Russian literature. A short introduction

substitution of a magnificently egotistical alternative cult of self. Vladimir Mayakovsky’s superb elegy for the poet Sergey Esenin, composed after the latter committed suicide in 1925, and one of the greatest poems written in Russian in the twentieth century, contains an extraordinary passage that at once repudiates the official construction of monuments and builds a monument before the reader’s eyes:

They haven’t even

built you a memorial, No bronze rings out,

no stone lies hewn in hunks, But the rails of memory

are ornamented With tributes and with memoirs –

all that junk.