Mikhail Slonimsky's career spanned several decades of Russia under Soviet power. He is best known as one of the Serapion Brothers, a group of innovative prose writers of the 1930s who believed in the autonomy of art. During his later years as a writer, Slonimsky was able to write works of a more realistic nature and even wrote construction novels according to the paradigm set up under socialist realism. After his heyday as a Serapion, Slonimsky's talents waned; nevertheless, he continued to publish interesting prose. His greatest contribution to Russian literature, however, remains his daring prose of the 1920s.

Mikhail Leonidovich Slonimsky was born into a Jewish family in Pavlovsk, a suburb of St. Petersburg, on 20 July 1897 and grew up, as he himself describes in the "Biografiia" section of the first volume of Sobranie sochinenii (1969), as a part of the "Petersburg intelligentsia" in a home where many famous...