Robert Rozhdestvensky

Robert Rozhdestvensky (1932-1994) was a Soviet-Russian poet and songwriter who, during the Khrushchev Thaw, broke with socialist realism and helped open the way to a freer kind of poetry, alongside Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina. He wrote in Russian, and his importance lies in having renewed the tone of Soviet lyric poetry.

He was born in the village of Kosikha, in West Siberian Krai, now Altai Krai. His father, of Polish origin, died in battle in Latvia in 1945, and his childhood was shaped by war. He lived with his grandmother in Omsk, spent time in a Moscow orphanage when his parents went to the front, and later settled with his mother and stepfather, whose surname he adopted. His first poem was published in an Omsk newspaper in 1941.

He studied at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow and became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers. Together with his contemporaries, he read his verses to large audiences in stadiums, with a critical edge that came close to the anti-Soviet. His clash with the authorities came in 1963, when Khrushchev publicly rebuked him over the poem "Yes, Boys", and he spent a period away from Moscow. Later he held prominent posts, including the secretaryship of the Union of Writers from 1976, and devoted much of his work to restoring the reputations of Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and Vysotsky.

In 1990 he was diagnosed with a brain tumour, which was successfully operated on in France. He died of a heart attack in 1994 in Peredelkino. His legacy lies in being a public voice of the thaw and in editing and defending silenced poets.