The article considers the newly discovered facts of the life and work of the forgotten writer Vasily Nikitich Borakhvostov (1905-1988), a Tsaritsyn Cossack by birth, and an example of the Soviet experiment of the 20-30s on growing «writers of the people». As a deservedly forgotten writer, he is of undoubted interest as a participant, even if marginal, of the literary life of the 1930s. A long-term acquaintance of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Yuri Olesha, Alexander Fadeev, Lev Nikulin, and many other representatives of the Soviet cultural elite, he left memoirs that were not published by the Soviet Writer Publishing House due to the negative reviews by Viktor Ardov and Georgy Munblit. This article is the first to publish an excerpt from these 124 memoirs, now mostly lost, which tells how, through their common love to billiards, Borakhvostov met Vladimir Mayakovsky. Then, the author traces the genesis of one of the Mayakovsky commissioned journalistic poems, “Dela vuznye, horoshie i konfuznye” (“University affairs, good and embarrassing” (1927), based on the Borakhvostov's feuilleton “Pari” (“The Bet”). Published in 1926 in the magazine «Red Studentship», the feuilleton was reprinted in 1927 by the «Komsomolskaya Pravda». As a result, public attention was attracted to unsightly facts from the way of life of Soviet students, which is exactly the theme of the specified poem by Mayakovsky
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