Rozhdestvenskii, Ignatii Dmitrievich

Born Oct. 28 (Nov. 10), 1910, in Moscow; died July 3, 1969, in Krasnoiarsk. Soviet Russian poet.

Rozhdestvenskii graduated from the department of literature at the Irkutsk Pedagogical Institute in 1940 and taught in the northern districts of Krasnoiarsk Krai. He began publishing in 1927, and his first poetry collection, Aurora Borealis, appeared in 1936. Rozhdestvenskii’s poetry dealt mainly with Siberia’s past and present, the fortitude of its inhabitants, and its harsh and beautiful landscape; examples are the narrative poems The Sentries of Mangazeia (1944) and Vasilii Pronchishchev (1947). A number of poems and the narrative poem The Eternally Living Heart (1957) were devoted to the Lenin theme. Rozhdestvenskii was awarded the Order of the Badge of Honor and several medals.