What is the relation of Soviet culture to Russian culture? How does a Soviet poet differ from a Russian poet? Sarah Pratt traces these interwoven questions in the work of Nikolai Zabolotsky, a figure ranking just behind Pasternak, Mandelstam, 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. Because of this apparent split, and...