Voronov, Evgeny

Evgeny Voronov was born in 1967 and grew up in the Urals, where he still has one of his dwelling places. He studied engineering, languages and the arts. After graduating from the Perm Polytechnical University, he became a programmer and a translator. Later he focused on music and electricity. His native German and not lesser his native Russian also played their role: his technical and engineering activities for the benefit of hydropower plants and pulp and paper mills in the Urals and Siberia, Karelia and Tuva developed in close cooperation with manufacturers from Europe, whose production has been so fond of in Russia since a long time. Since 30 years, after studying Russian literature at Moscow State University and the study of the basics of the German economy in the city of Tübingen, he actively supports through his personal example the convergence between Germany and Russia in the fields of literature and music, as well as technology. He studies European history in the aspects of language and movements, the architecture of Prussia in the aspect of form, he writes stories and notes.

Vorobeva, Ekaterina

Ekaterina Leonidovna Vorobeva is a poet, prose writer and translator. She was born in Stepnogorsk, Tselinogorskaya obl., USSR, in 1991 and began writing poems at the age of six. The first book of her lyrics called “Following the Dream” was published in 2007. Vorobeva’s compositions can be found on pages of major Saint Petersburg literary editions such as, for example, “Nevsky Miscellany”.

In 2012 Vorobeva became the Klavdia Holodova All-Russian Literary Prize laureate. In 2014 she won the Second Prize in Literary Translation from Finnish and Scandinavian languages Competition within the Decade of Foreign Languages and Cultures in St. Petersburg. At the moment Vorobeva is doing her Master’s degree in Baltic Sea Region studies at the University of Turku. 

Krivulin, Victor

Victor Krivulin (1944 - 2001) was a highly visible figure in the unofficial literary scene of Leningrad during the three decades of its existence (1960s - 1980s). His large and varied poetic output exemplifies some of the most pertinent features of the postmodern current that has been variously labelled neomodernism and metarealism. For many years, his poetry circulated exclusively in samizdat, the first in 1981 by an emigrant publishing house in Paris, in the Soviet Union in book form first in 1989. 
Also active as literary critic and prose writer.
 

 

Brodsky, Joseph

Iosif Brodsky (Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский), Russian poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad in 1940, Brodsky ran afoul of Soviet authorities and was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and settled in the U.S. He taught thereafter at universities including those at Yale, Cambridge and Michigan.

In 1955, Brodsky began writing his own poetry and producing literary translations. He circulated them in secret, and some were published by the underground journal Sintaksis (Syntaxis). By 1958 he was already well known in literary circles for his poems "The Jewish cemetery near Leningrad" and "Pilgrims”. In 1960 the young Brodsky met Anna Akhmatova, who encouraged his work, and would go on to become his mentor.  Later Anna Akhmatova laughed at the K.G.B.’s shortsightedness: “What a biography they’re fashioning for our red-haired friend!” meaning the purges and persecutions he was exposed to. In 1963, Brodsky's poetry was denounced by a Leningrad newspaper as "pornographic and anti-Soviet." His papers were confiscated, he was interrogated, twice put in a mental institution and then arrested. He was charged with social parasitism by the Soviet authorities in a trial in 1964 and sentenced to five years hard labor, of which he served 18 months on a farm in the village of Norenskaya in the Arctic Archangelsk region. Brodsky's sentence was commuted in 1965 after protests by prominent Soviet and foreign cultural figures.

On 4 June 1972 he was put by the Soviet authorities on a plane for Vienna. Although the poet was invited back after the fall of the Soviet Union, Brodsky never returned to his country. Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". The prize coincided with the first legal publication in Russia of Brodsky's poetry as an exile. He was also awarded the McArthur scholarship in 1981 and several other prizes, as well as received the National Order of the Legion of Honour.

Brodsky died of a heart attack aged 55, in his New York City apartment. He was buried on Isola di San Michele cemetery in Venice, Italy. In 1997, a plaque was placed on his house in St. Petersburg (the former Leningrad) with his portrait in relief, and the words "In this house from 1940 to 1972 lived the great Russian poet Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky".

Likhachov, Dmitry

Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachov (Дми́трий Серге́евич Лихачёв, also Dmitri Likhachev; 1906, St. Petersburg – 1999, St. Petersburg) was an outstanding Soviet Russian scholar who was considered the world's foremost expert in Old Russian language and literature. He is revered as "the last of old St Petersburgers", "a guardian of national culture", and "Russia's conscience".
From his early childhood he was passionate about literature, even though his parents did not approve of this interest. In 1923 at the age of sixteen Likhachov entered the Leningrad State University in the Department of Linguistics and Literature, where he attended Roman-Germanic and Slavic-Russian sections at the same time. In 1928, at the end of his studies, Likhachov was arrested and accused of being a member of the students’ club “Cosmic Academy of Science”, which was simply a playful name for a group of like-minded youths. After nine months in jail, the young scientist was unlawfully exiled without trial and sentenced to five years in the USSR’s largest labor camp situated on the Solovetsky Islands, where he met both exiled Russian intellectuals and real criminals, who happened to save his life. From 1931 Likhachov was a worker on the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal until his release in 1932.
After working at the Institute for Russian Literature in Moscow member of the Soviet Academy of Science in 1970. Doctor Honoris Causa at Torun University in 1964, Oxford University in 1967, Edinburgh University in 1970, Bordeaux in 1982, Zurich in 1983, Budapest in 1985 and Sofia in 1988.
In 1995 he could publish his memoirs under the title "Vospominaniya". Dmitry Likhachov died on 30 September 1999. He was married to Zinaida Makarova and had twin daughters, Vera and Lyudmila.

Kupriyanov, Vyacheslav

Born in Novosibirsk in 1939, Kupriyanov studied technical sciences in the High Navy School in Leningrad (1958 - 1960) and graduated in 1967 from the Moscow Foreign Language Institute (now Linguistic University), section of matematical linguistics and German (1967). He is a freelance writer, a member of the Moscow Writers Union and the Serbian Writers Union.
His first published works were translations of poetry from German (Hölderlin, Novalis, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Brecht, Grass, Enzensberger, Hans Arp, Erich Fried) and English (Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg). His published works include the volumes of poetry "First person", 1981 (Moscow), "Life goes on", 1982, "Homework", 1986; "Echo", 1988, 1989; "Poems", 1994; "THE BEST TIME", 2003, the novel "The shoe of Empedokles", 1996, 2000 (Moscow) and short stories (including science-fiction) published in various magazines. His literary works have been translated to 55 languages.