dumbfoundry

On February 21, after an enduring illness people’s poet of Chuvashia Gennady Aigi died in hospital, the poet’s relatives informed a REGNUM correspondent.

Gennady Aigi was born on August 21, 1934 in Shaimurzino village of Batyrev district in Chuvashia. In 1953-1958, he was a student of Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow (expelled for “writing a book of hostile poems, destroying fundamentals of socialistic realism’s method”), being a friend of Boris Pasternak. 1961-1971, Aigi is an employee of Mayakovsky museum. In the USSR, his books had not been published till 1987. By that time, his poems were already translated into many European languages and they were widely recognized.

Being people’s poet of Chuvachia, Knight of Legion d’Honneur, Andrey Bely Price Laureate in 1987, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize.

MOSCOW (AP) - Russian poet Gennady Aigi, who was often considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature, has died at age 71, news agencies reported Friday.

Aigi died Tuesday in Moscow of an unspecified illness and on Friday was buried in his native village of Shaimurzino, in the Volga River area about 650 kilometres east of Moscow, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

His poems, written in the indigenous language of the Chuvashia region, were translated into scores of other languages and Aigi himself was a noted translator into Chuvash of poets of other countries. [...]

In an interview published by Russia's New Times this month, Aigi said he had little interest in the post-modern poetry of recent years. He also lamented that poets were abandoning the aim of writing with moral authority, saying "(now) we have swagger, a rope to pull, and ambition to pursue. I still remember the cynical joke: a poet is no different from other dogs, except that he is a talking dog." [...]

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 at 4:55 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.