PICTURESHOW: DAVID CRONENBERG'S WIFE

The father of Russian lit. His poetry is amazingly sonorous and visual. A confirmed womaniser, one of his (youthful) bawdy poems features a man who opens up a box only to discover that it contains a host of flying vaginas, which promptly flutter up and nestle in the trees. They only return to the box when another man suggests undoing his fly… Pushkin was killed in a duel defending the honour of his frivolous wife. Don’t get that happening much these days.

Ukrainian born, but wrote in Russian. His stories have a surreal, absurd slant to them, sometimes with an almost Freudian edge, like the story where a man wakes up to discover that his nose has disappeared. The nose turns up in town, wearing a jacket and refusing to rejoin the man’s face – the nose, after all, is of a higher rank in the civil service… When Gogol’s remains were moved to a new cemetery, they opened the coffin to find that he was face down, not as he was buried, leading people to think he had been buried alive!

Dostoevsky answered the critics who considered his novels melodramatic and unrealistic by saying that you only had to read a newspaper to learn that such violent things happened every day. And his life certainly mirrored the turbulence of his novels; he suffered from epilepsy, would more than once lose all his money to gambling, and earlier in life at 28 thought he was to be shot for being a member of an intellectual liberal group, only for it to transpire that the execution was a ‘mock’ and part of the punishment. I reckon that would leave its mark.

Perhaps my favourite writer. Often pictured as a well-to-do English-style gentleman, his short stories are actually very earthy and sensuous. His plays get all the attention, but his stories seemingly manage to fit the whole of life into a few pages. He understood that what was important was not people’s views in themselves, but the circumstances and experiences of their lives that had made them form those views. Considered, unlike a lot of artists, to be a nice guy, he died of tuberculosis, drinking champagne in 1904.

One of the Russian ‘futurists’, Mayakovsky was torn between writing very visceral love poetry and upholding the aims of communism in verse (which viewed lyric poetry as ‘bourgeois’). His verse is packed full of invented words, over-the-top metaphors and violent imagery. He supported the Bolsheviks (though was never a party member), thinking they would bring about a ‘revolution of the soul’, but as Soviet society became more repressive under Stalin, he was attacked from all sides, and having been refused a visa to see his current girlfriend in Paris, he shot himself through the heart. Conspiracy theories abound.