Николай Заболоцкий

The article discusses the history of the creative dialogue between the great pianist Maria Veniaminovna Yudina and the outstanding poet Nikolay Alekseevich Zabolotsky. The material was not only Yudina’s memories of her joint work with the poet on equirhythmic translations of the collection Schubert’s Songs conceived by the pianist, but also Yudina’s thoughts expressed in various sources about the specific features of Zabolotsky’s work, whose poetry Yudina “ardently” loved.

The article analyzes the poem by Nikolai Zabolotsky A City in the Steppe, which was written by the poet after returning from exile in 1946. The poem unfolds before the reader a grand panorama of the Kazakh city of Karaganda. The city appears as a kind of epic and even mythological City that has replaced the timeworn era. It is shown that there are several metaphysical layers in the plot of the poem: along with the description of the real city of Karaganda, the biblical symbolism of both the Old and New Testaments is present in the text.