On Feb. 21, poet Gennady Aigi, 71, died in Moscow following an extended illness. This sad news was widely reported in the media, even though Aigi's name was not well-known among the general public.

Which is understandable -- Aigi was a poet, and poetry rarely makes headlines these days. Joseph Brodsky was perhaps the last poet whose name triggered "brand awareness," but even that was mostly thanks to his turbulent life, his influential essays and his 1987 Nobel Prize. Aigi, in contrast, led a quiet life, did not eagerly share his political opinions and, though he was sometimes rumored to be a Nobel nominee, never got the award.

But the potential was there. In the 1950s, Aigi was expelled from Moscow's Gorky Literary Institute for writing "a hostile poetry book [consider the expression!] undermining the basic principles of Socialist Realism." Perhaps some blame lay with Boris Pasternak, who had suggested that the young poet write in Russian instead of his native Chuvash. Works written in the empire's more obscure languages faced less scrutiny, and publishers in far-flung regions and republics got away with books in Moldavian, Georgian or Tatar that would certainly have been deemed inappropriate in Russian.

Aigi's breach with his native language was not complete. He continued to write poetry in Chuvash and do translations, such as a comprehensive anthology of French poetry in Chuvash. The impact of such work should not be underestimated: Chuvash is a marginal and archaic Turkic language, and if one believes that having a strong language influences a nation's consciousness, then Aigi's work was far from a mere technical exercise.

Starting in the 1970s, his Russian-language poetry was widely published and translated in the West, but his first publications at home appeared only with perestroika. Aigi wrote mostly free verse, creating dense poetic structures very unusual for the Russian tradition.

Aigi's life proves a curious point. Having lived most of his life under a totalitarian regime, having seen his poems ridiculed, Aigi remained an essentially free man. He did not become a dissident; he just waited calmly and wrote poetry, and success came to him in the dead of the Soviet night, from the West -- which did not ruin his quiet life in the Soviet Union. He was, perhaps, one of the few people to follow Voltaire's advice and stubbornly cultivate his own garden.

In accordance with the poet's will, Aigi will be buried in his native Chuvashia, next to his mother's grave.