[4] However, she also studied Judaism with a rabbi, and "not only the stories themselves but also the biblical language (albeit in Russian translation) made a deep impression on her; her solemn, rhetorical verse is often marked by Slavonicisms.

[4] The following year the family moved to St. Petersburg, where she began to work for the Bolshevik cell in the Semyannikov section of the Nevskaya Zastava district, occasionally being sent to Finland to pick up leaflets from Vladimir Lenin to distribute in St.

[6] Leslie Dorfman Davis writes: "Aside from poetry, Erenburg and Movšenson shared a satirical impulse which provoked disapproval from some of their older comrades.

[...] Movšenson and Erenburg [jointly] published two journals, Byvšie ljudi (Former People) and Tixoe semejstvo (A Quiet Family), in which they 'rather caustically, without any sort of reverence, mocked the manners of the Bolshevik circle, insulting even the 'chiefs' (Plexanov, Lenin, Trotskij), and therefore had a sensational response.'

[9] On her arrival in Petrograd, she found her family mourning her father's death; she received her diploma from the University of Tartu and the title of lekar' (physician) in July and went to the Galician front, where she remained until April 1917 supervising an epidemiological division.

[9] On her final return to Petrograd in the spring of 1917, she had little time for either politics or literature; to support her family, which was in dire straits after her father's death, she took a job as assistant to a municipal charity doctor on Vasilyevsky Island, and was merely a spectator when the October Revolution occurred.

[12] Even after the slow dissolution of the group (around the time of Lunts's emigration in 1923 and premature death in 1924), she kept in touch with a number of the Serapions and their friends, particularly Veniamin Kaverin and Korney Chukovsky.

[13] She published her second verse collection, Pod kammenym dozhdyom (Under a stone rain), in 1923; by the time of her third, Upryamy kalendar' (A stubborn calendar), in 1929, she had begun to move "from strictly lyric poetry to ballads, narrative poems, and literary portraits.

[15] In 1931 Polonskaya gave up the practice of medicine to become a full-time writer, focusing on prose sketches;[16] the turn from creative writing to journalism was common among women poets at the time, for example her friend Maria Shkapskaya.

[17] Towards the end of the decade "she was suffering from a worrisome heart condition, which interfered with her work and contributed to recurring bouts of despair,"[18] but shortly after the German invasion of Russia she and her family had to leave Leningrad for the Urals, first in Polazna and then (from November 1942) in Molotov.

[25] Although Polonskaya was highly respected in the 1920s—in 1926 the critic D. S. Mirsky called her "the most gifted of the young poetesses"[26]—she fell into obscurity, both because of the difficulty of keeping a career going as a single mother and for political reasons.