Editor’s Postscript

When Mayakóvsky committed suicide in 1930, Mírsky was to compare his death with Púshkin’s as marking the end of an era in Russian literature.¹ “The objective meaning of his death,” wrote Mirsky, “is clear—it is a recognition of the fact that the new Soviet culture does not need the individualistic literature that has its roots in pre-Revolutionary society. . . . [Mayakóvsky] showed his old spirit only in order to kill it. His suicide was the act of an individualist and at the same time a deathblow to individualism. [By it] he buried pre-proletarian literature forever.”