SOURCE: MacFadyen, David. “Review of Zapadno-vostochnyi veter, by Elena Shvarts.” World Literature Today 72, no. 1 (winter 1998): 161-62.

In the following review, MacFadyen argues that synthesis is the unifying theme of Shvarts's oeuvre and the poems in Zapadno-vostochnyi veter.

To talk of Elena Shvarts as the most commanding female voice in contemporary Russian poetry is not to risk much. She was born forty-nine years ago in Leningrad, and while remaining outside Soviet institutions of both higher learning and professional literature, she garnered increasing respect through the medium of samizdat. Now long since projected into the relative security of regular publications (in terms of both time and normalcy), she is increasingly spoken of as the “third” clear voice that sounds at the century's close, following those of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva.

The second of these suggested kinships is more instructive. Shvarts is sufficiently younger than the generation of Brodsky, Kushner, Rein, et...