Rod. in the village of Yazvitsy, Moscow region. Born into a peasant family, he worked as a grinder. He studied at the Literary Institute from 1934 to 1938. Afterwards he was arrested and ended up in the Gulag, and then in exile. Having returned, he lived in poverty: “I walked for months with an unshaven face, remembered Nekrasov’s St. Petersburg nights, I ate cabbage leaves like a hare, and I was covered in rust and vain... I never. The Commune, I didn’t curse you - not even at the wheelbarrow with earth, not by a heavy hammer... I am all yours! Mayakovsky and Lenin are mine!..” - he wrote these poems about the commune and, of course, did not know that it was Lenin who signed the first decree on the creation of the first camp for political prisoners, one of whom became a poet himself. In 1958, he published his first collection, filled with folklore. All his life he has been collecting Russian ditties and performing them charmingly to the accompaniment of a balalaika.