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.

Sarah (Sally) Pratt is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses primarily on Russian poetry. She has published three books, Nikolai Zabolotsky: Enigma and Cultural Paradigm, which is the source of Загадка Заболоцкого; Russian Metaphysical Romanticism: The Poetry of Tiutchev and Boratysnkii; and The Semantics of Chaos in Tiutčev.