Dovid Knut

Dovid Knut or Knout (Russian: До́вид Кнут) (23 September [O.S. 10 September] 1900–15 February 1955), real name Duvid Meerovich (later David Mironovich) Fiksman (Russian: Ду́вид Ме́ерович [Дави́д Миро́нович] Фи́ксман), was a Russian Jewish poet and member of the French Resistance.

Fiksman was born in the Bessarabian town of Orgeev in the Russian Empire (now Orhei, Moldova), the eldest son of the grocer Meer Fiksman and his wife Haya. His early years were spent in Chisinau, where his parents had moved by early 1903. There he studied in a cheder and a state school for Jews. At fourteen he began publishing poetry in local periodicals, and in 1918 he edited the magazine Molodaya mysl' [Young thought], taking the pen name Dovid Knut, perhaps from the word knut, meaning 'whip, lash', used in both Russian and Yiddish as a symbol of oppression and slavery.

In 1920, when Bessarabia became part of Romania, the family moved to Paris, where Dovid had factory and other jobs during the day and studied French at the night school of the Alliance française, opened his own eatery in the Latin Quarter, studied in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Caen in Normandy, and worked as an engineer. He also took part in the cultural life of emigre Paris, helping to organize the "Exhibition of Thirteen" in July 1922, joining the Union of Young Poets and Writers, and coediting the magazine Novy dom [New home]. He contributed poems to many émigré publications, and his first collection, Moikh tysyachiletii [My millennia], appeared in 1925 and was "well received for its Biblical intonation and verbal vibrancy"; his second, published in 1928, was reviewed sympathetically by Vladimir Nabokov, who praised its "energetic verses" but complained about lapses of taste.

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