April 23 – Millosh Gjergj Nikolla is appointed schoolteacher among the Serbs of Vraka, Kingdom of Albania. The next two years bring his creative period as a short story writer, describing his sense of despair at being isolated in a backward region.[2]
May 16–17 – In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin orders the NKVD to "preserve but isolate" Osip Mandelstam, after having been informed of the "Stalin Epigram"; Mandelstam is then arrested. A protest by literary figures, including Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, prompts Stalin to declare that he might "review the case" (he never will). His admiration for Pasternak as a poetic genius is strengthened when the latter asks for a private meeting to discuss "life and death" — although he never grants it, he instructs the NKVD to "leave that cloud-dweller [Pasternak] alone".[3]
Robert Walser, under treatment for schizophrenia since 1929, is placed in a sanatorium in Herisau, Switzerland. This ends his work as a writer, though he will live until 1956.[5]
^Preface to his anthology The Protestant Mystics (1964).
^Heffernan, Valerie (1998). Provocation from the Periphery: Robert Walser Re-examined. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. pp. 15–16. ISBN978-3-8260-3264-6.