The Grass of Oblivion - by Valentin Katayev - Vintage Hardcover Book

The Grass of Oblivion
by Valentin Katayev

hardcover in good used condition

"A memoir of literary Russia in the early Soviet days, with unforgettable portraits of two great writers: Bunin - the only Russian besides Pasternak to receive the Nobel Prize for literature - and the futurist poet Mayakovsky.

This book is Valentin Katayev's brief, perfect memoir of his youth in his native Odessa and in Moscow, just before and just after the 1917 Revolution. It is a haunting evocation of an era, nostalgic but never sentimental, centered around affectionate yet objective portraits of two writers Katayev knew well: Ivan Bunin, the poet who was his idol, mentor, and friend in Odessa, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, his Moscow comrade in the first hopeful years of the Soviet epoch. Bunin was an aesthete of an older age who eventually chose exile; Mayakovsky, like Katayev, was a 'son of the Revolution', the poet and publicist of the new order, but all too soon a shocking suicide."