With his first book, “Columns” (1929), Nikolai Zabolotsky established his name in Russian poetry once and for all. The recognized verse theorist and literary critic Yu. N. Tynyanov presented the young poet with his book with the inscription: “To the first poet of our days.” But “Columns” became the only book that N. Zabolotsky managed to compile himself. The poet's innovative experiments were subjected to severe ideological criticism. Subsequently, he published three more collections of poems, greatly cut down by censorship. Having experienced an extremely dramatic fate (eight years of imprisonment in the Gulag), Nikolai Zabolotsky, after a long forced silence, managed to return to poetry and created dozens of lyrical masterpieces in the 1940s–1950s, already in the classical manner. Literary connoisseurs during his lifetime put Zabolotsky on a par with Tyutchev and Boratynsky. And one of our contemporaries defined his place in Russian literature in this way: “Boratynsky became the largest poet of the 19th century in the 20th, Zabolotsky will become the largest poet of the 20th century in the 21st.” The book by Valery Fedorovich Mikhailov is the first biography in the “ZhZL” series, dedicated to to the great Russian poet, wonderful translator Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky.