Nikolai Zabolotsky. The Destruction of the Myth

Historian and writer, laureate of the «Big Book» award, finalist of the «Yasnaya Polyana» and «National Bestseller» awards; author of the documentary novel «Parisian Boys in Stalin's Moscow», biographies of Lev Gumilev, Valentin Kataev, and Evgeny Petrov. This book is written without bronze and pathos, but with attention to detail. Sergey Belyakov carefully analyzes the myth of the «broken» and «corrected» Zabolotsky, showing how from a provincial boy with a notebook of poems, he grew into one of the most paradoxical poets of the 20th century. It has everything: Mari sacred groves, a district «Hogwarts», hungry Moscow, avant-garde Petrograd, OBERIU, camps, and a return to poetry.

Zabolotsky is not only a poet, equal to Pasternak, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, but also an unusual utopian thinker who corresponded with Tsiolkovsky and predicted the achievements of modern biotechnology.