Essayist and member of the Russian Acmeist School of poets. His poetry collections and prose works include Kamen and Stikhotvoreniya 1921–1925 (poems) and Razgovor o Dante and Chetvertaya Proza (prose).
He studied at the Sorbonne, the University of Heidelberg, and the University of Saint Petersburg.
Accused by the regime of Stalin of government disloyalty, he was forced to spend the last years of his life in a Soviet prison camp.
He married Russian author Nadezhda Khazina in the early 1920s.
He allegedly had a love affair with fellow Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (Akhmatova, his longtime friend, denied the affair).
