Vladimir Lugovskoi

Born June 18 (July 1), 1901, in Moscow; died June 5, 1957, in Yalta; buried in Moscow. Soviet Russian poet. Son of a teacher.

Lugovskoi graduated from the Military Pedagogic Institute in 1921 and served in the Red Army until 1924. He began publishing his work that year. His first books of poetry were Lightning Flashes (1926) and Muscle (1929). Lugovskoi’s best works of the 1920’s were imbued with the romanticism of the Civil War of 1918-20 and with sincere revolutionary fervor (“Song of the Wind,” for example).

Once a member of the Literary Center of Constructivists, Lugovskoi wrote My Friends’ Sufferings (1930), a book that signaled a break with constructivism and expressed his desire to creatively interpret the new manifestations of reality. He followed it with the poetry collections Europe (1932) and Life (1933), the narrative poem Dangara (1935), and the collections of poetry Caspian Sea (1936) and New Poetry (1941). The struggle for socialism is the theme of one of Lugovskoi’s major works, the poetic epic The Desert and the Spring (books 1-4, 1930-54), devoted to the transformation of Middle Asia.

In the last years of his life, Lugovskoi produced many works, including Vortex of the Sun (1956) and Blue Spring (published 1958), which are notable for their profound lyric and philosophical grasp of reality. Lugovskoi’s finest work is Midcentury (1958), a philosophical poem which the poet described as “the century’s autobiography.” Lugovskoi’s poetic style is distinguished by intense lyricism and emotionally charged and imaginative thought. A collection of his articles, Thoughts About Poetry, came out in 1960. He translated the works of poets from Azerbaijan, Armenia, Lithuania, and Uzbekistan, as well as the socialist countries. Lugovskoi was awarded the Order of the Badge of Honor and several medals.