Curated category
20th-century Russian poets
- Alexander BlokAlexander Alexandrovich Blok heard something in the summer of 1917 that most people could not. Writing in his diary, he recorded: "I feel that a great event…
- Vladimir NabokovVladimir Nabokov arrived in the United States in May 1940 aboard the SS Champlain, a Russian exile who spoke three languages and had already written nine…
- Anna AkhmatovaAnna Akhmatova chose a Tatar surname for herself because her father refused to see any verses printed under his "respectable" name.
- Andrei BelyAndrei Bely was born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev in Moscow, into a household where intellectual life was the air everyone breathed.
- Eldar RyazanovEldar Ryazanov was born on the 18th of November 1927, in Samara, to a diplomat father and a Jewish mother, in a country that would spend the next several…
- Vladimir MayakovskyVladimir Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart on the 14th of April 1930, and then the suspicions began. The bullet pulled from his body did not match…
- Sergei YeseninSergei Yesenin was found dead on the 28th of December 1925 in his room at the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad. He was thirty years old.
- Sergey MikhalkovSergey Mikhalkov wrote the words that hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens heard every morning, every sporting event, every state occasion for decades.
- Ivan BuninIvan Alekseyevich Bunin became the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy gave it to him in 1933, while he was living…
- Konstantin BalmontKonstantin Balmont once sent Leo Tolstoy a copy of his most celebrated book with a letter that read: "This book is a prolonged scream of a soul caught in the…