Nikolai Nikolaevich and Other Works

Yuz Aleshkovsky (1929–2022) — a Russian writer and poet, author of popular "camp" songs that were not performed on stage, yet gained fame among the people; they were fondly loved and sung even without knowing the author's name. Aleshkovsky is also the author of works such as "Nikolai Nikolaevich", "Camouflage", "Kangaroo", and others, which also won the love of the people, although in the writer's homeland, most of them were published only years after their creation. According to Joseph Brodsky, in Aleshkovsky, we deal with a unique type of writer "as an instrument of language"; there are few such examples in Russian literature: Nikolai Gogol, Andrey Platonov, Mikhail Zoshchenko... "The sentimental saturation has been pushed to the limits of mockery, the fiction — to the phantasmagorical," wrote Brodsky, he is a "true Orphic: a poet who has completely subordinated himself to language and has received as a reward from its generosity the gift of revelation and Homeric laughter".