Nikolai Zabolotsky biography. Brief biography of Nikolai Zabolotsky

(1903-1958) Russian poet

A poet of thought, a poet of philosophical reflection and classical completeness of verse - this is how Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky entered our poetry. He wrote poetry sparingly, only when an idea had matured, and left behind only a volume of his poetic works and several books of translations, unanimously recognized as exemplary.

Nikolai Zabolotsky was born in Kazan. At that time, his father served as an agronomist on a Kazan zemstvo farm seven kilometers from the city. The poet was proud of his pedigree. His grandfather was a Nikolaev soldier, his father was a rural agronomist. Nikolai's childhood years were spent in the Vyatka province, in the village of Sernur, not far from the city of Urzhum. Impressions of the local nature, its pristine freshness, remained in the poet’s soul for the rest of his life and were reflected in his work. Here he graduated from three grades of primary school, and here he first began writing poetry. As a seven-year-old child, he had already chosen his future profession.

In 1913, Nikolai Zabolotsky was admitted to the Urzhum Real School and from that time on he lived outside his family, coming home only on vacation. His youthful world took shape during the First World War in the setting of a small provincial town located 180 kilometers from the railway. Such a life suited the young man little; he longed for the center, for living life, for art.

After graduating from a real school in Urzhum, Zabolotsky in 1920, as a seventeen-year-old young man, went to Moscow to continue his education and entered the philological and medical faculties of Moscow University at the same time.

However, life in Moscow did not suit him, and in August 1921 he left for Petrograd, where he entered the Pedagogical Institute. Herzen at the Department of Language and Literature of the Faculty of Social and Economics. The poet did not intend to be a teacher. He only wanted to receive the philological education necessary for writing. Nikolai Zabolotsky lived in a student dormitory, wrote a lot, imitating Mayakovsky, Blok, and Yesenin. He did not yet have his own voice in poetry, but was considered a capable student and at one time even thought of devoting himself entirely to science. However, the attachment to poetry turned out to be stronger, and Zabolotsky abandoned these thoughts.

In 1925, he graduated from the institute, having by that time a voluminous notebook of not very good poems and a small basket of property. But the young man wanted to become a writer at all costs, so he was persistent and purposeful. " We must conquer life,” he wrote in February 1928. - We have to work and fight for ourselves. How many failures are still ahead, how many disappointments and doubts! But if at such moments a person hesitates, his song is finished. Faith and perseverance, work and honesty. ..My life is forever connected with art - you know that. You know what the writer's path is. I renounced worldly prosperity, “social status”, broke away from my family - for art. Outside of it, I am nothing...»

In 1926, Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky was drafted into the army and served in Leningrad in a team of short-term soldiers. He was a member of the editorial board of the military wall newspaper, which was considered the best in the area. In 1927, having passed the platoon commander exam, he was transferred to the reserve.

It should be noted that at this time Nikolai Zabolotsky actively collaborated in children's literature - he wrote in magazines for children “Hedgehog” and “Chizh”, “Pioneer” and “Koster”. He published several children's books, the best of which were adaptations of “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by Francois Rabelais and “Till Eulenspiegel” by C. de Coster. Of course, children's literature did not exhaust his interests, and he continued to write lyrics. In 1929, Zabolotsky’s first book of poems, “Columns,” was published, written in a satirical spirit in relation to the philistine, NEP reality that surrounded the poet.

In 1930, the young poet married E.V. Klykova, two years later a son, Nikita, was born into the family, and five years later, a daughter, Natasha.

In his creative development, Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky constantly turned to the pure springs of classical Russian poetry - the poems of Pushkin, Tyutchev, Baratynsky. The poetry of Nikolai Zabolotsky is the poetry of thought, which is expressed in a metaphorical, figurative form. The poet is invariably concerned with the problem of creativity. Many of his poems recreate the very process of the birth of a work of art - inspiration, the emergence of a subconscious plan and the triumph of thought in the completed whole. In the poem “Beethoven” the creator’s thought arises “in the face of world space” and becomes music:

And through the peace of the world's space, the ninth wave passed to the very stars... Open, thought! Become music, word, strike the hearts so that the world may triumph!

