Yuz Aleshkovsky (1929–2022) - Russian writer and poet, author of popular “camp” songs that were not performed on the Soviet stage, nevertheless gained fame among the people, they were dearly loved and sung, even without knowing the name of the author. Aleshkovsky also wrote such works as “Nikolai Nikolaevich”, “Kangaroo”, “Disguise”, etc., which also gained people’s love, although in the writer’s homeland most of them were published only years after their creation. According to Joseph Brodsky, in the person of Aleshkovsky we are dealing with a unique type of writer “as an instrument of language”; there are few such examples in Russian literature: Nikolai Gogol, Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Zoshchenko... “Sentimental richness in him is brought to mocking limits, fiction - to phantasmagorical,” wrote Brodsky, “this is a true Orphic: a poet who has completely subordinated himself to language and received from its bounty as a reward the gift of revelation and Homeric laughter.”