ABSTRACT
Elena Shvarts maintained close personal friendships with numerous unofficial artists and writers, including Tatiana Goricheva and Viktor Krivulin, and her poetry was published in all the mainstream samizdat journals. The daughter of the theatre expert Dina Shvarts, Elena grew up immersed in literature, began writing poetry as a teenager, and was soon part of the vibrant semi-official literary scene of the 1960s, participating in various LITOs and other activities for young poets. Shvarts was of Jewish background, and her interest in Christian motifs, and Christianity itself, places her in line with many well-known figures of Jewish heritage who felt a similar attraction, such as Osip Mandelstham, Lev Shestov, Boris Pasternak, and in her own age, Iosif Brodsky, Lev Losev, and the artist Mikhail Shvartsman. This chapter states that Shvarts's poetry had a clear devotional focus.
