The Crazy Ship

*THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) HAS BEEN PRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED AND/OR DIRECTED BY A FOREIGN AGENT, OLEG ANDERSHANOVICH LEKMANOV, OR CONCERNS THE ACTIVITIES OF A FOREIGN AGENT, OLEG ANDERSHANOVICH LEKMANOV.

The chronicle of the House of Arts and the people who inhabited it. It is an opportunity to feel the atmosphere of Petersburg culture from centuries past—to witness a literary flourishing and the everyday life of an artistic milieu.

Olga Dmitrievna Forsh (1873–1961) is a prose writer and playwright.

The novel “The Mad Ship,” often called “the last novel of the Silver Age,” was created in 1930: that same year it was published in a journal, sparked heated controversy, and was then for a long time absent from Soviet book publishing for censorship reasons. Its basis is real life at the Petrograd House of Arts (DISK), opened in 1919 on the initiative of Korney Chukovsky with the active participation of Maxim Gorky. Writers and artists lived and worked here: Alexander Blok (Gaetan), Andrey Bely (Alien Gastrolër), Yevgeny Zamyatin (The Buckskin/Horned One), Mikhail Slonimsky (Kopilsky), and others. The masks—pseudonyms—are easy to recognize; many episodes are close to documentary material. But most importantly, Forsh tells of the unusual fate of the Artist during the era of the Revolution.

The book is provided with a foreword by the philologist Oleg Lekmanov.