Nature is perceived by the poet as a historical reality, changing under the influence of human reason and labor. Hence the path to such poems as “City in the Steppe”, “North”, “Road Makers”, in which the construction of a road takes place in the virgin nature of the Far East. The poet himself took part in its construction. Nikita Zabolotsky recalled: “My father spoke scantly about his life and work at construction sites. I only remember his story about how once, while working in a quarry where they were extracting building stone, my father had to climb a high, almost vertical cliff in order to secure at the top the ropes necessary to prepare for the next explosion.

I had to press my whole body against the cliff and carefully choose barely noticeable ledges where I could put my foot. And suddenly some root sticking out of the stones caught on the temple of the glasses, and the glasses hung on one ear. Losing glasses in such a situation meant that a nearsighted person would fall off a cliff. My hands were busy, and only by bending my whole body, with incredible efforts, was it possible to return the glasses to their place.”

In Zabolotsky's later poems, the greatness and spirituality of the world acquires special transparency. In them, nature does not suppress man, does not oppose him, but gives him the joy of recognition; for him it is embodied in the landscape of his native land that is familiar and close to his heart:

I was raised by harsh nature. It’s enough for me to notice a ball of fluff at Dandelion’s feet. Plantain hard blade...

Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky is a poet with a heightened sense of color and picturesqueness. This feature of his poetic vision manifested itself throughout his creative career.

The poet’s attitude towards nature is defined as recognition of the world, its “living features”, as the unity of man with nature. The knowledge of nature becomes more intimate, more human, just as nature itself manifests itself in the reality of the depicted landscape:

Who responded to me in the thicket of the forest? Was the old oak whispering with the pine, Or was the rowan tree creaking in the distance? Or the goldfinch ocarina began to sing, Or the robin, little friend. She suddenly answered me at sunset?...

Nikolai Zabolotsky has always loved painting. He was fond of the works of P. Filonov, M. Chagall, and the old Flemings. The poet highly valued the integrity and keen-sighted naivety of such primitivist artists as Henri Rousseau and Niko Pirosmanishvili. He loved the work of Pieter Bruegel, whose sense of nature and pictures of peasant labor and fun were especially close to the poet.

There was one tragic period in the life of Nikolai Zabolotsky, which he endured courageously and with dignity. On March 19, 1938, the poet was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to five years in prison. Only in May 1946 did he receive permission to move to Moscow and continue his literary work.

Speaking about his work, one cannot fail to mention his numerous translations from Georgian poetry (he owns a translation of Shota Rustaveli’s poem “The Knight in the Skin of a Tiger”), a poetic adaptation of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” on which he worked for about eight years.

In the last years of Zabolotsky’s life, his work became more and more noticeable in his appeal to people, the emergence of a personal theme, and an interest in everyday life. At this time he wrote such poems as “The Ugly Girl”, “At the Movies”, “The General’s Dacha”, “The Old Actress” and others. The poem “The Ugly Girl” - about the fate of a girl who does not yet realize that she is “just a poor ugly girl” - became especially widely known.

During these years, Nikolai Zabolotsky also began to write love lyrics, which found expression in the cycle of poems “Last Love” (1956-1958). These are poems about love, which has retained its constant power and is especially painfully experienced in a breakup:

Juniper bush, juniper bush.

The cooling babble of changeable lips.

A light babble, barely reminiscent of resin,

Pierced me with a deadly needle!

Each creative stage of Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky should not be understood as a mechanical scheme. Each of them, while maintaining the originality of the poetic structure, left their mark on his further work, enriching it with new discoveries. Therefore, the “classicism” of the poems of the last period is by no means addressed to the past, is not a stylization of the classics, but is deeply modern, even polemical in relation to modern poetry.

The poet spends the summer and autumn of the last two years of his life in Tarusa-on-Oka. By this time he had suffered a heart attack and was seriously ill. In general, not very fond of long walks, he now led a sedentary lifestyle due to illness, often resting on a bench in the garden under a huge pear tree. Somehow he worked particularly well in Tarusa. Many lyric poems were written there. But Nikolai Zabolotsky’s health deteriorated, and on October 14, 1958, he died from a second heart attack.

The poet was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow. Death found him in the prime of his creative activity, on the eve of new plans and works.

The awareness of the poet's high mission made him especially demanding of both himself and those around him. No wonder Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeev once said about him to N.K. Chukovsky: “What a firm and clear person!”

Biography, life story of Zabolotsky Nikolai Alekseevich

He was born on April 27, 1903 on a farm in the Kazan provincial zemstvo, located near Kazan. His father was an agronomist-manager in Kizicheskaya Sloboda, and his mother was a rural teacher. The poet spent his childhood there, as well as in the village of Sernur, located on the territory of the current Mari El Republic. Nikolai Zabolotsky’s first attempts at writing date back to the third grade of a rural school, where he regularly “published” a magazine written by hand.

In 1913, Nikolai went to Urzhum, where until 1920 he studied at a real school, devoting his free time to studying history, chemistry and drawing.

Leningrad

In 1920, Nikolai Zabolotsky first went to the capital, immediately enrolling in the philological and medical faculties of Moscow University, and a year later he ended up in Leningrad. In the city on the Neva, he became a student at the Pedagogical Institute. Herzen. Despite his active work in the literary circle, he still could not find “his own voice.” In 1925 he received his diploma.

Around the same time, he became an “Oberiut” - a member of the “Union of Real Art”. This group of young poets, who published little and rarely, performed reading poems of their own composition. Participation in this association allowed Nikolai Zabolotsky to find his way in poetry.

Army

In 1926, Nikolai Alekseevich received a draft summons, sending him to military service, which all took place on the Vyborg side. A year later he was transferred to the reserve. Despite its short duration, the army service was able to show the world of the barracks, which seemed to Nikolai Zabolotsky “turned inside out.” The military uniform, dressed against his will, served as a kind of catalyst that discovered him as a poet. It was in 1926-27 that the first worthwhile poetic works with a style unlike anything else came out of his pen. Having repaid his debt to his homeland, Nikolai Zabolotsky got a job in the children's book department of the Leningrad OGIZ, which he headed in those years.

CONTINUED BELOW

Nikolai Alekseevich was fond of painting by Bruegel, Chagall, Filonov, which helped him look at the world around him through the eyes of an artist. Discharge from the army came at the end of the NEP, the depiction of which from the point of view of satire became the main theme of the poems included in the first poetry collection “Columns”. It was published in 1929 in Leningrad and caused a lot of noise. At first, positive reviews appeared in the press, the author was noticed by leading poets and writers of those years, starting from V.A. Kaverina and ending. But then the rhetoric quickly changed to the opposite - the collection was described as nothing more than a “hostile attack.” However, no organizational conclusions or orders were followed. Moreover, soon after the scandal, about a dozen more poems were published in the Zvezda magazine, included in the second edition of Stolbtsy, which was never published.

After the poem entitled “The Triumph of Agriculture” was published, Nikolai Zabolotsky had no chance to avoid harsh criticism. The young poet was immediately branded as an ardent supporter of formalism and an apologist for bourgeois ideology. Because of this, the second collection of poems was never released. Despite this, Nikolai Alekseevich did not abandon his creative activity, completely switching to children's literature. Until his arrest in 1938, he wrote stories and poems that were published in the magazines Chizh and Hedgehog.

Arrest

A year after the publication of the collection of poems “The Second Book” in 1937, Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky was arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda. The basis for the arrest was a review of the poet’s work as a counter-revolutionary struggle against the socialist system, written by critic Nikolai Lesyuchevsky. Despite severe torture, Nikolai Alekseevich did not admit these charges, which allowed him to avoid execution. While in prison, in 1944 he completed the adaptation of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” which he had begun 7 years earlier. Reviews from critics, who called this work the best among many Russian poets, allowed Zabolotsky to return to Moscow in 1946, and soon after that to be reinstated in the Writers' Union.

