Igor Guberman belongs to the generation of dissidents who came of age in the post-Stalinist Thaw of the late 1950s. He is well known for his satirical rhymed quatrains, later named gariki, whose compact form became a venue for a free-spirited voice that spoke of love, life, and its ironies. This voice expressed the passions and frustrations of Guberman's generation and acquired a great popularity among the contemporary intelligentsia through the underground distribution of the epigrammatic gariki often committed to memory, since they could not be published in the Soviet Union until the perestroika period in the late 1980s. Guberman has been called the Omar Khayyam (a twelfth-century Persian poet, widely popular in the West) of his time and compared to François Villon, the celebrated fourteenth-century French poet known for his prison verse. Many lines of Guberman's poems have become part of Russian folklore.

Igor' Mironovich...