Elena Shvarts

Elena Andreyevna Shvarts (17 May 1948 – 11 March 2010) was a Russian metarealist poet.

Shvarts was born in Leningrad, where she lived her entire life. Her mother was Dina Shvarts, a dramatist. In the 1960s, Shvart attended "literary circles for youths" at the Palace of Pioneers in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg.

Shvarts poems were first published officially in the newspaper of the University of Tartu in 1973, which had a wide circulation. Birdsong escaping from a cage is a metaphor running through her work.

Dr. Laura Little describes Shvart's poetry as being "characterized by elaborate authorial masks and endless metamorphoses." Shvart's work also includes "allusions to the foreign and Russian texts that inspire her writing." In 1989, Barbara Heldt, an emerita professor of Russian at the University of British Columbia, noted that Shvarts often wrote "poetic cycles," or "long poems composed of several interrelating sections."

Shvarts was known as an "openly spiritual poet;" she described poetry as a "a way of reaching the non-material (spiritual) by semi-material means."

Shvarts won the Andrei Bely Prize in 1979 for poetry. In 2003, she was awarded the Triumph Prize in 2003, which is "an independent award for lifetime's achievement in the arts."