1. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated from the Italian by Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 7.
2. ‘Proshchanie s avangardom’, Strana i mir, 1985, no. 8, pp. 89–92. John Willett would seem to agree, describing the concept of avant-garde as ‘still able to fire the less sceptical creative artists, middlemen, and critics with a fruitful sense of minority cohesion’: Alan Bullock and Oliver Stallybrass (eds), The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (London, Fontana/Collins, 1977), p. 47.
3. All this is, of course, a far cry from an early Russian avant-gardist’s call for disunity: ‘Khudozhniki vsekh stran raz’’ediniaites’!’: V. K[aratygin], ‘M. Reger’, Zolotoe runo, II (1906), 97.
4. An excerpt from the novel with a sympathetic introduction by Tat’iana Tolstaia appeared in Ogonek, 1988, no. 33, pp. 20–21, and a full edition with an afterword by Andrei Bitov followed in Oktiabr’, 1989, no. 3, pp. 75–156. Chapter 2 alone was published by Sel’skaia molodezh’, 1989, no. 3, pp. 32–7, again with an introduction by Tat’iana Tolstaia. Page references in the text are to the first edition: Sasha Sokolov, Shkola dlia durakov (Ardis, Ann Arbor, 1976).
5. Sasha Sokolov, Palisandriia (Ardis, Ann Arbor, 1985).