see also:
Socialist Realism

EXPLORATION (in Russian):
Osip Mandelshtam
Marina Tsvetaeva
Anna Achmatova
 

The Russian czar was deposed in 1917, even before the end of World War I. The radical left-wing Bolsheviks emerged victorious out of the dispute between the democratic transitional government and the revolutionary Soviet Council of Soldiers' and Workers' Deputies. They came to power in the October Revolution in 1917 under the leadership of Lenin, ended the war, suppressed counterrevolutionary uprisings in a civil war, and constituted the first Communist-ruled state in the world: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). After Lenin's death in 1924, the Soviet Union became an increasingly centralized personal dictatorship under Stalin in the 1930s. Stalin oversaw a massive industrialization program and forcibly collectivized agriculture, while millions fell victim to the regime's repression.

Political repression in the Soviet Union
 

Great Purge

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Intelligentsia

In the 1920s and 1930s, two thousand writers, intellectuals, and artists were imprisoned and 1,500 died in prisons and concentration camps.

Russian poet Nikolai Gumilev was executed on 24th August, 1921.

Nikolay Gumilyov Nikolai Gumilev From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia   Nikolai Gumilev during his senior years in gymnasium Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilyov (Russian: Íèêîëà́é Ñòåïà́íîâè÷ Ãóìèë¸â, April 15 NS 1886 - August 1921) was an influential Russian poet who founded the acmeism movement. Early life and poems Nikolai was born in Kronstadt, into the family of Stepan Yakovlevich Gumilev (1836—1920), a naval physician, and Anna Ivanovna L'vova (1854—1942). His childhood nickname was Montigomo the Hawk's Claw. He studied at the gymnasium of Tsarskoe Selo, where the Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky was his teacher. Later, Gumilev admitted that it was Annensky's influence that turned his mind to writing poetry. His first publication were verses I ran from cities into the forest (Russian: ß â ëåñ áåæàë èç ãîðîäîâ) on September 8, 1902. In 1905 he published his first book of lyrics entitled The Way of Conquistadors. It comprised poems on most exotic subjects imaginable, from Lake Chad giraffes to Caracalla's crocodiles. Although Gumilev was proud of the book, most critics found his technique sloppy; later he would refer to that collection as apprentice's work. From 1907 and on, Nikolai Gumilyov traveled extensively in Europe, notably in Italy and France. In 1908 his new collection Romantic Flowers appeared. While in Paris, he published the literary magazine Sirius, but only three issues were produced. On returning to Russia, he edited and contributed to the artistic periodical Apollon. At that period, he fell in love with a non-existent woman Cherubina de Gabriak. It turned out that Cherubina de Gabriak was the literary pseudonym for two people, a disabled schoolteacher and Maximilian Voloshin, and on November 22, 1909 he had a duel with Voloshin over the affair. Like Flaubert and Rimbaud before him, Gumilyov was fascinated with Africa and travelled there almost each year. He hunted lions in Ethiopia and brought to the Saint Petersburg museum of anthropology and ethnography a large collection of African artifacts. His landmark collection The Tent (1921) collected the best of his poems on African themes. Guild of Poets In 1910, Gumilyov fell under the spell of the Symbolist poet and philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov and absorbed his views on poetry at the evenings held by Ivanov in his celebrated "Turreted House". His wife Anna Akhmatova accompanied him to Ivanov's parties as well. Gumilyov and Akhmatova married on April 25. On September 18, 1912, their child Lev was born. He would eventually become an influential and controversial historian. Dissatisfied with the vague mysticism of Russian Symbolism, then prevalent in the Russian poetry, Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky established the so-called Guild of Poets, which was modeled after medieval guilds of Western Europe. They advocated a view that poetry needs craftsmanship just like architecture needs it. Writing a good poem they compared to building a cathedral. To illustrate their ideals, Gumilyov published two collections, The Pearls in 1910 and the Alien Sky in 1912. It was Osip Mandelshtam, however, who produced the movement's most distinctive and durable monument, the collection of poems entitled Stone (1912). According to the principles of acmeism (as the movement came to be dubbed by art historians), every person, irrespective of