Semyon Kirsanov, an outstanding Soviet poet, Mayakovsky’s younger friend and colleague at LEF, carried through all his work a special, innovative attitude to poetic language, preserving and developing in conditions that were not at all favorable for this, the great traditions of the Russian avant-garde.

< p>The volume of the Poet's Library, designed to rediscover this wonderful master to the Russian reader, includes the best of what the poet wrote: the bulk of the books published during his lifetime, most of the poems. A number of texts are published for the first time. The poems are commented in detail. The introductory article, written by the greatest modern philologist M. L. Gasparov, is a subtle and deep analysis of Kirsanov’s complex poetics. The chronological outline compiled by V. S. Kirsanov, the son of the poet, gives a complete picture of all the vicissitudes of the life of the poet, who was always under suspicion of “formalism” of the poet.