Voznesenskii, Andrei

Born May 12, 1933, in Moscow. Soviet Russian poet.

Voznesenskii graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute in 1957 and began publishing his poems in 1958. His narrative poem The Craftsmen (1959) attracted attention by its freshness of language and its profound belief in the lofty vocation of art. The collection Forty Lyrical Digressions From the Poem “The Triangular Pear” (1962), basically devoted to the poet’s impressions of a trip to the USA, brought about a discussion of the “modern style” and the civic position of the artist. Outstanding among Voznesenskii’s narrative poems are Lonzhiumo (1963), which is devoted to V. I. Lenin, and Oza (1964), a meditation upon the human personality in an epoch of the universal “advance” of technology. Voznesenskii’s poetry is marked by an acute feeling for the contemporary, a dynamic quality of the verse, a complex, often paradoxical, associative imagery of an “urbanistic” character, and a whimsical play of alliterations.