Portraits of early Russian liberals Book

A must-have for anyone interested in the political-historical-aesthetic context of the Russian Revolution and Russian Futurism. We have here what is (I think) the only english translation of Jakobson's essay "On A Generation That Squandered Its Poets," the most well-known essay dealing with the suicide of Mayakovsky and his contribution to world poetry. There are numerous essays on all things avantgarde, and written at a time when these writings were involved in active ideological battles over the worth of the things being written about (e.g., surrealism, dada, formalism, futurism, modernism). On top of this there's a good hundred pages of Jakobson's memoirs (as per the title of the book), that are an invaluable look into the personalities of the time (e.g., Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Bely, the Briks, Shklovsky, Pasternak, Malevich), not to mention the political and social context of the revolution.

A particularly heartwarming section details the first two or so years after the revolution in Petersburg, before Kronstadt, when the anarchists squatted the old aristocratic palaces, everyone made the most-modern of art, and all met up (Bolshevik, anarchist, and everywhere in between) at night at the Stray Dog Cabaret to talk art, life, and politics until the wee-hours of the morning. Jakobson lived through the most crucial world events of the twentieth century, and was somehow at its center as someone continually evaluating the effects from within them. He really put any aspiration toward bohemianism I might have to shame'at one point he speaks of his time in Riga as a poor student, reading and writing all day, living in an unheated room, and only able to afford to eat three times a week. There is somehow a beauty in his privation, and a fondness for it too, that is made palpable as Jakobson recounts his life story to the editor of this book (Bengt Jangfeldt) soon before his death in the 1990s. Jakobson, better known as one of the cornerstones of structuralist theory, is here as human and alive as any, and his life and work are worth experiencing.