At the end of his days

The poet’s return from “places not so remote” occurred during a period of extreme tightening of ideological oppression by the state. Fearing for his freedom, Nikolai Alekseevich almost completely switched to literary translations. Only with the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw in 1957 did he publish a collection of poems, “Last Love.” It was completed in Tarusa-on-Oka, where Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky spent the last two years of his life, dying on October 14, 1958 from a heart attack.

Brief biography of Nikolai Zabolotsky

Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky (Zabolotsky) - Soviet poet, prose writer and translator. Born on April 24 (May 7), 1903 on a farm near Kazan in the family of an agronomist. The writer spent his childhood in Kizicheskaya Sloboda and in the village of Sernur, not far from the city of Urzhum. Already in the third grade, Nikolai published a school magazine, where he published his poems. Until 1920 he lived and studied in Urzhum, and then moved to Moscow. In his youth he liked the works of Akhmatova and Blok.

In Moscow, the writer enters the university into two faculties at once: philological and medical. He was fascinated by the cultural life in Moscow, but a year later he moved to Leningrad, where he entered the Pedagogical Institute. During his student years, he was part of a group of young poets who called themselves “Oberiuts,” which was an abbreviation of the phrase: Association of Real Art. It was by participating in the activities of this literary circle that he found himself and the style of his poetry.

After graduation, Zabolotsky served in the army. Then he worked in a children's publishing house and wrote such children's books as "Rubber Heads", "Snake's Milk", and others. In 1929, a collection of his poems entitled “Columns” was published. The second collection appeared in 1937 and was called “The Second Book.” A year later, the writer was repressed and sent to a camp for 5 years on false charges. After this imprisonment, he was sent into exile in the Far East. Zabolotsky was rehabilitated in 1946.

Returning to Moscow, he continued to write poetry, which had a more mature character and strict language. He traveled to Georgia and was interested in translations of Georgian poems. His name became known in wide circles in the 1950s, after the appearance of the poems “The Ugly Girl”, “The Confrontation of Mars” and some others. In recent years I have spent a lot of time in Tarusa. There the poet suffered a heart attack. The writer died on October 14, 1958 in Moscow from a second heart attack.

Zabolotsky Nikolai Alekseevich (1903-1958), poet.

Born on May 7, 1903 in Kazan in the family of an agronomist. He studied at a rural school, then at a real school in the city of Urzhum.

He started writing poetry in childhood. In 1925 he graduated from the Faculty of Russian Language and Literature of the Pedagogical Institute named after A. I. Herzen in Leningrad.

In 1926-1927 served in the army.

At the end of the 20s. XX century Zabolotsky joined the group of Oberiuts - young writers who created the Association of Real Creativity (A. Vvedensky, Yu. Vladimirov, D. Kharms, etc.). Together with the Oberiuts, he began to try his hand at children’s literature and was published in the magazine “Yozh”.

In 1929, the poet’s first collection, “Columns,” was published, which, in his own words, caused “a decent scandal” and brought him popularity.

In 1929-1933. he writes the poems “The Triumph of Agriculture”, “Mad Wolf”, “Trees”. Zabolotsky devoted many works to the relationship between man and nature, including one of his best poems, “Everything that was in the soul...” (1936).

In 1937, the “Second Book” was published, confirming the poet’s skill and originality.

At the end of the 50s. Zabolotsky translated the Georgian medieval poem “The Knight in the Tiger’s Skin” by Sh. Rustaveli (1953-1957). In 1938, Zabolotsky was arrested on false political charges. While in prison, he continued to write and made a free adaptation of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” After his release in January 1946, he came to Moscow.

Poems by Zabolotsky from the late 40s-50s. became classics of Russian lyrics (“Testament”, “Thunderstorm”, “The dawn has not yet risen over the village...”, “I am not looking for harmony in nature...”, “Swallow”, “Ugly girl”, “Cranes”, “Give way to me, starling, corner...", cycle "Last Love", etc.). They are distinguished by philosophical depth; the author discovers new facets and secrets in life, finds new correspondences to his changing inner world.

Zabolotsky also owns numerous translations from German, Hungarian, Italian, Serbian, Tajik, Uzbek, and Ukrainian.

His translations from Georgian poetry are especially significant. The result of many years of work was the two-volume book “Georgian Classical Poetry”, translated by N. Zabolotsky, published in Tbilisi in 1958.

His last poem is “Don’t let your soul be lazy...”.

Very short, understandable. It helped a lot! Thank you very much:3

Everything is clear and concise... Personally, it helped me with my homework

Russian Empire, USSR

Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky (Zabolotsky)(April 24 [May 7], Kizicheskaya Sloboda, Kaimar volost, Kazan district, Kazan province - October 14, Moscow) - Russian Soviet poet.

Biography

Zabolotsky was fond of painting by Filonov, Chagall, Bruegel. The ability to see the world through the eyes of an artist remained with the poet throughout his life.

After leaving the army, the poet found himself in the situation of the last years of the New Economic Policy, the satirical depiction of which became the theme of the poems of the early period, which made up his first poetry book, “Columns.” In 1929, it was published in Leningrad and immediately caused a literary scandal and mocking reviews in the press. Assessed as a “hostile attack,” it did not, however, cause any direct “organizational conclusions” or orders against the author, and he (through Nikolai Tikhonov) managed to establish a special relationship with the magazine “Zvezda,” where about ten poems were published, which replenished Stolbtsy in second (unpublished) edition of the collection.

Zabolotsky managed to create surprisingly multi-dimensional poems - and their first dimension, immediately noticeable, is a sharp grotesque and satire on the theme of bourgeois life and everyday life, which dissolves personality. Another facet of Stolbtsy, their aesthetic perception, requires some special preparedness of the reader, because for those in the know, Zabolotsky has woven another artistic and intellectual fabric, a parody. In his early lyrics, the very function of parody changes, its satistic and polemical components disappear, and it loses its role as a weapon of intraliterary struggle.

In “Disciplina Clericalis” (1926) there is a parody of Balmont’s tautological eloquence, ending with Zoshchenko’s intonations; in the poem “On the Stairs” (1928), Vladimir Benediktov’s “Waltz” suddenly appears through the kitchen, already Zoshchenko world; “The Ivanovs” (1928) reveals its parody-literary meaning, evoking (hereinafter in the text) the key images of Dostoevsky with his Sonechka Marmeladova and her old man; lines from the poem “Wandering Musicians” (1928) refer to Pasternak, etc.

The basis of Zabolotsky’s philosophical searches

With the poem “The signs of the zodiac are fading,” the mystery of the origin of the main theme, the “nerve” of Zabolotsky’s creative search begins - the Tragedy of Reason is heard for the first time. The “nerve” of this search will in the future force its owner to devote much more lines to philosophical lyrics. Through all his poems runs the path of the most intense adaptation of individual consciousness into the mysterious world of existence, which is immeasurably wider and richer than the rational constructs created by people. On this path, the poet-philosopher undergoes a significant evolution, during which 3 dialectical stages can be distinguished: 1926-1933; 1932-1945 and 1946-1958.

Zabolotsky read a lot and with enthusiasm: not only after the publication of “Columns”, but also before, he read the works of Engels, Grigory Skovoroda, the works of Kliment Timiryazev on plants, Yuri Filipchenko on the evolutionary idea in biology, Vernadsky on the bio- and noospheres that embrace all living things and the intelligent on the planet and extolling both as great transformative forces; read Einstein's theory of relativity, which gained widespread popularity in the 1920s; “Philosophy of the Common Cause” by Nikolai Fedorov.

