“Wasn’t Mayakovskii imprisoned?” Artiom remembered again.
“That doesn’t count,” Afanasiev didn’t agree again. “All that’s not enough, not it at all! Solovki — now that’s the real thing, Tioma, a special case! It’s like Odysseus, when visiting Polyphemus…”
“Well yes, Polyphemus, skerries, sludge… that’ll be quite a salad,” sniggered Artiom, then immediately remembered the sour cream and onions.
“You don’t understand anything!” Afanasiev seemed to be really angry now. “The future of poetry is in rough words, accidental ones. Lomonosov wrote about three styles — the exalted, the middling and the low. Well, we need to find even lower sources for our poetry. We need to dip into the dung, the latrine hole and mix it up with the exalted style — believe me, it’ll work, you’ll see!”
“As for me,
