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“... 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 ...”

“... know the force of words/the alarm they sound … so often unpublished, unprinted’ – lines by Mayakovsky that turned up after his suicide. Why won’t Serge acknowledge that his writing is a suicidal mission? Without a party card, he’s unpublishable, unprintable, fatally exposed as an oppositionist. Liuba throws the volume of poems at him. In the ...”

“... 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 ...”