TBV (on hiatus)’s Reviews > Fear and the Muse Kept Watch: The Russian Masters—From Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein—Under Stalin > Status Update

“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.”