Between 1988 and 2004 Zavyalov taught Greek, Latin and classical literature at high school and university level.

In the second half of the 1990s, Zavyalov participated in several joint literary actions with a group of St. Petersburg poets, later on to be known as postmodernists (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Alexander Skidan, Dmitry Golynko and others).

In the 2000s he published a number of essays analysing Soviet poetry as evidence of traumatic experience.

His second special topic is postcolonial studies in the reconstruction and deconstruction of Erzya and Moksha and, more generally, Finno-Ugric identity.

by Simona Schneider) Collections of Zavyalov’s poems in Finnish, Swedish, Estonian and Italian: