 From 1952 to 1957, he studied at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, and was a member of national teams for university athletics.While at university, Kunyaev started writing poetry, and his first collection of poems "Earth Explorers" was published in 1960.Between 1957 and 1960, he worked for the newspaper "Zavety Lenina" (Tayshet, Irkutsk Oblast), before serving as head of the poetry department of literary magazine "Znamya" from 1960 to 1963.