He starved to death in a psychiatric ward during the siege of Leningrad. A year earlier, he had pretended to be insane to avoid execution. A year before that, he was accused of sabotaging the war effort. In the preceding decade, he had been fired many times, had lost most of his publishing venues, and had been exiled.
Before all of this, when he still was prone to interrupt the traffic on Nevsky prospect, he kept a large machine at home, which he made of found scrap. When asked what it did, he would retort, “Nothing. It’s just a machine.”
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