on Nikolai Zabolotsky

All of nature laughs together

No matter how many Euro 2025 matches you sat through, it’s unlikely you would have heard the beautiful game described in the manner of Nikolai Zabolotsky’s 1927 poem ‘Football’. Shifting to the ball’s perspective, Zabolotsky’s mock-heroic verses describe how the whirling orb ‘apprehends the iron bane of boots’; how it:

steams, puffs out, cackles with spite,
[...]
And racks the forward with a fight

The poem ends with the forward lying in a hospital, the image of the infernal ball hovering above them. Interestingly, FIFA estimates that the average footballer spends just 1 minute and 49 seconds of a game in possession of the ball. The rest of the game, as Zabolotsky’s poem suggests, is really just an elaborate (and dangerous) dance around an object forever beyond control.

With its vertiginous shifts in subject and geography, ‘Football’ is a good starting place for navigating Zabolotsky’s short collection Columns (Stolbtsy), first published in 1929 and newly translated by Dmitri Manin. Born outside Kazan in 1903, Zabolotsky came of age in the harsh yet artistically fertile climate of 1920s Leningrad (St Petersburg) and belonged to the short-lived, avant-garde group OBERIU (Association for Real Art). A glance at Columns, then, might suggest a cerebral book of modernist poetry aiming to capture the metropolis and its mental life; of blurry apparitions and metro stations. But responding to a city still thick with the memory of revolution, famine and civil war, Zabolotsky gives us something far headier: a series of visceral vignettes where decaying limbs, rivers, animals, Red Army ...