Alexander Esenin-Volpin | |
---|---|
Native name | Александр Сергеевич Есенин-Вольпин |
Born | Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin May 12, 1924 Leningrad, USSR |
Died | March 16, 2016 Boston, U.S. |
(aged 91)
Citizenship | Soviet Union, United States |
Nationality | Russian |
Institutions | Boston University |
Alma mater | Moscow State University |
Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin (also written Ésénine-Volpine and Yessenin-Volpin in his French and English publications; Russian: Алекса́ндр Серге́евич Есе́нин-Во́льпин; May 12, 1924 – March 16, 2016) was a prominent Russian-American poet and mathematician. A notable dissident, political prisoner and a leader of the Soviet human rights movement, he spent a total of fourteen years incarcerated and repressed by the Soviet authorities in prisons, psikhushkas and exile.
Alexander Volpin was born on May 12, 1924 in the Soviet Union. His mother, Nadezhda Volpin, was a poet and translator from French and English. His father was Sergei Yesenin, a celebrated Russian poet, who never knew his son. Alexander and his mother moved from Leningrad to Moscow in 1933.
His first psychiatric imprisonments took place in 1949 for "anti-Soviet poetry", in 1959 for smuggling abroad samizdat, including his Свободный философский трактат (Free Philosophical Tractate), and again in 1968.
Esenin-Volpin graduated from Moscow State University with a “candidate” dissertation in mathematics in the spring of 1949. After graduation, Volpin was sent to the Ukrainian city of Chernovtsy to teach mathematics at the local state university. Less than a month after his arrival in Chernovtsy he was arrested by the MGB, sent on a plane back to Moscow, and incarcerated in the Lubyanka prison. He was charged with "systematically conducting anti-Soviet agitation, writing anti-Soviet poems, and reading them to acquaintances."