Yuri Kolker Explained

Yuri Kolker
Birth Name:Yuri Iossiphovich Kolker
Birth Date:1946 3, df=y
Occupation:Poet
Notableworks:
  • Some Observations
  • We'll become English soil when we die
  • translation of Lord Tennyson The Charge of the Light Brigade
Citizenship:
  • Soviet Union (1946–84)
  • Israel (1984)
  • United Kingdom (1996)

Yuri Kolker (14 March, 1946; Russian: Ю́рий Ко́лкер, Hebrew: יורי קולקר) is a Russian poet. He is also known as an essayist, literary critic, and as a translator.

Biography

Yuri Kolker was born in Leningrad in 1946, to a Russian mother and a Jewish father. Since childhood, he attended various officially authorised literary associations. In 1969, he graduated with honours from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute and got his PhD in Physics and Mathematics in 1978. From the 1960s, he became part of the Russian Samizdat culture. By 1975, in addition to pure lyrics, civic motifs appeared in his poetry, and thereby he joined the Movement of the Soviet Dissidents. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Yuri Kolker quit his work in a state science research institution, cut off his few remaining ties with the Soviet officialdom and became a labourer. He lived in a communal slum, in severe poverty, making a living as a boiler-room operator. By early 1983, while being hounded the KGB, he completed for Samizdat the first ever annotated collection of poems by the then forbidden in the USSR poet Vladislav Khodasevich in two volumes.[1] The collection was immediately re-published in Paris by La presse libre, the publishing house of the newspaper La pensée russe. In June 1984, after years as a refusenik struggling for an exit visa, he emigrated to Israel. In October 1989, he joined the London BBC Russian Service where he went on to edit the radio magazines Paradigma (1990–1999) and Yevropa (1999–2002).[2] [3] [4] [5]

Family

His father, Joseph (Iosif) Kolker, was an electrical engineer educated in Germany. His mother, Valentina Chistyakova, was a housewife. His grandfather, Feodor Chistyakov, who became a Bolshevik in 1909, participated in the October Revolution, served in the Red Army as a middle ranking commissar and was buried in the prestigious Alexander Nevsky Lavra cemetery.

In 1973, Yuri Kolker married his schoolmate Tatiana (Tanya) Kostina. In 1974, their daughter Elizabeth was born.[4] [5] [6]

Poetry and essays

Yuri Kolker started composing poetry in the age of six but his poems were first published in a Soviet literary magazine only in 1972, when he was 26. That was an accomplishment for a completely apolitical lyrical poet. Ideological obstacles were common to all writers (all Soviet literary magazines were state institutions) but were especially harsh for people with typically Jewish surnames such as Kolker. After 1975, none of his work was published in the Soviet Union.[4] [5]

From 1981, and especially after his emigration in 1984, his poetry and essays were extensively published in the West: in Austria, France, Israel, USA, Germany, Britain, Italy, and Canada. Since 1991, he has been widely published in the post-Soviet Russia and the former Soviet Baltic republics.

His poetic work is usually understood as philosophical elegiac lyricism traditional in form,[7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] and "typically St. Petersburg perfectionist short poems".[14] Yuri Kolker himself often emphasised his bellicose anti-avant-garde stance.[15] [4] [5]

One of his most popular poems is the translation of Lord Tennyson The Charge of the Light Brigade. Yuri Kolker also translated from Shelly,[16] Lord Byron,[17] George Herbert,[18] Dylan Thomas,[19] García Lorca,[20] Avrom Sutskever[21] and other poets. Essays by the 19th century British historian Lord Acton translated by Yuri Kolker were published in 1992 in London and re-published in 2016 in Moscow.

Kolker is also well known for his aesthetically against-the-current non-conformist essays, including those on Khodasevich,[22] Brodsky,[23] Zabolotsky,[24] Vladimir Lifshits,[25] Yevtushenko;[26] and his defiant memoirs, (One can't throw out the evil from a song), V Iudeiskoy Pustune (The Desert of Milk and Honey), and others.

In 2009, Yuri Kolker published My Farewell Autobiography.[5] He lives in the UK.

Poem collections in Russian

Other works in Russian

Notes and References

  1. Владислав Ходасевич. Собрание стихов, в двух томах. (Составление,) редакция и примечания Юрия Колкера. La presse libre: Paris, 1983
  2. Wolfgang Kasack. Lexicon der russischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts, Mϋnchen, 1992
  3. Самиздат Ленинграда (1950–1980). Литературная энциклопедия. Под общей редакцией Д. Я. Севе­рюхина. — Новое литературное обозрение, Москва, 2003, стр. 217–219
  4. http://yuri-kolker.com/prose/IM_AS_1.htm Yuri Kolker. A Mangy is Damned, 2008. Yuri Kolker website (in Russian).
  5. Yuri Kolker. My Farewell Autobiography, 2009, Yuri Kolker website (in Russian).
  6. Лица петербургской поэзии: 1950–1990-e. Автобиографии. Авторское чтение. Отв. ред. Ю. М. Валиева. Zamizdat, СПб, 2011.
  7. Елена Елагина. «Елей и мёд — нашёптывать стихи» (Юрий Колкер. Завет и тяжба), — альманах Речитатив №2, St.Petersburg, 1995.
  8. Александр Танков. Праздник аскетизма. — газета Вечерний Петербург, St.Petersburg, 22 March 1996.
  9. Н. Джеймс. «Уж если читать, так поэтов…». — Лондонский курьер No. 56, London, May 1997
  10. Зоя Капустина. К нам приезжал поэт. — Калейдоскоп (приложение к газете Время, выпуск 371, Tel Aviv, 28 April 1998.
  11. Алексей Машевский. Авангардизм традиционности (Юрий Колкер. Ветилуя). — Новый Мир №9, Moscow, 2001.
  12. Татьяна Вольтская. Строгий рай (рецензия на Ветилую). — газета La pensée russe No 4333, Paris, 21–27 September 2000
  13. Наум Басовский. «Уж если читать, так поэтов…» — журнал Знамя №6, Moscow, 2001
  14. Дмитрий Северюхин. Вечер в Летнем саду. Эпизоды из истории второй литературы. Издательство им. Новикова, СПб, 2000.
  15. http://yuri-kolker.com/articles/Retrograd.htm Why I am a Retrograde, 1995. Yuri Kolker website (in Russian).
  16. Web site: see translation in Russian.
  17. Web site: see translation in Russian.
  18. Web site: see translation in Russian.
  19. Web site: see translation in Russian.
  20. Web site: see translation in Russian.
  21. Web site: see translation in Russian.
  22. http://yuri-kolker.com/articles/Aides_Chill.htm Айдесская прохлада. Очерк жизни и творчества В.Ф.Ходасевича. — На вебсайте Юрия Колкера http://yuri-kolker.com
  23. http://yuri-kolker.com/articles/Brodsky.htm Юрий Колкер. Несколько наблюдений / О стихах Иосифа Бродского. — На вебсайте Юрия Колкера http://yuri-kolker.com
  24. http://yuri-kolker.com/articles/Zabolotsky.htm Юрий Колкер. Заболоцкий: Жизнь и судьба. — На вебсайте Юрия Колкера http://yuri-kolker.com
  25. http://yuri-kolker.com/articles/Lifshits.htm Юрий Колкер. Поэт в квадрате. — На вебсайте Юрия Колкера http://yuri-kolker.com
  26. http://yuri-kolker.com/articles/Yevtushenko.htm Юрий Колкер. Евтушенко как зеркало русской деволюции. — На вебсайте Юрия Колкера http://yuri-kolker.com

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