his talent, may learn to produce high-quality poems if only he follows the guild's masters, i.e., Gumilev and Gorodetsky. Their own model was Theophile Gauthier, and they borrowed much of their basic tenets from the French Parnasse. Such a program, combined with colourful and exotic subject matter of Gumilyov's poems, attracted to the Guild a large number of adolescents. Several major poets, notably Georgy Ivanov and Vladimir Nabokov, passed the school of Gumilyov, albeit informally. Nikolay Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova and their son Lev Gumilev, 1913 War experience Nikolay Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova and their son Lev Gumilev, 1913When the World War I started, Gumilyov hastened to Russia and enthusiastically joined a corps of elite cavalry. For his bravery he was invested with two St. George crosses (December 24, 1914 and January 5, 1915). His war poems were assembled in the collection The Quiver (1916). In 1916 he wrote a verse play, Gondla, which was published the following year; set in ninth-century Iceland, torn between its native paganism and Irish Christianity, it is also clearly autobiographical, Gumilyov putting much of himself into the hero Gondla (an Irishman chosen as king but rejected by the jarls, he kills himself to ensure the triumph of Christianity) and basing Gondla's wild bride Lera on Gumilyov's wife Akhmatova. The play was performed in Rostov na Donu in 1920 and, even after the author's execution by the Cheka, in Petrograd in January 1922: "The play, despite its crowd scenes being enacted on a tiny stage, was a major success. Yet when the Petrograd audience called for the author, who was now officially an executed counter-revolutionary traitor, the play was removed from the repertoire and the theatre disbanded." (In February 1934, as they walked along a Moscow street, Osip Mandelstam quoted Gondla's words "I am ready to die" to Akhmatova, and she repeated them in her "Poem without a Hero." During the Russian Revolution, Gumilyov served in the Russian expedition corps in Paris. Despite advice to the contrary, he rapidly returned to Petrograd. There he published several new collections, Tabernacle and Bonfire, and finally divorced Akhmatova (August 5, 1918), whom he had left for other woman several years prior to that. The following year he married Anna Nikolaevna Engelhardt, a noblewoman and daughter of a well-known historian.   Nikolai Gumilev Later poems and death "Despite the hard experiences of real travels and battles, he remained, to the end of his life, a schoolboy entranced by the Iliad of childhood - the adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He never outgrew the influence of Mayne Reid, Alexandre Dumas, père, Jules Verne, Gustave Aimard and others."  In 1920 Gumilyov co-founded the All-Russia Union of Writers. Gumilyov made no secret of his anti-communist views. He also crossed himself in public and didn't care to hide his contempt for half-literate Bolsheviks. On August 3, 1921 he was arrested by Cheka on allegation of participation in monarchist conspiracy. Most literary historians agree that it was not a Cheka fabrication, and Gumilyov was a likely conspirator. On August 24 Petrograd Cheka decreed execution of all 61 participants of the Tagantsev Conspiracy, including Nikolai Gumilev. The exact dates and locations of their execution and burial are still unknown. Gumilyov's direct influence on Russian poetry was short lived. The sentiment is best expressed by Nabokov, who once remarked that Gumilyov is the poet for adolescents, just like Korney Chukovsky is the poet for children. His most durable verse, written in mystical strain, appeared in the collection "The Pillar of Fire" (1921). Although "banned in the Soviet times, Gumilyov was loved for his adolescent longing for travel and giraffes and hippos, for his dreams of a fifteen-year-old captain" and was "a favorite poet among geologists, archaeologists and paleontologists."] His "The Tram That Lost Its Way" is considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. When Mikhail Sinelnikov was asked to study the archives of the late Mikhail Zenkevich, the last of the Acmeists - his teacher - he "found piles of secreted verse, an unpublished novel, manuscripts which Pasternak brought to the old master to be critiqued, the poems and letters of his friends. According to Sinelnikov, "at the bottom of a wide box lay a copy of Izvestia Petrosovieta with a list of people executed in connection with the Tagantsev case. The type was barely legible, more like wisps of old wool. Some names, those of Zenkevich's acquaintances, were ticked off. Gumilyov's name was underlined in red."

After sunspot development research was judged un-Marxist, twenty-seven astronomers disappeared between 1936 and 1938. The Meteorological Office was violently purged as early as 1933 for failing to predict weather harmful to the crops.  But the toll was especially high among writers. Those who perished during the Great Purge include:

The great poet OSIP MANDELSTAM was arrested for reciting his famous anti-Stalin poem Stalin Epigram to his circle of friends in 1934. After intervention by Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Pasternak (Stalin jotted down in Bukharin's letter with feigned indignation: “Who gave them the right to arrest Mandelstam?”), Stalin instructed NKVD to "isolate but preserve" him, and Mandelstam was "merely" exiled to Cherdyn for three years. But this proved to be a temporary reprieve. In May 1938, he was promptly arrested again for "counter-revolutionary activities". On August 2, 1938, Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in correction camps and died on December 27, 1938 at a transit camp near Vladivostok.  Boris Pasternak himself was nearly purged, but Stalin is said to have crossed Pasternak's name off the list, saying "Don't touch this cloud dweller."
 

see also: OSIP MANDELSTAM see also: EXPLORATION (in Russian): THE SECRETS OF THE CRAFT Osip Mandelshtam - Marina Tsvetaeva - Anna Achmatova - Joseph Brodsky Osip Mandelstam From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (also spelled Mandelshtam) (Russian: Î́ñèï Ýìè́ëüåâè÷ Ìàíäåëüøòà́ì) (January 15 [O.S. January 3] 1891 – December 27, 1938) was a Russian poet and essayist, one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. Life and work Mandelstam was born in Warsaw to a wealthy Jewish family. His father, a tanner by trade, was able to receive a dispensation freeing the family from the pale of settlement, and soon after Osip's birth, they moved to Saint Petersburg. In 1900, Mandelstam entered the prestigious Tenishevsky school, which also counts Vladimir Nabokov and other significant figures of Russian (and Soviet) culture among its alumni. His first poems were printed in the school's almanac in 1907. In April 1908, Mandelstam decided to enter the Sorbonne to study literature and philosophy, but he left the following year to attend the University of Heidelberg. In 1911, in order to continue his education at the University of Saint Petersburg, he converted to Methodism (which he did not practice) and entered the university the same year. Mandelstam's poetry, acutely populist in spirit after the first Russian revolution, became closely associated with symbolist imagery, and in 1911, he and several other young Russian poets formed the "Poets' Guild" (Russian: Öåõ Ïîýòîâ, Tsekh Poetov), under the formal leadership of Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky. The nucleus of this group would then become known as Acmeists. Mandelstam had authored the manifesto for the new movement - The Morning Of Acmeism (1913, published in 1919). 1913 also saw the publication of his first collection of poems, The Stone (Russian: Êàìåíü, Kamyen), to be reissued in 1916 in a greatly expanded format, but under the same title. Nadezhda Mandelstam In 1922, Mandelstam arrived in Moscow with his newly-wed wife Nadezhda. At this time, his second book of poems, Tristia, was published in Berlin. For several years after that, he almost completely abandoned poetry, concentrating on essays, literary criticism, memoirs (The Din Of Time, Russian: Øóì âðåìåíè, Shum vremeni; Ôåîäîñèÿ, Feodosiya - both 1925) and small-format prose (The Egyptian Stamp, Russian: Åãèïåòñêàÿ ìàðêà, Yegipetskaya marka - 1928). As a day job, he translated (19 books in 6 years), then worked as a correspondent for the newspaper The Irish Times. Mandelstam's non-conformist, anti-establishment tendencies always simmered not far from the surface, and in the autumn of 1933, they broke through in form of the famous "Stalin Epigram". The poem, sharply criticizing the "Kremlin highlander", was described elsewhere as a "sixteen line death sentence," likely prompted by Mandelstam's seeing (in the summer of that year, while vacationing in Crimea) the effects of the Great Famine, a result of Stalin's collectivisation in the USSR and his drive to exterminate the "kulaks". Six months later, Mandelstam was arrested. Georgy Chulkov, Mariya Petrovykh, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam Anna Akhmatova For Osip Mandelstam And the town is frozen solid in a vice, Trees, walls, snow, beneath a glass. Over crystal, on slippery tracks of ice, the painted sleighs and I, together, pass. And over St Peter’s there are poplars, crows there’s a pale green dome there that glows, dim in the sun-shrouded dust. The field of heroes lingers in my thought, Kulikovo’s barbarian battleground. The frozen poplars, like glasses for a toast, clash now, more noisily, overhead. As though it was our wedding, and the crowd were drinking to our health and happiness. But Fear and the Muse take turns to guard the room where the exiled poet is banished, and the night, marching at full pace, of the coming dawn, has no knowledge Mandelstam and Achmatova However, after the customary pro forma inquest, he not only was spared his life, but the sentence did not even include labor camps - a miraculous event, usually explained by historians as owing to Stalin's personal interest in his fate. Mandelstam was "only" exiled to Cherdyn in Northern Ural with his wife. After his attempt to commit suicide, the sentence was softened, and he was banished from the largest cities, but otherwise allowed to choose his new place of residence. He and his wife chose Voronezh.   NKVD photo after the first arrest NKVD photo after the second arrest     Stalin Epigram   Ìû æèâåì, ïîä ñîáîþ íå ÷óÿ ñòðàíû, Íàøè ðå÷è çà äåñÿòü øàãîâ íå ñëûøíû, À ãäå õâàòèò íà ïîëðàçãîâîðöà, Òàì ïðèïîìíÿò êðåìë¸âñêîãî ãîðöà. Åãî òîëñòûå ïàëüöû, êàê ÷åðâè, æèðíû, À ñëîâà, êàê ïóäîâûå ãèðè, âåðíû, Òàðàêàíüè ñìåþòñÿ óñèùà, È ñèÿþò åãî ãîëåíèùà. À âîêðóã íåãî ñáðîä òîíêîøåèõ âîæäåé, Îí èãðàåò óñëóãàìè ïîëóëþäåé. Êòî ñâèñòèò, êòî ìÿó÷èò, êòî õíû÷åò, Îí îäèí ëèøü áàáà÷èò è òû÷åò, Êàê ïîäêîâó, êóåò çà óêàçîì óêàç: Êîìó â ïàõ, êîìó â ëîá, êîìó â áðîâü, êîìó â ãëàç. ×òî íè êàçíü ó íåãî - òî ìàëèíà È øèðîêàÿ ãðóäü îñåòèíà. Íîÿáðü 1933   Stalin Epigram translation by Darran Anderson We live, not feeling the earth beneath us At ten paces our words evaporate. But when there’s the will to crack open our mouths our words orbit the Kremlin mountain man. Murderer, peasant killer. His fingers plump as grubs. His words drop like lead weights. His laughing cockroach whiskers. The gleam of his boot rims. Around him a circle of chicken-skinned bosses sycophantic half-beings for him to toy with. One whines, another purrs, a third snivels as he babbles and points. He forges decrees to be flung like horseshoes at the groin, the face, the eyes. He rolls the liquidations on his tongue like berries delicacies for the barrel-chested Georgian. 1933   This proved a temporary reprieve. In the coming years, Mandelstam would (as was expected of him) write several poems which seemed to glorify Stalin (including Ode To Stalin), but in 1937, at the outset of the Great Purge, the literary establishment began a systematic assault on him in print -- first locally, and soon after that from Moscow -- accusing him of harboring anti-Soviet views. Early the following year, Mandelstam and his wife received a government voucher for a vacation not far from Moscow; upon their arrival in May 1938, he was promptly arrested again and charged with "counter-revolutionary activities". Four months later, Mandelstam was sentenced to hard labor. He arrived at a transit camp near Vladivostok and managed to pass a note to his wife back home with a request for warm clothes; he never received them. The official cause of his death is an unspecified illness. Mandelstam's own prophecy was fulfilled: "Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?" Nadezhda Mandelstam presented her account of the events surrounding her husband's life in "Hope against Hope" and later continued with Hope Abandoned.   Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam (Russian: Íàäåæäà ßêîâëåâíà Ìàíäåëüøòàì, née Hazin; 31 October 1899 — 29 December 1980) was a Russian writer and a wife of poet Osip Mandelstam. Born in Saratov into a middle-class Jewish family, she spent her early years in Kiev. After the gymnasium she studied art. After their marriage in 1921, Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam lived in Ukraine, Petrograd, Moscow, and Georgia. Osip was arrested in 1934 for his Stalin Epigram and exiled with Nadezhda to Cherdyn, in the Perm region and later to Voronezh. After Osip Mandelstam's second arrest and his subsequent death at a transit camp "Vtoraya Rechka" near Vladivostok in 1938, Nadezhda Mandelstam led an almost nomadic way of life, dodging her expected arrest and frequently changing places of residence and temporary jobs. On at least one occasion, in Kalinin, the NKVD came for her the next day after she fled. As her mission in life, she set to preserve and publish her husband's poetic heritage. She managed to keep most of it memorized because she didn't trust paper. After the death of Stalin, Nadezhda Mandelstam completed her dissertation (1956) and was allowed to return to Moscow (1958). In her memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, first published in the West, she gives an epic analysis of her life and criticizes the moral and cultural degradation of the Soviet Union of the 1920s and later. The titles of her memoirs are puns, Nadezhda in Russian meaning 'hope'. In 1979 she gave her archives to Princeton University. Nadezhda Mandelstam died in 1980 in Moscow, aged 81. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia     Varlam Shalamov's short story "Sherry Brandy" was written as a fictional description of Mandelstam's death in a Soviet Union GULAG transit camp near Vladivostok.   Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) Russian writer best known for a series of short stories about imprisonment in Soviet labour camps. In 1922 Shalamov went to Moscow and worked in a factory. Accused of counterrevolutionary activities while a law student at Moscow State University, Shalamov served two years at hard labour in the Urals. He returned to Moscow in 1932 and became a published writer, journalist, and critic. Rearrested in 1937, supposedly in part because of his public approval of Soviet émigré writer and 1933 Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin, Shalamov spent the next 17 years in the extremely harsh labour camps of the Kolyma River basin in the Soviet Far East. He was released in the 1950s and was allowed to publish some of his poetry, including the collections Ognivo (1961; “Flint”), Doroga i sudba (1967; “Journey and Destiny”), and Moskovskiye oblaka (1972; “Moscow Clouds”). In the early 1970s Shalamov, by then broken, ill, and dependent on the Soviet Writers’ Union for publication and money, was forced to write a public letter denouncing publication of his work abroad. In 1978 a Russian edition of Shalamov’s Kolymskiye rasskazy (1978; “Kolyma Stories”) was published in England. This collection of 103 brief sketches, vignettes, and short stories chronicles the degradation and dehumanization of prison-camp life. Written in understated and straightforward documentary style, the tales contain almost no philosophical or political nuances. Publication was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988. Among the collections of his poetry that were posthumously published are Stikhotvoreniya (1988; “Poems”) and Kolymskiye tetradi (1994; “The Kolyma Notebooks”). Complete editions of Shalamov’s works were released in Moscow in 1992. Selected tales from the collection were published in English in two volumes, Kolyma Tales (1980) and Graphite (1981). Encyclopaedia Britannica   Rehabilitation After the end of the Stalin era, Mandelstam was rehabilitated in 1956, when he was exonerated from the charges brought against him in 1938. On October 28, 1987, he was also exonerated from the 1934 charges and thus fully rehabilitated.

