nothing about J.V. Stalin rely on some writer who has sold out his pen and written a million and one slanders. This is done in order to defame him and many of the greatest human accomplishments of his period. Naturally, in taking the initiative to launch a one-volume Selected Works of Stalin, any publisher must necessarily start from those events in his life which are most obscured. It must include his major works — Anarchism or Socialism?, Marxism and the National Question, the Foundations of Leninism, Trotskyism or Leninism?, Concerning Questions of Leninism, On the Right Deviation in the CPSU(B), On the Draft Constitution of the USSR, Dialectical a
Copyright ©airtory.pages.dev 2025