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

Sunday, November 27, 2011

A Farewell to Friends

In wide-brimmed hats and long duffel coats,
With notebooks full of your verse,
Long ago like fallen lilac sprigs,
Into dust you've since dispersed.

You're in that land, where no shape's ready-made,
Where everything's disjointed, blurred, aborted,
Where the sky is replaced by a burial mound,
And a motionless moon has orbited.

There, in a foreign, inaudible tongue,
A synod of soundless insects chants,
There, with a little lantern in his hand,
A beetle-man greets an acquaintance.

Is it peaceful for you, comrades?
Is it easy for you? And is forgetting only just?
Now your brothers are the roots, the ants,
Blades of grass, whispers, and columns of dust.

Now your sisters are carnations,
Lilac tips, chicks, and chips of wood...
And you're powerless to remember that language
Up there where your forsaken brother stood.

There's no place for him yet in those parts,
Where you've vanished, as shadows lightly cursed,
In wide-brimmed hats and long duffel coats,
With notebooks full of your verse.

1952
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