Are you a dissident? Art and diplomacy - two encounters

Abstract

Although his background was in science, the ambassador reminded me that, because he was a Russian, art and poetry were deeply, deeply rooted in his psyche. It followed that he knew well the Moscow writers’ centre, the Gorkiy Institute, which I had visited with the poets Ian Wedde and Tusiata Avia a few months earlier. (We had stood in the room where Mayakovsky made his last public address, and beside the desk where he wrote some of his greatest verse...) Not far from Red Square, the Gorkiy Institute is a part of the Russian soul, he said, just as literature and art are. A Russian can never be a stranger to poetry.