Dmitry Vasilyevich Bobyshev (Russian: Дми́трий Васи́льевич Бо́бышев; born 11 April 1936, Mariupol[1]) is a Soviet poet, translator and literary critic.
Dmitry Bobyshev was born on 11 April 1936 in Mariupol. From his childhood he lived in Leningrad. During the Siege of Leningrad, Bobyshev's father died, and after the war he was adopted by his stepfather. In 1959 he graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Technology. He worked for 10 years as an engineer for chemical equipment. Later, he became an editor on television.[2]
Bobyshev started to write poetry in the mid-1950s. His poems were published in samizdat (including Alexander Ginzburg's journal Syntax"). In the early 1960s, along with Joseph Brodsky, Anatoly Naiman, Yevgeny Rein, Bobyshev entered the inner circle of Anna Akhmatova.[3] Bobyshev's first book of poems, Hiatus, was published in 1979 in Paris.
In 1979, Bobyshev emigrated to the United States, where he taught Russian language and literature. In 1983, he became a US citizen.[4] He is currently professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[5] Bobyshev is the author of six books of poetry, a number of poetry translations (modern American poetry) and volumes of prose memoir, I am here (2003). Among the circle of Akhmatova, Bobyshev stands apart aesthetically. While, like Brodsky, he is rooted in a century and a half of Russian poetic tradition, Bobyshev chooses more radical manifestations of this tradition.[3]