48 Moyka Embankment, St. Petersburg 191186, Russia
Zabolotsky studied literature at the Herzen Educational Institute in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) during the stricken years following the Revolution.
48 Moyka Embankment, St. Petersburg 191186, Russia
Zabolotsky studied literature at the Herzen Educational Institute in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) during the stricken years following the Revolution.
Nikolay Zabolotsky was a Russian poet and translator. He was a member of Leningrad’s last avant-garde group, OBERIU (the “Association of Real Art”). Today the books of this once forbidden and suppressed author are shelved among the literary classics.
Background
Nikolay Zabolotsky was born on May 7, 1903, in Kizicheskaya Sloboda (now part of the city of Kazan). Zabolotsky was born into a family that had only just risen above its peasant origins. His father was a local agricultural advisor and his mother had been a schoolteacher. He grew up in the village of Sernur (now in the Republic of Mari El) and the small town of Urzhum, in the rural province of Vyatka. At the age of seventeen, he left home and headed for Moscow.
Education
After a good but unremarkable education at school, Zabolotsky became an indigent student first of medicine in Moscow, and then of literature at the Herzen Educational Institute in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) during the stricken years following the Revolution. He was briefly tempted by academia, but his desire to become a professional writer prevailed.
Zabolotsky had already begun to write poetry during his university time. His formative period showed the influences of the Futurist works of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, the lyrical poems of Alexander Blok and Sergei Esenin, and the art of Pavel Filonov and Marc Chagall. During this period, Zabolotsky also met his future wife, E.V. Klykova.
Graduating in 1925, Zabolotsky took a position with the state’s children's publishing house; his income through the 1930s was earned as a writer and translator of children’s stories, a fact which has been seen by scholars as affecting, for the better, his own literary style. He became associated with the modernist literary group OBERIU, or “Association for Real Creativity,” and was the primary writer of its 1928 manifesto, which, as described: “advocated an art that attempts to awaken a fresh appreciation and understanding of objects and surroundings through an unconventional presentation.”
As a modernist movement, OBERIU, and consequently Zabolotsky as a member of it, received a great deal of criticism from conservative Communist critics during the Lenin and early Stalin eras. Zabolotsky’s first volume of verse, Stolbtsy “Scrolls”, was viciously attacked in official quarters upon its first publication in 1929, although writers in avant-garde circles recognized its value. These early poems, according to Sona Stephan Hoisington in the Encyclopedia of World Literature, portrayed life in the new Soviet Union as “a monstrous phantasmagoria,” in “bold and bizarre imagery” which made use of extensive wordplay, the mixing of formal and informal voices, fantastic creatures, and startling metamorphoses such as a city turning into a sea, and a streetcar into a steamship.
Zabolotsky was arrested in 1938 and spent six and a half years in prison and two more in exile. He wrote of this experience in “The Story of My Imprisonment” (not published until 1988). Yet he survived and managed to re-establish himself as a writer.
Zabolotsky's first book of poetry, “Columns,” was a series of grotesque vignettes on the life that Lenin's NEP (New Economic Policy) had created. It included the poem “Zodiac's Dimming Every Feature”, an absurdist lullaby that, 76 years later, in 2005, provided the words for a Russian pop hit. In 1937, Zabolotsky published his second book of poetry. With his “Second Book of Verse”, he attempted, brilliantly but unsuccessfully, to reconcile his originality with the dictates of “Socialist Realism.” This collection showed the subject matter of Zabolotsky's work moving from social concerns to elegies and nature poetry and is notable for its inclusion of pantheistic themes.
Zabolotsky was a thoroughly professional man who saved his liveliness for his poetry. He also made his mark early with “Scrolls,” a collection of verse distinguished by its pictorial energy and inventive rhyming. A disciple of the painter Pavel Filonov, he transposed the maitre's colorful and grotesque visions into verbal landscapes of urban life, reflecting the tenets of the OBERIU, whose manifesto of 1928 Zabolotsky helped write, and whose key techniques were unexpected transitions, absurd coincidences, and brevity of montage. Zabolotsky aimed to free the poetic word from the semantic freight of poetic tradition. Making poetic language strange was a way of rediscovering the world.
A philosophical strain emerged in a second collection that was banned at the last moment in 1932. Influenced by the fashionable utopian doctrines and evolutionary theories of Fedorov and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, in the 1930s, Zabolotsky developed a complex Naturphilosophie in his long poems, most famously in “The Triumph of Agriculture” (1933) where the speakers, who are animals, articulate a belief in the union of man and environment.
Although not anti-Soviet, this work was hardly in tune with the usual hymns to Stalin's policy of collectivization. The penalty was a decade in the Gulag that left him a broken man. Following his release, he settled in Moscow, where he mainly worked as a translator. What remained of his creative spirit went into translating poetry from Old Russian and Georgian, including Rustaveli's epic poem “The Knight in the Panther's Skin” as well as more modern Georgian poets such as Vazha-Pshavela, Grigol Orbeliani, and David Guramishvili.
As a result of his exile, Zabolotsky’s health was not good. The last few years of Zabolotsky's life were beset by illness. He suffered a debilitating heart attack and, from 1956 onward, spent much of his time in the town of Tarusa. A second heart attack claimed his life on 14 October 1958 in Moscow. The first unexpurgated edition of his “Complete Works” appeared in 2002.
Amidst Joseph Stalin's increased censorship of the arts, Zabolotsky fell victim to the Soviet government's purges. In 1938, he was sent for five years to Siberia. This sentence was prolonged until the war was over. In 1944 after his appeal he was freed of the guard, but still continued the sentence in exile in Karaganda. In Siberia he continued his creative work and was occupied with the translation of The Tale of Igor's Campaign. This followed with his release in 1945.
Membership
Upon his return to Moscow in 1946, Zabolotsky was restored as a member of the Union of Soviet Writers.
Union of Soviet Writers
1946 - 1958
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Writers
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexander Blok, Sergei Esenin, Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky
Artists
Pavel Filonov, Marc Chagall
Connections
Zabolotsky was married to Ekaterina Klykova. They had a son, named Nikita Zabolotsky, and a daughter, named Natalia Zabolotsky.
The Life of Zabolotsky
A biography of the poet Nikolay Zabolotsky, written by his son, illustrated with examples of his work and telling in detail the story of his arrest during Stalin's terror.