feelings that fill our hearts—but what words would do our lives justice? . . . The highest mountain on earth—Mount Stalin—has been conquered by our country. The best subway in the world is our subway. The highest sky in the world is our sky: it has been raised by our aviators. The deepest sea is our sea: it has been deepened by our divers. In our country, people fly, run, study, draw, and play faster, farther, and better than anyone else in the world! . . . That is what is expected of us—the first generation produced by the revolution. 40 In the second half of the 1930s, the most prestigious Soviet university was the Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature (IFLI), headed by R. S. Zemliachka’s sister A. S. Karpova (Zalkind) and known as the “Communist Lycée” (by analogy with the aristocratic Tsarskoe Selo Lycée, attended by Pushkin and forever associated with joyous creativity, lifelong friendships, auspicious beginnings, and, above all, poetry). IFLI had all of those things in great abundance. According to Orlova’s recollections, “The cult of friendship reigned supreme. We had our special language, our Masonic signs, and a very strong sense of belonging. Friendships were formed overnight and lasted a long time. And even now [1961–79], whatever the moats and precipices that divide some of us, I find myself saying: ‘God help you, dear friends.’ ” 41 The quotation is, of course, from Pushkin. The most popular IFLI teachers (Abram Belkin, Mikhail Lifshits, and Leonid Pinsky) were professors of literature, and the most charismatic students (also predominantly Jewish) were poets, critics, and journalists. As Kopelev wrote about Belkin, “he did not just love Dostoevsky—he professed Dostoevsky’s work as a religious doctrine.” And as David Samoilov wrote about Pinsky, “in the old days he would have become a famous rabbi somewhere in Hasidic Ukraine, a saint and an object of worship. In fact, we worshiped him too. He was a great authority, a famous interpreter of texts.” But it was not their professors that the IFLI poets worshiped—it was their “age,” their youth, their generation, their fraternity, and their art. We would talk until we were hoarse and recite poetry until we were blue in the face. We would sit around long past midnight. I remember how I ran out of cigarettes once, around two in the morning. We walked about five kilometers through the city, to an all-night store near Mayakovsky Square. Then we walked back and continued our argument in the haze of tobacco