David Samoylov
David Samoylov (1920 - 1990) is the pseudonym of David Samuilovich Kaufman,
one of the most beloved Soviet poets of the War generation.
Samoylov was born in Moscow into a Jewish family. When the war with Finland
broke out in 1938, Samoylov was a student at MIFLI, the Moscow Institute of
Philosophy, Literature and History.
He volunteered for the army two times but was refused for health reasons. In 1941,
when Hitler’s troops were approaching Moscow, Samoylov worked in a trench digging brigade together with many Moscovites, who were not at the front line. Later, he entered an infantry officers' school, and after graduating in 1942, was sent to the front. He remained on active duty until the end of the war.
Samoylov called himself and his peers “unrealized war generation”, but his readers hear the voice of the whole generation through Samoylov’s lyrical poetry.
Poems
Boris Slutsky
Boris Slutsky (1919 -1986), a Soviet poet, was born in Tula, but spent his childhood and
youth in Kharkov, Ukraine.
In 1937 he entered the Law Institute of Moscow, and also studied at the Maxim Gorky
Institute of Literature from 1939 till 1941.
He was a member of a group of young poets who called themselves "the Generation
of 1940." In 1941-1945 he served in the Soviet Army in an infantry platoon. Coming back from war with the rank of major, Slutsky began working for State Radio (1948–1952).
In 1957 Slutsky's first book of poetry, Memory, was published. It contained many poems written much earlier, many of them about his war experience. Together with David Samoylov, Boris Slutsky became the most prominent representative among the poets of War Generation.
In 1953 - 1954, after the fall of Stalin rule, unpublished verses condemning the Stalinist regime were attributed to Slutsky. They had been circulating in the underground, "Samizdat", in the 1950s and were published in 1961 in Germany. Slutsky neither confirmed nor denied their authorship.
In his poetry, Slutsky also approached Jewish themes. He translated Yiddish poets (Leib Kvitko, Asher Shvartsman, Yakov Sternberg and others) into Russian.
In 1963, The Poets of Israel edited the first anthology of Israeli poetry under the guidance of Boris Slutsky.
Gennady Shpalikov
Gennady Shpalikov, (1937 – 1974) a Soviet Russian poet and a screenwriter, was born
in Karelian ASSR. He moved to Moscow with his parents in 1939.
In the fall of 1941, he was evacuated to the Kirghiz SSR, together with the Academy of
Military Engineers, where his father served. He returned to Moscow in 1943. His father
was declared missing in action in 1945 during World War II.
In 1947 Shpalikov was sent to study in Kiev's military cadet school.
His first work was published in 1955. In 1956, he entered the screenwriting department of VGIK, a premier film school in the Soviet Union. He was a writer and actor, known for the films Walking the Streets of Moscow (1964), I Am Twenty (1965) and A Long Happy Life (1967) which received a prize at the Bergamo Film festival. Gennady Shpalikov died in 1974 after committing suicide.
Arseny Tarkovsky
Arseny Tarkovsky (1907-1989) is one of the great twentieth century
Russian poets and prominent translator.
He was born in Elisavetgrad, Ukraine. In his family poetry was a natural form of
communication. They used to write each other rhymed letters and notes and versify
the family events, the habit the poet kept till the end of his life.
After finishing school, Tarkovsky moved to Moscow. There he attended Higher State
Literary Courses attached to the All-Russian Union of Poets. At that time he translated poetry from Turkmen, Georgian, Armenian and Arabic.
During World War II Tarkovsky volunteered as a war-correspondent at the Army Newspaper. He was wounded in action in 1943 and lost his leg.
After the war Tarkovsky prepared his collected works for publication. However, the poems were not released due to the notorious decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which degraded the work of some remarkable Soviet poets. For a long time, Tarkovsky as a poet remained unknown to general public; however, he was popular as a translator. His first collection of poetry, Before Snow, was published in 1962.
Tarkovsky was predeceased by his son Andrei Tarkovsky, a famous film director. Arseny Tarkovsky died in 1989.
