Alexander Mezhirov

"[2] Some of Mezhirov's lyrical poems based on his wartime experience belong with the best Russian poetical works created in the Soviet 1950s-1960s.

Born in Moscow, he was the son of an educated Jewish couple — his father a lawyer, his mother a German-language teacher, and one of his grandfathers was a rabbi.

At some points he was close to fellow Jewish-Russian Boris Yampolsky, Kazakh writer Olzhas Suleimenov, and Russian cultural ultranationalist and critic Vadim Kozhinov.

Mezhirov associated with younger writers Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Tatyana Glushkova (known for her nationalist views in the mid-1980s, according to Shrayer) and Evgeny Reyn, who was censored in the Soviet Union until the mid-1980s.

[3] Mezhirov has a "special gift" for absorbing the voices of his contemporaries and his predecessors from the 1900s–1930s, according to Shrayer, who notes the influences in Mezhirov's writing of Eduard Bagritsky, Erich Maria Remarque, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, Vladislav Khodasevich, Mikhail Kuzmin, Vladimir Lugovskoy, David Samoylov and Arseny Tarkovsky.