By the time “Columns” was published, its author already had his own natural philosophical concept. It was based on the idea of ​​the universe as a single system that unites living and nonliving forms of matter, which are in eternal interaction and mutual transformation. The development of this complex organism of nature proceeds from primitive chaos to the harmonious order of all its elements, and the main role here is played by the consciousness inherent in nature, which, in the words of the same Timiryazev, “smolders dully in lower beings and only flares up as a bright spark in the human mind.” Therefore, it is Man who is called upon to take care of the transformation of nature, but in his activity he must see in nature not only a student, but also a teacher, for this imperfect and suffering “eternal winepress” contains within itself the beautiful world of the future and those wise laws that should be guided by the person.

Gradually, Zabolotsky’s position in the literary circles of Leningrad strengthened. Many of his poems from this period received favorable reviews, and in 1937 his book was published, including seventeen poems (The Second Book). On Zabolotsky’s desk lay the beginnings of a poetic adaptation of the ancient Russian poem “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and his own poem “The Siege of Kozelsk,” poems and translations from Georgian. But the prosperity that followed was deceptive.

In conclusion

« The first days they didn’t beat me, trying to break me down mentally and physically. They didn't give me food. They weren't allowed to sleep. The investigators replaced each other, but I sat motionless on a chair in front of the investigator’s table - day after day. Behind the wall, in the next office, someone's frantic screams could be heard from time to time. My feet began to swell, and on the third day I had to tear off my shoes because I could not bear the pain in my feet. My consciousness began to become foggy, and I strained all my strength to answer reasonably and to prevent any injustice in relation to those people about whom I was asked...“These are lines from Zabolotsky from the memoirs “The History of My Imprisonment” (published abroad in English in the city, in the last years of Soviet power they were published in the USSR, in).

He served his sentence from February 1939 to May 1943 in the Vostoklag system in the Komsomolsk-on-Amur region; then in the Altailaga system in the Kulunda steppes; A partial idea of ​​his camp life is given by the selection he prepared, “One Hundred Letters 1938-1944” - excerpts from letters to his wife and children.

Since March 1944, after liberation from the camp, he lived in Karaganda. There he completed the arrangement of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” (begun in 1937), which became the best among the experiments of many Russian poets. This helped in 1946 to obtain permission to live in Moscow.

In 1946, N. A. Zabolotsky was reinstated in the Writers' Union. A new, Moscow period of his work began. Despite the blows of fate, he managed to return to his unfulfilled plans.

Moscow period

The period of returning to poetry was not only joyful, but also difficult. In the poems “Blind” and “Thunderstorm” written then, the theme of creativity and inspiration sounds. Most of the poems of 1946-1948 have been highly appreciated by today's literary historians. It was during this period that “In this birch grove” was written. Outwardly built on a simple and expressive contrast of a picture of a peaceful birch grove, singing orioles of life and universal death, it carries sadness, an echo of what has been experienced, a hint of personal fate and a tragic premonition of common troubles. In 1948, the third collection of the poet’s poems was published.

In 1949-1952, the years of extreme tightening of ideological oppression, the creative upsurge that manifested itself in the first years after the return was replaced by a creative decline and an almost complete switch to literary translations. Fearing that his words would be used against him again, Zabolotsky restrained himself and did not write. The situation changed only after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, with the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw, which marked the weakening of ideological censorship in literature and art.

He responded to new trends in the life of the country with the poems “Somewhere in a field near Magadan”, “Confrontation of Mars”, “Kazbek”. Over the last three years of his life, Zabolotsky created about half of all works of the Moscow period. Some of them appeared in print. In 1957, the fourth, most complete collection of his lifetime poems was published.

The cycle of lyrical poems “Last Love” was published in 1957, “the only one in Zabolotsky’s work, one of the most painful and painful in Russian poetry.” It is in this collection that the poem “Confession”, dedicated to N.A. Roskina, is placed, later revised by the St. Petersburg bard Alexander Lobanovsky ( Enchanted, bewitched / Once married to the wind in the field / All of you seem to be shackled / You are my precious woman...).

