IntroductionIn the brilliant galaxy of names of Russian poets of the early 20th century, the name of Nikolai Klyuev stands apart, as if apart from the others. His path seems uneven, unclear, more hidden than that of his other contemporaries, and his fate is more dramatic and joyless. “The People's Poet,” whose name once thundered throughout Russia, he found himself forced out of his native culture for half a century from the late 1920s. A participant in the literary movements of the 1910s, Klyuev corresponded and communicated with Blok, met with Bryusov and Andrei Bely, Gumilev and Akhmatova, and was friends with Yesenin. But on Parnassus of the Russian Silver Age he never took a place equal to them. He was the spiritual leader of the new peasant movement in literature that arose shortly before 1917 (Yesenin, Klychkov, Shiryaevets, etc.); but this group broke up before it had time to define itself. The question of the significance of Klyuev’s creative heritage still gives rise to heated, heated debates.