Nikolai Zabolotsky: The Destruction of a Myth

The road from a provincial wunderkind to one of the key poets of the 20th century—without embellishment, but with respect for the facts.

Winner of the «Большая книга» (Big Book) award, Sergey Belyakov reconstructs Zabolotsky’s life piece by piece.

This biography is an attempt not only to come closer to understanding his poems, but also to unravel the mystery of a personality whose inner world was on a scale comparable to the universe of Tsiolkovsky.

A historian and writer, winner of the «Большая книга» award; finalist of the «Ясная Поляна» and «Национальный бестселлер» awards; author of the documentary novel «Парижские мальчики в сталинской Москве» and of biographies of Lev Gumilyov, Valentin Kataev, and Yevgeny Petrov.

The book is written without monumentality and rhetoric—instead, with precision and attention to detail. Sergey Belyakov carefully dismantles the enduring myth of “a broken” and “re-educated” Zabolotsky, showing how from a county boy with a notebook of poems emerged one of the most contradictory and unexpected poets of the century. Here are—Maris sacred groves, and the provincial “Hogwarts,” and starving Moscow, and avant-garde Petrograd, and ОБЭРИУ, and the camps, and a return to poetry. Zabolotsky appears not only as a poet in the same line as Pasternak, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, and Mayakovsky, but also as a utopian thinker: he corresponded with Tsiolkovsky and anticipated ideas that today are linked to biotechnologies.