Poet, prose-fiction writer, essayist, and playwright, Sergei Gandlevsky was one of the key figures of literary life in the Soviet Union and Russia during the 1980s and 1990s. His path as a poet is highly characteristic for this pivotal epoch in the history of the new Russian literature, when in the course of ten to fifteen years the barriers that earlier had been insurmountable were destroyed--such as the boundary between "underground" poetry and the poetry submitted to the censors for publication in legitimate periodicals or as Soviet-sanctioned books; the boundary between poets of the "Metropol'" group and those of the "Russian emigration"; and, finally, the boundary between the poets of the 1960s, who used to give readings in stadiums during the years of the "Thaw," initiated by Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, and the younger lyric poets who belonged to the "lost generation" of the 1970s.

Gandlevsky's literary fate is...