Poets of the Silver Age: George Ivanov and Irina Odoevtseva. A story of love
St Petersburg University St Petersburg University and the Representative office of Saint Petersburg University in Barcelona invite you to an online lecture «Poets of the Silver Age: George Ivanov and Irina Odoevtseva. A story of love». The lecture will be delivered by Nina Shcherbak, PhD in Philology.
The flowering of George Ivanov talent coincided with life changing period of the country. The poet of a perfect taste had been a regular visitor to literary club “Stray Dog" at St. Petersburg. He had been corresponding with Blok, was a member of the literary group "Workshop of Poets", which was headed by him after N. Gumilyov’s death. G. Ivanov could not accept the revolution and in September 1922, together with his wife, the poetess Irina Odoevtseva, he left Russia and became the first poet of Russian emigration.
Irina Odoevtseva, a student of N. Gumilyov, "a poetess with a huge ribbon in her hair" as she described herself in one of her poems, discovered her passion for poetry at a very young age. She published her poetry Court of Miracles in 1922, and in the same year she emigrated to Paris with her husband George Ivanov. She was not only a poet, but also a novelist. She wrote several very popular novels: Angel of Death (1927), Isolde (1931), The Mirror (1939), Leave Hope Forever (1954). After 65 years of emigration, Irina Odoevtseva returned to St. Petersburg. In her memoires On the Shore of the Neva and On the Shore of the Seine published after returning to Russia she described life of intellectual elite in St. Petersburg and Paris. She also wrote about Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Zinaida Gippius, George Adamovich, Osip Mandelshtam, and Andrey Bely in memoirs.
Before death, George Ivanov wrote a letter to Russian emigration representatives: ‘I am writing to all those who appreciated me as a poet and asking for one thing. Take care of my wife, Irina Odoevtseva. She was the light and happiness of my whole life’.
Lecturer
Nina Shcherbak, Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, philosophy of language, and English literature.
The lecture will be held as part of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg University, the first university in Russia.
The meeting will be held online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish.