Nikolai Zabolotsky. Enigma and Cultural Paradigm

Sarah Pratt traces interwoven questions in the work of Nikolai Zabolotsky, a figure ranking just behind Pasternak, Mandelstram and Akhmatova in modern Russian poetry and the first major poet to come to light in the Soviet period. The book identifies a "Soviet" impulse, marked by a veneer of Marxist ideology and political acceptability, and a "Russian" impulse that reflects prerevolutionary mores and the cultural bedrock of Russian Orthodoxy.