Poet Vasily Betaki died

The Soviet and Russian poet and translator Vasily Betaki died in France. Poet and human rights activist Natalya Gorbanevskaya reported this on her blog . Betaki was 82 years old.

The son of a futurist artist who worked in cinema, Vasily Betaki was born in Rostov-on-Don in 1930, and since 1931 he lived in Leningrad. He studied at the Eastern Faculty of Leningrad State University, but in 1950 he was forced to interrupt his studies to avoid arrest. In 1960 he graduated from the Literary Institute in absentia. Student of Pavel Antokolsky and Tatyana Gnedich.

He worked as a teacher, director of amateur theaters, riding instructor, and chief methodologist at the Pavlovsk Palace Museum. The first book of his poems was published in 1965 in Leningrad. From 1965 to 1972 he was a member of the Writers' Union. Betaki translated poetry from English and German, wrote literary programs for radio, and led a literary association. Known as a translator of three "main" poems by Edgar Allan Poe ("The Raven", "Bells", "Ulalyum").

Since 1973 he lived in the Parisian suburb of Meudon. Betaki worked for Radio Liberty for twenty years and for eighteen at Continent magazine. He was one of the organizers of the transfer to the USSR of Russian books banned there and published in the West.

During his life in France, he published eighteen books of poetry, a book of articles about modern Russian poets, and eight books of translations. Since 1989, Vasily Betaki has been publishing again in Russia. He was a regular contributor to the St. Petersburg magazine " Zvezda ".