My Diamond Crown

This is not an ordinary novel… A novel-mystery, a flight of fantasy, a "magical crystal of memory"… Unique, peculiar, and innovative for its time — it merges the lyrical and the autobiographical. In the novel "My Diamond Crown," Valentin Katayev describes specific facts of his personal biography, recreating a panorama of the literary (and not only!) life of Russia in the twenties to early thirties. By extracting characters one by one from the "mysterious convolutions of the imagination's mechanism," Valentin Petrovich "avoids real names." Each "character" — among whom are Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yuri Olesha, Sergei Yesenin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, Osip Mandelstam, Evgeny Petrov, and many others — is given a nickname, their appearance and character are described, poems are quoted from memory, allowing readers to unravel the mysteries themselves…