Writer Isaac Babel was arrested in May 1939, and according to his confession paper (which contained a blood stain) he "confessed" to being a member of Trotskyist organization and being recruited by French writer Andre Malraux to spy for France. In the final interrogation, he retracted his confession and wrote letters to prosecutor's office stating that he had implicated innocent people, but to no avail. Babel was tried before an NKVD troika and convicted of simultaneously spying for the French, Austrians, and Leon Trotsky, as well as "membership in a terrorist organization." On January 27, 1940, he was shot in Butyrka prison.
 

Isaac Babel Isaac Babel Main Russian author born July 13 [July 1, Old Style], 1894, Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire died Jan. 27, 1940, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R. Soviet short-story writer noted for his war stories and Odessa tales. He was considered an innovator in the early Soviet period and enjoyed a brilliant reputation in the early 1930s. Born into a Jewish family, Babel grew up in an atmosphere of persecution that is reflected in the sensitivity, pessimism, and morbidity of his stories. His first works, later included in his Odesskiye rasskazy (“Odessa Tales”), were published in 1916 in St. Petersburg in a monthly edited by Maksim Gorky; but the tsarist censors considered them crude and obscene. Gorky praised the young author’s terse, naturalistic style, at the same time advising him to “see the world.” Babel proceeded to do so, serving in the Cossack First Cavalry Army and in the political police (Babel’s daughter denied this), working for newspapers, and holding a number of other jobs over the next seven years. Perhaps his most significant experience was as a soldier in the war with Poland. Out of that campaign came the group of stories known as Konarmiya (1926; Red Cavalry). These stories present different aspects of war through the eyes of an inexperienced, intellectual young Jew who reports everything graphically and with naive precision. Though senseless cruelty often pervades the stories, they are lightened by a belief that joy and happiness must exist somewhere, if only in the imagination. The “Odessa Tales” were published in book form in 1931. This cycle of realistic and humorous sketches of the Moldavanka—the ghetto suburb of Odessa—vividly portrays the lifestyle and jargon of a group of Jewish bandits and gangsters, led by their “king,” the legendary Benya Krik.   The NKVD photo of Babel made after his arres Babel wrote other short stories, as well as two plays (Zakat, 1928; Mariya, 1935). In the early 1930s his literary reputation in the Soviet Union was high, but, in the atmosphere of increasing Stalinist cultural regimentation, Communist critics began to question whether his works were compatible with official literary doctrine. After the mid-1930s Babel lived in silence and obscurity. His last published work in the Soviet Union was a short tribute to Gorky in 1938. His powerful patron had died in 1936; in May 1939 Babel was arrested, and he was executed some eight months later. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Babel was rehabilitated, and his stories were again published in the Soviet Union. Encyclopaedia Britannyca

Writer Boris Pilnyak was arrested on October 28, 1937 for counter-revolutionary activities, spying and terrorism. One report alleged that "he held secret meetings with (Andre) Gide, and supplied him with information about the situation in the USSR. There is no doubt that Gide used this information in his book attacking the USSR." Pilnyak was tried on April 21, 1938. In the proceeding that lasted 15 minutes, he was condemned to death and executed shortly afterward.
 

Boris Pilnyak Boris Pilnyak Boris Pilnyak (Russian: Áîðè́ñ Ïèëüíÿ́ê) (October 11 [O.S. September 29] 1894–April 21, 1938) was a Russian author. Born Boris Andreyevich Vogau (Russian: Áîðè́ñ Àíäðǻåâè÷ Âîãà́ó) in Mozhaisk, he was a major supporter of anti-urbanism and a critic of mechanized society. These views often brought him into disfavor with Communist critics. His most famous works are The Naked Year, Mahogany, and The Volga Falls into the Caspian Sea, all novels concerning revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia. Another of his well-known works is OK, an unflattering travelogue of his 1931 visit to the United States. On October 28, 1937, he was arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary activies, spying and terrorism. One report alleged that "he held secret meetings with (Andre) Gide, and supplied him with information about the situation in the USSR. There is no doubt that Gide used this information in this book attacking the USSR." Pilnyak was tried on April 21, 1938. In the proceeding that lasted 15 minutes, he was condemned to death. A small yellow slip of paper attached to his file read: "Sentence carried out."

Theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested in 1939 and shot in February 1940 for "spying" for Japanese and British intelligence. In a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov dated January 13, 1940, he wrote: "The investigators began to use force on me, a sick 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap... For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain. I incriminated myself in the hope that by telling them lies I could end the ordeal. When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after 18 hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour's time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever."  His wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was murdered in her apartment by NKVD agents She was stabbed 17 times, two of them through the eyes.
 

Vsevolod Meyerhold   Vsevolod Meyerhold Vsevolod Meyerhold's mugshot, taken at the time of his arrest Russian theatrical producer, director, and actor born Feb. 9 [Jan. 28, old style], 1874, Penza, Russia died Feb. 2, 1940, Moscow Russian theatrical producer, director, and actor whose provocative experiments in nonrealistic theatre made him one of the seminal forces in modern theatre. Meyerhold became a student in 1896 at the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School under the guidance of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, cofounder of the Moscow Art Theatre. Two years later, Meyerhold joined the Moscow Art Theatre and there began to formulate his avant-garde theories of symbolic, or “conditional,” theatre. In 1906 he became chief producer at the theatre of Vera Komissarzhevskaya, a distinguished actress of the time, and staged a number of Symbolist plays that employed his radical ideas of nonrepresentational theatre. For his presentation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in 1906, Meyerhold rebelled against the stylized naturalism popularized by Konstantin Stanislavsky’s art theatre and instead directed his actors to behave in puppetlike, mechanistic ways. This production marked the beginning of an innovative theatre in Russia that became known as biomechanics. Meyerhold’s unorthodox approach to the theatre led him to break with Komissarzhevskaya in 1908. Thereafter, drawing upon the conventions of commedia dell’arte and Oriental theatre, he went on to stage productions in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). During 1920–35 Meyerhold achieved his greatest artistic success as a director, beginning with Fernand Crommelynck’s Le Cocu magnifique (1920; The Magnificent Cuckold) and ending with his controversial production in 1935 of Aleksandr Pushkin’s story “Pikovaya Dama” (“The Queen of Spades”). Alexander Golovin. Portrait of Meyerhold Dmitriy Shostakovich, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Vladimir Mayakovsky & Alexander Rodchenko Although he embraced the Russian Revolution of 1917, his fiercely individualistic temperament and artistic eccentricity brought reproach and condemnation from Soviet critics. He was accused of mysticism and neglect of Socialist Realism. Meyerhold refused to submit to the constraints of artistic uniformity and defended the artist’s right to experiment. In 1939 he was arrested and imprisoned. Weeks later, his actress-wife, Zinaida Raikh, was found brutally murdered in their apartment. Nothing more was heard of him in the West until 1958, when his death in 1942 was announced in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia; in a later edition the date was changed to 1940. Vsevolod Meyerhold and Zinaida Raikh

