Born in 1935, Evgeny Rein belongs to that tragic generation of Russian poets who for decades went unpublished in the Soviet Union, and didn’t publish his first book of poems until he was 49. One of Akhmatova’s ‘magic choir’ of young Leningrad poets, he was Joseph Brodsky’s mentor and lifetime friend. Brodsky figures in many of his poems, and Brodsky’s essay on Rein introduces his Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2001).
