May 7 marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Zabolotsky, a Russian poet with a tragic fate. Alexander Korotko responded to this date with an essay in which he compared the lyrical poetry of Zabolotsky with painting: the early one – with the works of Brueghel and Filonov, the later one – with the landscapes of famous Levitan’s level masters. But to the astonishingly accurate, touching, amazing simplicity and at the same time profound poetry-paintings of Zabolotsky, there was another – camp poetry, terrible truth of an eye-witness, who stayed, experienced fear and did not get rid of it until the end of days, and this is the leitmotif of the essay: “Fear is not a splinter, fear is an imprint of the NKVD boots on the heart. ” A new work by Alexander Korotko, like the previous essays, dedicated to people of art, close to the author in spirit, is terse. However, laconism did not stop to say about the poet the main thing that was in his destiny and, naturally, reflected in the work: Nikolai Zabolotsky – both lyrics and fear.