Moscow, March 1953: As Stalin breathes his last, four women meet in Room 408 of the luxurious hotel Metropol. They have gathered to reminisce about the great poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose work they once inspired.
Following his mysterious suicide twenty-five years earlier, he was canonised by Stalin as the 'most talented poet of our Soviet era' - but in life he was a far more complicated man, violently torn between art and politics. As the four muses - who both loved and loathed him - piece together their conflicting memories of the poet, a portrait of the artist as a tormented young idealist emerges. Recalling Mayakovsky's early years as a leader of the Futurists, his later work as a propagandist for the Soviet state, and the censorship battles that pitted him against the government, their unabashedly frank conversation reveals him as an intense and tormented sexual obsessive caught in the eye of history's storm, struggling to hold on to his ideals in the face of a revolution betrayed.
In Vladimir M., Robert Littell tells a subversive, passionate story of free love, avant-garde art and political ideals. In this explosive, provocative cocktail of fiction and reality, he brings to life the tumultuous Stalinist era, and the disaster it spelt for the artists it ensnared.
The award-winning author Robert Littell is one of the grand masters of the spy novel. Born in Brooklyn in 1935, he served as an officer aboard an American destroyer in the 1950s, then turned to journalism and from 1965 to 1970 was the Newsweek editor specializing in Russia and the Middle East. His many acclaimed novels include A Nasty Piece of Work, Young Philby and The Stalin Epigram, and are published by Duckworth Overlook. He has won both the prestigious Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger (for The Defection of A. J. Lewinter) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (for Legends). His 2002 novel The Company was a New York Times bestseller, and both it and Legends have been adapted for television. He lives in France.
Genre: Historical
Following his mysterious suicide twenty-five years earlier, he was canonised by Stalin as the 'most talented poet of our Soviet era' - but in life he was a far more complicated man, violently torn between art and politics. As the four muses - who both loved and loathed him - piece together their conflicting memories of the poet, a portrait of the artist as a tormented young idealist emerges. Recalling Mayakovsky's early years as a leader of the Futurists, his later work as a propagandist for the Soviet state, and the censorship battles that pitted him against the government, their unabashedly frank conversation reveals him as an intense and tormented sexual obsessive caught in the eye of history's storm, struggling to hold on to his ideals in the face of a revolution betrayed.
In Vladimir M., Robert Littell tells a subversive, passionate story of free love, avant-garde art and political ideals. In this explosive, provocative cocktail of fiction and reality, he brings to life the tumultuous Stalinist era, and the disaster it spelt for the artists it ensnared.
The award-winning author Robert Littell is one of the grand masters of the spy novel. Born in Brooklyn in 1935, he served as an officer aboard an American destroyer in the 1950s, then turned to journalism and from 1965 to 1970 was the Newsweek editor specializing in Russia and the Middle East. His many acclaimed novels include A Nasty Piece of Work, Young Philby and The Stalin Epigram, and are published by Duckworth Overlook. He has won both the prestigious Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger (for The Defection of A. J. Lewinter) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (for Legends). His 2002 novel The Company was a New York Times bestseller, and both it and Legends have been adapted for television. He lives in France.
Genre: Historical
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