Constellation Similarity Assertions

Biography

Andrei Voznesenskii, one of Russia's foremost modern poets, was born in Moscow on May 12, 1933. Part of his early childhood was spent in the ancient Russian city of Vladimir. During the war, from 1941 to 1944, he lived with his mother in Kurgan, in the Urals, while his father, a professor of engineering in peacetime, was in Leningrad, engaged in evacuating factories during the blockade. Both Voznesenskii's parents have literary and artistic interests. His mother read poetry to him from his earliest childhood - Igor' Severyanin and Boris Pasternak, he remembers in particular. Voznesenskii recalls seeing his father once during the war when he flew to Kurgan on leave from the front. He carried nothing with him but a small rucksack containing some food and a little book of reproductions of etchings by Goya, which powerfully affected his small son. Voznesenskii's childhood apprehension of war in Russia, heightened by Goya's grotesque and terrible visions, ultimately gave rise to his most famous poem, "I Am Goya". After the war the family returned to Moscow. As an adolescent, Voznesenskii thought of becoming an artist. Then he studied architecture. "I was already writing", he says, "but mainly I painted. Yet poetry was flowing in me like a river under the ice". Shortly before his graduation from the Moscow Architectural Institute in 1957, an event occurred which is the subject of the poem "Fire in the Architectural Institute". Like other senior students, Voznesenskii had spent his last year on an elaborate design project, which he describes, with all due modesty, as "a spiral-shaped thing, a bit like the Guggenheim Museum". "One morning", he says, "we found that a fire had destroyed a year's work. Whole districts and cities on blueprints had vanished. We were so tired that we were glad that final examinations had to be postponed. But for me it was more than a fire. I believe in symbols. I understood that architecture was burned out in me. I became a poet". Andrei Voznesenskii was a disciple of Boris Pasternak during his early years. "Your entrance into literature was swift and turbulent. I'm glad I've lived to see it", Boris Pasternak wrote to a 14-year old youngster who had sent him his early verses asking for the great poet's opinion.

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