Elena Shvarts

Elena Andreyevna Shvarts (Russian: Елена Андреевна Шварц) (17 May 1948 – 11 March 2010) was a Russian poet.
Born in Leningrad, where she lived her entire life, Shvarts attended the University of Tartu, where her first poems were published in the university newspaper in 1973. After that, however, she did not publish for another decade in her own country; her work began to appear in émigré journals in 1978, and she published two collections of poetry (Tantsuyushchii David and Stikhi) and a novel in verse (Trudy i dni Lavinii) abroad before a collection (Storony sveta) was allowed to be published in the Soviet Union, "bringing her immediate recognition both at home and abroad." Birdsong escaping from a cage is a metaphor running though her work.