Published on: 2026-10-06
Source: Moscow Government – Правительства Москвы –
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The V.V. Mayakovsky State Museum invites you to a new meeting of the reading group “Reading with Mayakovsky.”
The theme will be the novel by Nikolay Chernyshevsky “What Is to Be Done?” — one of the key works of the 19th century that influenced the people of the 20th century. Lilya Brik recalled that this book was one of the closest to Vladimir Mayakovsky: he constantly returned to it and reread it shortly before his death.
The novel “about new people” served as a source of life modeling for an entire generation, which included V.V. Mayakovsky. The themes of “new life” and struggle against philistinism in the poem “About This” refer to the utopian communes from “What Is to Be Done?”.
At the meeting, participants will analyze the connections between the novel and the poet’s work, looking for similarities between the lyrical hero of Vladimir Mayakovsky in his early poems and the rebellious characters of 19th-century literature.
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