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, December 1, 2011

The Portrait

Poets, you should love painting!
For it alone
Can portray on canvas
Signs of an unsettled soul.

Remember how Struiskaya,
Draped in satin, looked at us
Out of Rokotov's portrait
From the depths of the past?

Her eyes were two clouds,
Half-smiling, half-weeping,
Like two lies,
Veiled by the mist of failure.

Two riddles came together,
Half-rapture, half-fright,
A touch of mad tenderness,
An expectation of mortal pain.

When darkness descends,
And a thunderstorm threatens,
Her lovely eyes will glimmer
From the depths of my soul.

1953

Note: Fyodor Stepanovich Rokotov's (1730-1808) portrait of the
noblewoman Struiskaya now hangs in the Tretiakov Gallery.
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