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. Because of this apparent split, and because Zabolotsky’s career was punctuated by a term in prison camp that emphasized the differences between his early and late works, the poet has often come across as enigmatic and politically suspect. Pratt, however, demonstrates an underlying continuity in Zabolotsky’s work, which embodies the mixture of brash iconoclasm and indelibly embedded tradition that shaped the culture of his homeland for most of the 20th century.