On 28 May 1919, the residents of Moscow woke to find that the walls of the Strastnoi convent had been daubed with what at first glance might have appeared to be crude blasphemous slogans. More attentive reading, however, revealed that this was poetry: 'I sing and appeal: Lord, give birth to a calf!' 'Look at the fat thighs/Of this obscene wall./Here the nuns at night/Remove Christ's trousers.' 'Citizens, change/The underclothes of your souls!' These words came courtesy of the Order of Imaginists, a group of avant-garde poets; they had been published together with their manifesto in February of the same year - only to meet a storm of criticism. Lenin is alleged to have read the assembled texts, by Sergei Esenin, Anatoly Mariengof, Vadim Shershenevich and Ryurik Ivnev, and to have referred to Mariengof - who wrote the lines about the underclothes - as a 'sick boy'.

LRB 7 March 2002 | PDF Download