Bagritskii, Eduard Georgievich

(pseudonym of E. G. Dziubin). Born Oct. 22 (Nov. 3), 1895, in Odessa; died Feb. 16, 1934, in Moscow. Soviet Russian poet. Published literary miscellanies in Odessa from 1915.

In 1919, Bagritskii served in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Special Partisan Detachment, writing agitational poems, proclamations, and leaflets. In his lyric verse and narrative poems of this period (“The Bird-Snarer,” “Till Eulenspiegel,” “The Inn,” “The Watermelon,” and others) he created romantic images of freedom-loving, courageous people. In 1926 he wrote the narrative poem Ballad of Opanas (opera libretto of the same name, 1932) about the Civil War in the Ukraine and the fate of a peasant who betrayed the revolution. The influence of T. G. Shevchenko and of the Tale of Igor’s Campaign are evident in the poem. His collection of poems Southwest was published in 1928. In his second collection, The Victors (1932), Bagritskii glorifies the builders of the new world and communicates the intensity of the struggle against a philistine existence. In his third collection, The Last Night (1932)— which includes the narrative poems The Last Night, Man of the Suburbs, and Death of a Pioneer Girl—the theme of the succession of revolutionary generations rising up against an obsolescent world unfolds. Along with N. Dement’ev, he was the first to translate the poems of Nazim Hikmet into Russian. The works of Bagritskii, one of the greatest artists of Soviet poetry, are marked by revolutionary romantic inspiration, emotionalism, variety of color, and a concretely sensual, object-oriented perception of the world. His work has perceptibly influenced the development of Soviet poetry.