Status Updates From Fear and the Muse Kept Watc...

“Why complain? Poetry is respected only in this country—people are killed for it. There’s no place where more people are killed for it.”
[Osip Mandelstam to his wife Nadezhda]

“There was nothing remarkable in Stalin anointing himself the nation’s number one poetry critic, since by 1935 he was on the way to becoming the Soviet Union’s final authority in every field of human knowledge, but his choice of Mayakovsky as the poet laureate of the revolution was not without irony.”