Hunt for Optimism

Begun in 1929 under the title "New Prose" and drastically revised after Vladimir Mayakovsky''s sudden death, A Hunt for Optimism (1931) circles obsessively around a single scene of interrogation in which a writer is subjected to a show trial for his unorthodoxy. Using multiple perspectives, fragments, and aphorisms, and bearing the vulnerability of both the Russian Jewry and the anti-Bolshevik int...