In 1968 the poet Mikhail Isakovsky complained that the Writers' Union had fostered an “inflation” in poetry. He estimated that between 1,700 and 2,400 books of poetry were published annually in the USSR, onethird or one-fourth by new authors. The trouble was, Isakovsky concluded, that the Union admitted too many poets; in 1967 there were 2,185 of them. Hundreds of these poets are members of the generation that will be described in the present chapter. Only eight of them have been selected for discussion, and this has meant the exclusion of several who, in other contexts, would indeed merit serious consideration. Among these are Robert Rozhdestvensky, Oleg Chukhontsev, German Plisetsky, Stanislav Kunyaev, Rimma Kazakova, Maya Borisova, and Yunna Morits. Not included, also, are a number of gifted young “underground” poets, many of them presently or recently incarcerated, of whom perhaps the most prominent are Natalya Gorbanevskaya and Yuri Galanskov. (Both of these poets are quoted in Chapter 13.) No doubt there are many other promising poets who have not been brought to general attention, either because they are relative beginners or because, under present Soviet circumstances, they cannot be published.

All of those to be mentioned in this chapter came to maturity well after the war. Although some of them recalled their wartime childhood painfully and vividly, its scars seemed relatively mild. Nor did they experience, as deeply as their elders, the paralyzing trauma of the postwar Stalinist repression. Their youthful temperaments enabled them to respond to liberalization with fewer inhibitions, with more exuberance and greater daring.