Leonid Shvab was born in 1961. He graduated from the Moscow Machine Tool Institute, lived and worked in Orenburg and Vladimir. Since 1990 he has lived in Jerusalem. Published in the magazines “Mirror”, “Solar Plexus”, “Colon”, in the collective collection “Everything at once” (2008; together with A. Rovinsky and F. Swarovsky). Author of the book of poems “Believe in Botany” (2005). Shortlist for the Andrei Bely Prize (2004). Leonid Schwab stands apart in modern poetry, not affiliated with any schools or movements. His solitary effort gives voice to endless abandoned spaces, sleepless landscapes of dispersion, where salt marshes sparkle and checkpoints remaining from a defeated army echo. This is how the fragments of a grandiose epic, great empires of meaning are formed - dead, buried in the sands, and nevertheless collected by a lyrical lens into a magic crystal, into the whole “heavenly Chevengur”.