Oleg Yuryev (1959–2018) was an outstanding Russian poet, representing the last generation of uncensored literature. For the first time, his poetic legacy is collected in a two-volume edition. Yuryev's work reveals unexplored possibilities of the Russian language, where the past of poetic culture converges with the future. The world in which his poetry exists is a world of utopian collapse.

Yuryev's contribution to contemporary Russian culture is significant and diverse. His novels and collections of essays became important phenomena in the literature of the 1990s and 2000s. His plays are performed in many Russian and European theaters. His articles sparked fruitful discussions. In the 1980s, together with friends, he founded the literary project "Kamera Khraneniya" in Leningrad, which continued in various forms until 2015 and was an important part of the poetic landscape of recent decades. Yuryev did much to bring forgotten names of 20th-century Russian literature back into our cultural consciousness and to draw attention to the work of talented authors of new generations.

Since 1991, Yuryev lived in Germany and also wrote in German. During his lifetime, he published 16 books in Russian and 13 in German (poetry, prose, essays, plays). His works have been translated into many languages. He became a laureate of the Hilda Domin Prize (2010), the "Zvezda" magazine prize (2012), the "Novy Mir" magazine prize (2013), the "Difference" prize (2014), the ANTHOLOGIA poetry prize of "Novy Mir" magazine (2016), and the Russian Prize (2017).

"There are poet-alchemists, but here, perhaps for the first time, a poet is not an alchemist, managing the mixing and separation, the dying and birth of elements for the sake of the philosopher's stone, but is himself this tortured experimental element." — Elena Schwartz.

"Yuryev's innovation (and he is an innovator) is paradoxical: his poems are, by all accounts, a revived archaism, but they work as effective — and therefore today's, the latest — lyricism." — Mikhail Aizenberg.

"Poems of incredible formal brilliance and skill, poems of sorrow, poems of non-lightheartedness: they shimmer like crumbs in the forest where we, his readers, are now left to wander, seemingly without meaning. However, the path is preserved by him for us: one can read these incredible luminous, resonant clusters of sounds, touch them with lips: there is no hope, but there is no death either." — Polina Barskova.

Poetry, Oleg Yuryev, uncensored literature, Leningrad poetry, contemporary poetry.