Arseny Tarkovsky

Arseny Tarkovsky was a Soviet and Russian poet and translator, born in 1907 in Yelisavetgrad, in the Russian Empire, and died in Moscow in 1989. He wrote in Russian. He is remembered for spare, nature-attentive poetry, and also as the father of the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, whose films, among them Mirror, Stalker and Nostalghia, used several of his poems.

He grew up in a family with populist sympathies. His father, who had been arrested in connection with a plot against the governor-general of Kharkov, introduced him to poetry by taking him as a child to readings by poets such as Severyanin, Balmont and Sologub. His older brother died in 1919 defending their hometown. As a young man, Tarkovsky and his friends were arrested after publishing a poem with an acrostic about Lenin and sent for execution; he was the only one who managed to escape. By 1924 he had moved to Moscow, where he worked for Gudok, a newspaper for railway workers, writing a verse editorial section, and from 1925 to 1929 he studied literature.

During the Second World War he worked as a war correspondent for the army newspaper Boevaya Trevoga. A leg wound became gas gangrene, and he underwent a series of amputations. He was a friend of Marina Tsvetaeva, to whom he dedicated a cycle of poems after her suicide in 1941. He was also a notable translator of Azerbaijani, Georgian, Armenian and Arabic poetry, and of writers such as Nizami and Adam Mickiewicz, a body of work nearly as important as his own. Although he wrote all his life, his first book did not appear until 1962, when he was past fifty. His verse is often linked to the Ukrainian philosopher and poet Hryhorii Skovoroda, particularly in its use of landscape.

His legacy lives on in film and music: his poems appear in Mirror, Stalker and Nostalghia, and Kaija Saariaho drew on his name for a string quartet. In 1989 he was posthumously awarded the USSR State Prize.