Rozhdestvenskii, Vsevolod Aleksandrovich

Born Mar. 29 (Apr. 10), 1895, in Tsarskoe Selo, now the city of Pushkin; died Aug. 31, 1977, in Leningrad. Soviet Russian poet.

Rozhdestvenskii began publishing in 1910; he studied in the faculty of history and philology at the University of Petrograd from 1914 to 1916. He fought in World War I and the Civil War of 1918–20. Rozhdestvenskii’s first poetry collection was Gymnasium Years (1914). The collections Summer and The Golden Spindle (both 1921) were noticeably influenced by acmeism. The collections The Big Dipper (1926), The Granite Garden(1929), An Earthly Heart (1933), and The Window Overlooking the Garden (1939) contained such new subjects as five-year plan construction, Leningrad as the city of revolution, and Russian cultural figures.

During the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Rozhdestvenskii was a correspondent for military newspapers; he also wrote popular songs and patriotic poetry, collected in Voice of the Motherland (1943) and Ladoga (1945). His lyric poetry written in the 1960’s and 1970’s is devoted to Leningrad’s past and present and to the natural beauties of the north. Rozhdestvenskii also wrote the memoirs Pages of Life (1962; 2nd ed., 1974), the book While Reading Pushkin (1962; 2nd ed., 1966), and many opera librettos and translations. He was awarded two orders and several medals.