Status Updates From Moura: The Dangerous Life o...

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"Gorky was appalled...by the daily deaths and deprivations, which threatened to wipe off the face of the earth not only middle-aged and older scholars and scientists of world renown but the entire intelligentsia as a class. The only ones with some hope of survival were those who could claim a proletarian background and those who by some miracle had been hired by the Soviets to work in a bureau or supply depot."

When he needed money in the late 1920s, Khodasevich had sold Diaghilev his first editions of Pushkin, which he had been collecting since he was a young man. The collection had been brought by him from Russia in 1925, and here it was intact, in the old nineteenth-century bindings.

Wells spoke of his future plans for an encyclopedia.. which would give people a chance to avoid the bloody catastrophe of revolutions and wars by showing them, through self-education, how to make life beautiful. He was his old self again, profoundly pessimistic on the inside and full of faith in and hope for progress on the outside.

In 1936 there were three archives in Europe that Stalin felt he needed, and he wanted to get control of them within a year. He did: the first, Trotsky's archive in Paris, he took care of by means of arson; the second, Gorky's, Stalin acquired by making a deal with the dying man; the third was seized by breaking into Kerensky's modest apartment in Past, on the rue des Eaux.

In the 1930s there existed in Parisian literary circles a strange distrust of certain women of Russian origin who had married French celebrities from the world of letters, music or the arts. It mattered little whether they were the legitimate wives of Rolland, Aragon, Éluard, Léger or their mistresses. ..the feeling was that they had been sent by Moscow to attach themselves to these celebrities.

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What he (Gorky) demanded of movies and the visual arts I those years was no different from what he demanded of literature. The cinema must be useful; it mus teach something. The primary function of painting was to illustrate history since 1917. To his favorite artist Pavel Korin he assigned the theme "Russia Departing": the picture was supposed to depict "all classes and all professions"