she took a job as assistant to a municipal charity doctor on Vasilyevsky Island, and was merely a spectator when the October Revolution occurred. From then until the 1930s, she worked in different Soviet medical settings, combining medicine with her writing. By the winter of 1918–19, she was writing in her spare moments, and when she learned (from a streetcar advertisement) of the courses being offered by the Translators' Studio at the publishing house World Literature (), newly established by Maxim Gorky, she immediately went to the Muruzi House (Mourousis family House) and signed up for Nikolay Gumilev's poetry class and Viktor Shklovsky's class on literary theory. It was there that she met and befriended the writers who were soon to form the Serapion Brothers; she was particularly close to Lev Lunts, whom she called "the most serapionic" of the group, and shared his insistence on artistic independence and the importance of Western literature (as opposed to the "Scythianism," or Russian exclusivity, that was popular at the time). Even after the slow dissolution of the group (around the time of Lunts's emigration in 1923 and premature death in 1924), she kept in touch with a number of the Serapions and their friends, particularly Veniamin Kaverin and Korney Chukovsky. She published her second verse collection, Pod kammenym dozhdyom (Under a stone rain), in 1923; by the time of her third, Upryamy kalendar (A stubborn calendar), in 1929, she had begun to move "from strictly lyric poetry to ballads, narrative poems, and literary portraits." From the 1920s she worked as a translator (beginning with Rudyard Kipling's "Ballad of East and West"), bringing into Russian works by Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Julian Tuwim, and others, as well as the Armenian epic David of Sasun. Chukovsky also helped her establish herself as a poet for children. She wrote the libretto for the children's operetta Chasi by composer Lyubov Streicher. 1930s and 1940s In 1931 Polonskaya gave up the practice of medicine to become a full-time writer, focusing on prose sketches; the turn from creative writing to journalism was common among women poets at the time, for example her friend Maria Shkapskaya. Towards the end of the decade "she was suffering from a worrisome heart condition, which interfered with her work and contributed to recurring bouts of despair," but shortly after the German invasion of Russia she and her family had to leave Leningrad for the