Zinaida Raikh (1893 -1939) Zinaida Raikh Actress. She was married to the poet Sergei Essenin from 1917 to 1921. Known more for her great beauty and fiery temperament than for her acting ability, she nevertheless became a star at the theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold, whom she married in 1924. In 1939, Josef Stalin had Meyerhold arrested on trumped-up charges of anti-Soviet activities. Three weeks later, thugs acting on orders of Stalin's secret police broke into Meyerhold's Moscow apartment and savagely attacked Raikh; she died of 17 stab wounds, two of them through her eyes. Meyerhold was executed in 1940.

Zinaida Raikh

Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze was arrested on October 10, 1937 on a charge of treason and was tortured in prison. In a bitter humor, he named only the 18th-century Georgian poet Besiki as his accomplice in anti-Soviet activities. [30] He was executed on December 16, 1937. His friend and poet Paolo Iashvili, having earlier been forced to denounce several of his associates as the enemies of the people, shot himself with a hunting gun in the building of the Writers' Union.  (He witnessed and even had to participate in public trials that ousted many of his associates from the Writers' Union, effectively condemning them to death. When Lavrenty Beria further pressured him with alternative of denouncing his life-long friend Tabidze or being arrested and tortured by the NKVD, he killed himself.)
 

Titsian Tabidze	Paolo Iashvili

In early 1937, poet Pavel Vasiliev is said to have defended Bukharin as "a man of the highest nobility and the conscience of peasant Russia" at the time of his denunciation at the Pyatakov Trial (Second Moscow Trial) and damned other writers then signing the routine condemnations as "pornographic scrawls on the margins of Russian literature." He was promptly shot on July 16, 1937.

Pavel Vasiliev

Jan Sten, philosopher and deputy head of the Marx-Engels Institute was Stalin's private tutor when Stalin was trying hard to study Hegel's dialectic. (Stalin received lessons twice a week from 1925 to 1928, but he found it difficult to master even some of the basic ideas. Stalin developed enduring hostility toward German idealistic philosophy, which he called "the aristocratic reaction to the French Revolution".) In 1937, Sten was seized on the direct order of Stalin, who declared him one of the chiefs of Menshevizing idealists. On June 19, 1937, Sten was put to death in Lefortovo prison.

 

see also: EXPLORATION (in Russian): THE SECRETS OF THE CRAFT
Osip Mandelshtam - Marina Tsvetaeva - Anna Achmatova - Joseph Brodsky
 

