Georgy Ivanov

Georgy Vladimirovich Ivanov (Russian: Гео́ргий Влади́мирович Ива́нов; 10 November [O.S. 29 October] 1894 – 26 August 1958) was a leading poet and essayist of the Russian emigration between the 1930s and 1950s.

As a banker's son, Ivanov spent his young manhood in the elite circle of Russian golden youth. [His father actually was a military officer, with a rank of lieutenant colonel, retiring in 1902].

After practicing a variety of

Ivanov was the only prominent member of this circle who emigrated westward. His natural arrogance and peremptory judgements easily won him respect and admiration of his younger contemporaries. He promoted himself as the only remnant of the highly sophisticated milieu of the

Together with his wife

In 1938 he published a prose poem Disintegration of the Atom, which was denounced by most of the émigrés (including Nabokov and Vladislav Khodasevich) and praised by his admirer V. Zlobin and Zinaida Gippius.

Afflicted with alcoholism and suffering from despondency, Ivanov sank ever lower. It was in conditions of abject penury and total despair that Ivanov's best poems were created. His art culminated in his last cycle of poems, written in the days preceding his death. In one of his last pieces, Ivanov prophetically promised "to return to Russia as poems". His wife returned to

Editions

• Georgy Ivanov, On the Border of Snow and Melt: Selected Poems. Translated and Annotated by Jerome Katsell and Stanislav Shvabrin. Introduction by Stanislav Shvabrin.
  ISBN 978-0-9774869-4-6
  ).

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Georgy Ivanov.

• (in Russian) Georgy Ivanov. Poems
• (in Russian) Georgy Vladimirovich Ivanov
• (in Russian) Georgy Ivanov: poems, biography
• English translations of 3 poems
• (in English) The Poems by Georgy Ivanov
• Works by Georgy Ivanov at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)