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Elena Shvarts

Elena Andreyevna Shvarts () (17 May 1948 – 11 March 2010) was a Russian metarealist poet.

Shvarts was born in Leningrad, where she lived her entire life. Her mother was Dina Shvarts, a dramatist. In the 1960s, Shvart attended "literary circles for youths" at the Palace of Pioneers in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg. Shvarts studied at the Leningrad Institute of Film, Music and Theatre.

Shvarts poems were first published officially in the newspaper of the University of Tartu in 1973, which had a wide circulation. Her work was also published in samizdat.

After that, however, she did not publish for another decade in her own country; her work began to appear in émigré journals in 1978, and she published two collections of poetry (''Tantsuyushchii David'' and ''Stikhi'') and a novel in verse (''Trudy i dni Lavinii'') abroad before a collection (''Storony sveta'') was allowed to be published in the Soviet Union, "bringing her immediate recognition both at home and abroad." Birdsong escaping from a cage is a metaphor running through her work.

Dr. Laura Little describes Shvart's poetry as being "characterized by elaborate authorial masks and endless metamorphoses." Shvart's work also includes "allusions to the foreign and Russian texts that inspire her writing." In 1989, Barbara Heldt, an emerita professor of Russian at the University of British Columbia, noted that Shvarts often wrote "poetic cycles," or "long poems composed of several interrelating sections."

Shvarts was known as an "openly spiritual poet;" she described poetry as a "a way of reaching the non-material (spiritual) by semi-material means."

Shvarts won the Andrei Bely Prize in 1979 for poetry. In 2003, she was awarded the Triumph Prize in 2003, which is "an independent award for lifetime's achievement in the arts." Provided by Wikipedia