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (Encyclopaedia Britannica) born June 11 [June 23, New Style], 1889, Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire died March 5, 1966, Domodedovo, near Moscow pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko Russian poet recognized at her death as the greatest woman poet in Russian literature. Akhmatova began writing verse at the age of 11 and at 21 became a member of the Acmeist group of poets, whose leader, Nikolay Gumilyov, she married in 1910 butdivorced in 1918. The Acmeists, through their periodical Apollon (“Apollo”; 1909–17), rejected the esoteric vagueness and affectations of Symbolism and sought to replace them with “beautiful clarity,” compactness, simplicity, and perfection of form—all qualities in which Akhmatova excelled from the outset. Herfirst collections, Vecher (1912; “Evening”) and Chyotki (1914; “Rosary”), especially the latter, brought her fame. While exemplifying the best kind of personal or even confessional poetry, they achieve a universal appeal deriving from their artistic and emotional integrity. Akhmatova's principal motif is love, mainly frustrated and tragic love, expressed with an intensely feminine accent andinflection entirely her own. Later in her life she added to her main theme some civic, patriotic, and religious motifs but without sacrifice of personal intensity or artistic conscience. Her artistry and increasing control of her medium were particularly prominent in her next collections: Belaya staya (1917; “The White Flock”), Podorozhnik (1921; “Plantain”), and Anno Domini MCMXXI (1922). This amplification of her range, however, did not prevent official Soviet critics from proclaiming her “bourgeois and aristocratic,” condemning her poetry for its narrow preoccupation with love and God, and characterizing her as half nun and half harlot. The execution in 1921 of her former husband, Gumilyov, on charges of participation in an anti-Soviet conspiracy (the Tagantsev affair) further complicated her position. In 1923 she entered a period of almost complete poetic silence and literary ostracism, and no volume of her poetry was published in the Soviet Union until 1940. In that year several of her poems were published in the literary monthly Zvezda (“The Star”), and a volume of selections from her earlier work appeared under the title Iz shesti knig (“From Six Books”). A few months later, however, it was abruptly withdrawn from sale and libraries. Nevertheless, in September 1941, following the German invasion, Akhmatova was permitted to deliver an inspiring radio address to the women of Leningrad [St. Petersburg]. Evacuated to Tashkent soon thereafter, she read her poems to hospitalized soldiers and published a number of war-inspired lyrics; a small volume of selected lyrics appeared in Tashkent in 1943. At the end of the war she returned to Leningrad, where her poems began to appear in local magazines and newspapers. She gave poetic readings, and plans were made for publication of a large edition of her works. In August 1946, however, she was harshly denounced by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for her “eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference.” Her poetrywas castigated as “alien to the Soviet people,” and she was again described as a “harlot-nun,” this time by none other than Andrey Zhdanov, Politburo member and the director of Stalin's program of cultural restriction. She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers; an unreleased book of her poems, already in print, was destroyed; and none of her workappeared in print for three years. Then, in 1950, a number of her poems eulogizing Stalin and Soviet communism were printed in several issues of the illustrated weekly magazine Ogonyok (“The Little Light”) under the title Iz tsikla “Slava miru” (“From the Cycle ‘Glory to Peace' ”). This uncharacteristic capitulation to the Soviet dictator—in one of the poems Akhmatova declares: “WhereStalin is, there is Freedom, Peace, and the grandeur of the earth”—was motivated by Akhmatova's desire to propitiateStalin and win the freedom of her son, Lev Gumilyov, who had been arrested in 1949 and exiled to Siberia. The tone of these poems (those glorifying Stalin were omitted from Soviet editions of Akhmatova's works published after his death) is far different from the moving and universalized lyrical cycle, Rekviem (“Requiem”), composed between 1935 and 1940 and occasioned by Akhmatova's grief over an earlier arrest and imprisonment of her son in 1937. This masterpiece—a poetic monument to the sufferings of the Soviet peoples during Stalin's terror—was published in Moscow in 1989. In the cultural “thaw” following Stalin's death, Akhmatova was slowly and ambivalently rehabilitated, and a slim volume of her lyrics, including some of her translations, was published in 1958. After 1958 a number of editions of her works, including some of her brilliant essays on Pushkin, were published in the Soviet Union (1961, 1965, two in 1976, 1977); none of these, however, contains the complete corpus of her literary productivity. Akhmatova's longest work, Poema bez geroya (“Poem Without a Hero”), on which she worked from 1940 to 1962, was not published in the Soviet Union until 1976. This difficult and complex work is a powerful lyric summation of Akhmatova's philosophy and her own definitive statement on the meaning of her life and poetic achievement. Akhmatova executed a number of superb translations of the works of other poets, including Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi, and various Armenian and Korean poets. She also wrote sensitive personal memoirs on Symbolist writer Aleksandr Blok, the artist Amedeo Modigliani, and fellow Acmeist Osip Mandelshtam. In 1964 she was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize, an international poetry prize awarded in Italy, and in 1965 she received an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University. Her journeys to Sicily and England to receive these honours were her first travel outside her homeland since 1912. Akhmatova's works were widely translated, andher international stature continued to grow after her death. Atwo-volume edition of Akhmatova's collected works was published in Moscow in 1986, and The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, also in two volumes, appeared in 1990.

see also: EXPLORATION (in Russian): THE SECRETS OF THE CRAFT
Osip Mandelshtam - Marina Tsvetaeva - Anna Achmatova - Joseph Brodsky