Who is Zabolotsky

Who is Nikolai Zabolotsky?

Nikolai Zabolotsky was a much admired Russian poet of the 20th century. He was prominent during the Soviet period and made his literary debut in 1929 with the publication of his first book of poetry, Scrolls. It was a remarkable collection of descriptions of urban life in Leningrad during the first years of the Soviet era. The poems created a sensation and Zabolotsky was severely criticized for his satirical view of life and pessimistic tone. As a result, many of the copies of the edition of 1,100 were confiscated and destroyed.

As the political situation steadily worsened, the authorities had enough of his strange brand of pessimism and parody and he was arrested in 1938 and sentenced to seven years in an NKVD labour camp. In 1946 he was released and allowed to return to Moscow; he continued to write poems, but now in a more classical form of nature poetry. He died in 1958.

A note about Zabolotsky's later poetry

A note about Zabolotsky's later poetry

Following Zabolotsky's expressionistic poems about Petersburg during the 1920s, he was led to a larger poetry exploring man's place in nature. An idealist at heart, his philosophical tone and ecological vision of nature is particularly relevant for us today.

Zabolotsky fell victim to the Stalinist purges and did not write any poetry until his release in 1946, whereupon he began to write with his earlier intensity. His work, from the early avant-garde pieces to the later classical lyrics, is unified: the poems add up to an epic about man's place in the scheme of creation

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Birds

Barely swaying
At a point where the winds cross,
Light birds hung
Like icon lamps amid the heavens.
Their tiny telescopic eyes
Peered straight down.
People crawled like bed-bugs,
And brooks meandered.
A mouse ran across a field,
And a bird pounced on it.
The little corpse, instantly disfigured,
Was dragged into the reeds.
And sitting there, the bird
Tore the mouse with its fingers,
And from its mouth a stream of water
Flowed onto the ground.

And shifting the tiny telescopes
Of its dimmed eyes,
The bird thought. A tarantas
Came rolling over the hill.

I was sitting in that tarantas,
As it sped across the field,
And my own wretched fate
Weighed on my heart as well.

1933
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