ABSTRACT
In 1924, just before the scope and ferocity of victory of bureaucratism became clear, a small anthology was published in Moscow, entitled, Artists about art and about themselves. To this anthology Pilnyak contributed some fearless and straight-spoken pages. Pilnyak was the victim of a veritable pogrom, a literary lynching at the hands of a mob instigated and egged on by state power, a hounding and baiting and branding and pounding and menacing on the platform and in the press from one end of the Soviet Union to the other, such as would break down a far more heroic fibre of mind than his. An accusation of secret treasonable relations with a military enemy is plausible. To accuse intelligent and sane men, flourishing prominently in the social life of a community, of entering into such relations for the purpose of world-wide publication, is either deliberate lying or damned nonsense, and this was perfectly clear to everyone not too frightened to think.
