Mezhirov has a "special gift" for absorbing the voices of his contemporaries and his predecessors from the 1900s–1930s, according to Shrayer, who notes the influences in Mezhirov's writing of Eduard Bagritsky, Erich Maria Remarque, Anna Akhmatova, Aleksandr Blok, Vladislav Khodasevich, Mikhail Kuzmin, Vladimir Lugovskoy, David Samoylov and Arseny Tarkovsky.
His first action (in December 1946) was to censor Russian writers such as Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko.
After being displayed in an open coffin, she was interred at Komarovo Cemetery in St Petersburg.
Other authors on whose works copyright was restored were Anna Akhmatova (died 1966), Vera Mukhina (died 1953, sculptor of the statue "Worker and Kolkhoz Woman"), Aleksey Shchusev (died 1949, architect of the Lenin Mausoleum), Aleksey Tolstoy (died 1945), and many others.
He is most notable for being one of the main translators into Chinese of the works of the Russian poets Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Bunin, Mikhail Lermontov and Anna Akhmatova.
Anna Akhmatova, the most famous Russian poet of the Soviet period, was a close friend during the war.
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Vollmann makes use of many historical figures as characters including composer Dmitri Shostakovich, artist Käthe Kollwitz, film director Roman Karmen, poet Anna Akhmatova, SS officer Kurt Gerstein, as well as German general Friedrich Paulus and Soviet general Andrey Vlasov.
His poetry, short fiction, essays and poetry translations (from Paul Auster, Ingeborg Bachmann, Erich Fried and Anna Akhmatova, among others) have appeared in many literary periodicals, anthologies and in book form since 1983.
He worked on a book-length project entitled Prisoners of Conscience: Public Intellectuals in a Time of Crisis, which examines the courageous stance of four public figures—Anna Akhmatova, Albert Camus, Langston Hughes, and George Orwell—during the tumultuous period of 1914-45.
His long time collaboration with famous singer Elena Kamburova has resulted in a number of vocal cycles based on the lyrics by the Russian Silver Age poets, including Requiem of Anna Akhmatova.
Just several months later Riga-based chess grandmaster Mikhail Tal was heard praising the author of "Bolshoy Karetny" (Большой Каретный) and Anna Akhmatova (in a conversation with Joseph Brodsky) was quoting Vysotsky's number "I was the soul of a bad company..." taking it apparently for some brilliant piece of anonymous street folklore.
The composition was performed during the Anna Akhmatova centennial in Kremlin, 1989, and later in Finland, Sweden, the Czech Republic, USA and Israel.