Guy Davenport. 
 
Scribners: 1974. First edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Near fine.
 
"'Tatlin!' is a fable about totalitarian governments strangling creativity, not always blatantly and openly.  At the time I was lecturing on Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, the classic study in our time of Government and The Poet.  Vladimir Tatlin's genius suffocated by Stalin seemed to me to be paradigmatic and timely.  I learned from Kafka's Amerika that you don't have to have a realistic knowledge of a place, and from Nabokov that 'realism' is simply a fashionable mode."