Dear All
You might be interested in the below:
David Brummell will give an illustrated talk about the life and work of Yuri Dombrovsky(1909 -1978).
Yuri Dombrovsky is comparatively unknown in the West. However, his two main literary works,The Keeper of Antiquities, and its sequel, the Faculty of Useless Knowledge, along with Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, stand as the greatest achievements of 20th century Russian literature.
In English, with a recital of Dombrovsky’s poems in Russian by Alla Gelich and in English translation.
Yuri Osipovich Dombrovsky was born in 1909 into the family of a well-known Moscow lawyer.
He got into trouble with the authorities as early as 1932, while still a student in the capital. As a result of this incident he was arrested and exiled to Alma-Ata, the then capital of Soviet Kazakhstan.
Although exile from Moscow was a punishment for Dombrovsky, he fell deeply in love with Alma-Ata and its history. He spent many years there, although this was interrupted by three further arrests and periods of imprisonment.
Dombrovsky had begun publishing literary articles in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda by 1937, when he was again arrested and this time imprisoned for seven months, having the “luck” to be detained during the partial hiatus between the downfall of Yezhov (as the head of the NKVD) and the appointment of Beria.
Dombrovsky’s first novel, Derzhavin, was published in 1938 and he was accepted into the Union of Soviet writers in 1939. However, in that year he was arrested yet again. This time he was sent to the notorious Kolyma camps in north-east Siberia. He was not released until 1943.
More information can be found on this link. http://www.pushkinhouse.org/events/2019/6/25/the-life-and-work-of-yurinbsp-dombrovsky-1909-1978-nbspthe-unknown-great-writer-of-russian-literaturenbsp
Best wishes
Ute