Eduard Bagritsky

Born in Odessa into a mostly assimilated Jewish family, Eduard Bagritsky (pseudonym of Eduard Godelevich Dziubin) was a renowned and sometimes controversial Soviet Jewish poet in the Russian language. Bagritsky began publishing poetry in 1913 in local literary journals in Odessa. After a stint in law enforcement and in the Red Army during the revolutionary years, in 1925 Bagritsky settled in Moscow, where he was much admired in the literary scene. His unsentimental style and direct treatment of difficult themes, such as violence, sexuality, and interethnic strife, drew ire and disapproval from critics in Russian nationalist circles. Bagritsky also worked as a translator, rendering Soviet Yiddish poets, such as Itzik Feffer and Peretz Markish, into Russian. Although Bagritsky was given an official funeral at the time of his untimely death in 1934, his works—which dealt with Jewish themes in only a few poems—were later spitefully critiqued by antisemitic intellectuals as evidence of Jewish infiltration and degradation of Russian cultural life.