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.