Mikhail Kuzmin and the Underground

Abstract This article focuses on the role of the poet, playwright, and novelist Mikhail Kuzmin as one of the first underground authors, whose circle in the 1920s–1930s became a prototype for analogous communities in the 1960s–1970s. Kuzmin had been associated with OBERIU and Nikolai Kliuev during his lifetime. The posthumous influences of Kuzmin’s poetry and drama are detected and discussed in the works of such underground authors as Vsevolod Petrov, Andrei Egunov, Joseph Brodsky, and Evgenii Rein, as well as such “in-betweeners” as Aleksandr Kushner and Oleg Chukhontsev.