 |
 |
Overlooked here too. Fascinating lot by the sounds of it. Bill On 21/01/2013, at 10:33 AM, Max Richards wrote: > Russia was in the midst of civil war, with millions dying in battle, and from hunger or cold. The cities had emptied: by 1920 St Petersburg had lost almost three-quarters of its pre-Revolutionary population, and Moscow half; those who remained dismantled houses for firewood, leaving horse carcases to rot among the ruins. It was against this apocalyptic backdrop that the Imaginists led their bohemian lives, shocking as much by their incongruous frivolity as by their risqué material. They declaimed in one murky café after another, strutting the streets of Moscow with walking sticks and in top hats; they staged prank after prank (in 1921 they renamed several main thoroughfares after themselves and hung a sign from the neck of a statue of Pushkin reading ‘I’m with the Imaginists’); they ran a bookshop and hounded out customers attempting to buy work by their rivals, while happily promoting their own books, of which they produced more than thirty in 1920 and 1921 alone. > > http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n05/tony-wood/im-with-the-imaginists > > review of > A Novel without Lies by Anatoly Mariengof, translated by José Alaniz > Glas, 192 pp, £8.99, August 2001, ISBN 1 56663 302 8 > > [a 1927 novel, reprinted 1988, englished 2001] > 2001 - but overlooked by me then and since… > MR