Family of N. A. Zabolotsky

In 1930, Zabolotsky married Ekaterina Vasilievna Klykova. This marriage produced a son, Nikita, who became the author of several biographical works about his father. Daughter - Natalya Nikolaevna Zabolotskaya (born 1937), since 1962 the wife of virologist Nikolai Veniaminovich Kaverin (born 1933), academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, son of the writer Veniamin Kaverin.

Death

Although before his death the poet managed to receive both widespread readership and material wealth, this could not compensate for the weakness of his health, undermined by prison and camp. In 1955, Zabolotsky had his first heart attack, and on October 14, 1958 he died.

Creation

Zabolotsky's early work is focused on the problems of the city and the masses, it is influenced by V. Khlebnikov, it is marked by the objectivity characteristic of futurism and the variety of burlesque metaphors. The confrontation of words, giving the effect of alienation, reveals new connections. At the same time, Zabolotsky’s poems do not reach the same degree of absurdity as those of other Oberiuts. Nature is understood in Abolotsky’s poems as chaos and prison, harmony as delusion. The poem “The Triumph of Agriculture” combines the poetics of futuristic experimentation with elements of an 18th-century irocomic poem. The question of death and immortality defines the poetry of Zabolotsky in the 1930s. Irony, manifested in exaggeration or simplification, marks a distance in relation to what is depicted. Zabolotsky's later poems are united by common philosophical aspirations and reflections on nature, the naturalness of the language, devoid of pathos; they are more emotional and musical than Abolotsky's previous poems, and closer to tradition (A. Pushkin, E. Baratynsky, F. Tyutchev). To the anthropomorphic depiction of nature, an allegorical one is added here (“Thunderstorm”, 1946).

Zabolotsky-translator

Nikolai Zabolotsky is the largest translator of Georgian poets: D. Guramishvili, Gr. Orbeliani, I. Chavchavadze, A. Tsereteli, V. Pshavely. Zabolotsky is the author of the translation of Sh. Rustaveli’s poem “The Knight in the Skin of the Tiger” (the latest edition of the translation).

About Zabolotsky’s translation of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” Chukovsky wrote that it is “more accurate than all the most accurate interlinear translations, since it conveys the most important thing: the poetic originality of the original, its charm, its charm.”

Zabolotsky himself reported in a letter to N.L. Stepanov: “ Now that I have entered into the spirit of the monument, I am filled with the greatest reverence, surprise and gratitude to fate for bringing this miracle to us from the depths of centuries. In the desert of centuries, where not one stone was left on another after wars, fires and cruel extermination, stands this lonely, unlike anything else, cathedral of our ancient glory. It's scary, creepy to approach him. The eye involuntarily wants to find in it familiar proportions, the golden sections of our familiar world monuments. Wasted work! There are no these sections in it, everything in it is full of a special gentle wildness, the artist measured it with a different measure, not ours. And how touchingly the corners have crumbled, crows sit on them, wolves prowl, and it stands - this mysterious building, without knowing its equal, will stand forever, as long as Russian culture is alive". He also translated the Italian poet Umberto Saba.

Addresses in Petrograd - Leningrad

• 1921-1925 - residential cooperative building of the Third Petrograd Apartment Owners Association - Krasnykh Zori Street, 73;
• 1927-1930 - apartment building - Konnaya street, 15, apt. 33;
• 1930 - 03/19/1938 - house of the Court Stable Department - Griboyedov Canal embankment, 9.

Addresses in Moscow

• 1946-1948 - in the apartments of N. Stepanov, I. Andronikov in Moscow and in Peredelkino at the dacha of V. P. Ilyenkov
• 1948 - October 14, 1958 - Khoroshevskoe highway, 2/1 building 4, apartment No. 25. Place of life, work and death of the poet. The house was included in the register of cultural heritage, but was demolished in 2001 (see). In the summer months, N. Zabolotsky also lived in Tarusa.

Memory