Robert Littell
Author
Language
English
Description
In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow's deluxe Hotel Metropol. They have gathered to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure.
The ladies, each of whom could claim to have been a muse to the poet, loved or loathed Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their conflicting memories of him, a...
Author
Language
English
Description
The Stalin Epigram is a masterful rendering of the life of Osip Mandelstam, one of Russia's greatest poets of the twentieth century. His heroic protest against the Stalin regime-particularly his outspoken criticism of the collectivization that drove millions of Russian peasants to starvation-finally reached its apex in 1934. When he composed a searing indictment of Stalin in a sixteen-line poem, secretly passed from person to person through recitation,...