Libraries acquire extensive collection of poet and writer Andrei Voznesensky
The poet and artist Andrei Voznesensky was denounced by the famously hot-tempered Nikita Krushchev (at right) in 1963. Voznesensky chose to give Stanford his collection of papers, manuscripts, drawings and other materials.
Stanford University Libraries has acquired a collection of papers, manuscripts, drawings, photographs and other materials from Russian poet and artist Andrei Voznesensky. Born in 1933, Voznesensky is one of the foremost writers of post-Stalinist Russia.
The poet wanted to place his archive at an American institution and chose Stanford partly because of his fondness for the San Francisco Bay Area, said Michael Keller, university librarian. Voznesensky also chose Stanford as a repository because of the importance given to modern Russian poetry in the Slavic Department’s program. Green Library has one of the best collections of Russian poetry in the world, Keller said.
The collection will significantly enhance the university’s collection of the work of contemporary Russian writers, since it joins the papers of Yevgeny Yevtushenko in Stanford University Libraries and the papers of Boris Pasternak, Abram Terts (Siniavskii) and others in the Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
From the late 1950s to the end of the Soviet Union, Voznesensky was a major public figure in the aboveground Soviet literary establishment. He was denounced by Khrushchev in 1963 in an attack that marked the beginning of a significant shift in Soviet cultural politics, said Lazar Fleishman, professor of Slavic languages and literatures.
The poet often served as a mediator between the literary establishment and its underground counterpart by “helping members of the new generation get published and interceding on behalf of those who had gotten themselves into trouble with the authorities,” said Gregory Freidin, also a professor of Slavic languages and literatures.
The collection is remarkable for its volume of manuscripts, which account for 5 of the 29 linear feet of the collection’s material, said Karen Rondestvedt, curator for Slavic and East European Collections. Included in the collection are original manuscripts, correspondence, more than 600 pages of drawings and sketches, over 1,000 photographs and other documents. Material from the trials of poets whom he helped, letters and drawings from imprisoned poets and research materials also are part of the collection, Rondestvedt said. The collection’s video and audiotapes include the hearing where Voznesensky was denounced by Khrushchev. Most material dates from the mid-1950s through 1990.
Voznesensky (his name is sometimes transliterated “Voznesenskii”) is the author of approximately 40 volumes of poetry in Russian, two collections of fiction, at least three plays and two operas. A number of his collections have been translated into English, including Antimiry, translated by W. H. Auden and others as Antiworlds (1966). He also has created many works of visual art in graphic and sculptural form and has produced illustrated essays on “visual poetry.”
The collection currently is being processed and cataloged. It is expected to become available to researchers during the first half of 2005.
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