Eduard Bagritsky


Eduard Bagritsky was an important Russian and Soviet poet of the Constructivist School.
He was a Neo-Romantic early in his poetic career; he was also a part of the so-called Odessa School of Russian writers. A large number of this school's writers were Odessa natives who often incorporated Ukrainian inflections and vocabulary into their writing.

Biography

Born Eduard Godelevich Dzyubin in Odessa to a Jewish bourgeois family, most of his creative career took place in Moscow. After his early death from asthma, his friends helped to publish several of his works posthumously to provide financial assistance to his family. Isaak Babel, for example, planned to write a screenplay based on Bagritsky's long "Duma about Opanas".
Bagritsky was heavily influenced by the Russian Revolution and Civil War. His poetry often touches on the subjects of violence, revolutionary morality, sexuality and its interethnic sociological problems. His worldview was extremely unsentimental, and earned him much invective from detractors from all sides who saw his poetry as vindictive toward both his Jewish origins and the host Russian culture.
In his book Russian Poet/Soviet Jew: The Legacy of Eduard Bagritskii, Maxim D. Shrayer investigated the path of this major Jewish poet writing in the Russian language and examined Bagritsky's contested legacy. The book included English translations of Bagrtisky's works, among them his long poem February.
In his poetry of the last period of his life Bagritsky managed to covertly criticise the growing oppressive Stalinist regime. He died in Moscow in 1934, aged 38.

Family

Bagritsky's wife, Lidia Gustavovna Suok, had two sisters who also married noted writers: Olga married Yuri Olesha and Serafima married Vladimir Narbut. Bagritsky's son Vsevolod was also a notable Russian poet, whose fiancée Yelena Bonner later was a notable Russian dissident.