Last night I went to Pushkin House, a centre for Russian Cultural Studies in Bloomsbury Square, to a meeting of The Pushkin Club. Set up in 1953 for emigres and lovers of Russian literature, the meetings have been hosted by a number of eminent speakers, poets and writers over the years. I hasten to add that I'm not a frequenter of either The Pushkin Club or Pushkin House, but was there to hear the poet Yvonne Green's interpretations of Semyon Izraelevich Lipkin's poetry, and Robert Chandler read from the 20th Century's greatest unknown Russian novelist and poet, Andrei Platonov. Chandler's excellent translations brought Vasily Grossman to Western audiences and he is now retranslating Platonov's, "Happy Moscow," (Harvill, 2001).

Pushkin House is currently showing an exhibition of iconic art, so after I climbed the cantilevered stone staircase, I entered the reading room, plush with gilt and red velvet chairs, where number of iconic paintings of gold-winged angels and curcifixed martyrs surrounded by pious maidens were on display, setting a pre-revolutionary scene for our journey into Russia's literary past. The nice man at reception told me later that traditionally the Church sanctions all iconic paintings and no one is allowed to paint them without permission, implying the paintings on display - one wall of which, incredibly, were done by children aged between 9 and 14 - were not exactly approved of. No one complained when the exhibition opened, he added, but he seemed a little miffed by it himself. I loved the idea of paintings of angels and religious piousness being illicit and controversial - it seems so implausible.

Robert opened the evening by introducing Yvonne Green who read from her collection, "The Assay" (Smith/Doorstop 2010), her forthcoming novella; "The Old Ladies Club" about a woman who dreams of retiring from her husband, family and job with her best friend; and from her new collection, "After Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin" (Smith Doorstop 2011) which won a Poetry Book Society's (PBS) Recommended Translation Award.

The PBS has just lost its Arts Council Grant and Yvonne articulated the importance of their work to both poets and readers in this country. I have no idea what the future is for literature and the arts but it worries me: in schools the sciences are pushed so much more than literature and increasing numbers of children are moving away from studying English in favour of sciences and social sciences; the programmes on physics on TV have started a wave of applicants for physics degrees, and the technological advances of modern life are so fast-moving, lucrative and impressive, it's no wonder students are more interested in studying gaming than studying literature and poetry. With funding cuts to the arts, who knows what will be in a generation's time. I pondered this as I drank wine with Elaine Feinstein, Eva Hoffman, Emeritus Professor Valentina Polukhina, the poet Eve Grubin and the venerable children's soccer coach, Brian Green, among others. 

Robert then read  from Platonov, whose humour and unique perspectives clearly influenced the work of his friend Grossman. Men eat meat and grow fur was a sentiment expressed at the end of the reading, where in ruined Moscow, butchers and hairdressers had sprung up but places of culture were absent. Sitting there reflecting on how little Russian literature I'd read and how much I'd like to change that, I realised that with funding being effectively eradicated and interest in the arts waning, London, sadly, doesn't seem far behind.