By early 1983, while being hounded the KGB, he completed for Samizdat the first ever annotated collection of poems by the then forbidden in the USSR poet Vladislav Khodasevich in two volumes.

His grandfather, Feodor Chistyakov, who became a Bolshevik in 1909, participated in the October Revolution, served in the Red Army as a middle ranking commissar and was buried in the prestigious Alexander Nevsky Lavra cemetery.

Ideological obstacles were common to all writers (all Soviet literary magazines were state institutions) but were especially harsh for people with typically Jewish surnames such as Kolker.

[4][5] From 1981, and especially after his emigration in 1984, his poetry and essays were extensively published in the West: in Austria, France, Israel, USA, Germany, Britain, Italy, and Canada.

«Among poets whose works have not been eclipsed by their biographies; among the poetic stars shining especially bright, I want to name Yuri Kolker ... who is distinguished by his ability to create some very powerful metaphorical images that are perceived as self-valuable ...

Yuri Kolker also translated from Shelly,[16] Lord Byron,[17] George Herbert,[18] Dylan Thomas,[19] García Lorca,[20] Avrom Sutskever[21] and other poets.

Kolker is also well known for his aesthetically against-the-current non-conformist essays, including those on Khodasevich,[22] Brodsky,[23] Zabolotsky,[24] Vladimir Lifshits,[25] Yevtushenko;[26] and his defiant memoirs, Iz pesni zlogo ne vykinesh (One can't throw out the evil from a song), V Iudeiskoy Pustune (The Desert of Milk and Honey), and others.