Vladimir Khanan

Vladimir Khanan was born Khanan Iosifovich Babinsky in Yerevan on 9 May 1945. His father, an economist and later a factory deputy director, chose the biblical name Khanan at the registry office in memory of relatives killed during the war. The family preferred calling the boy Vladimir (Volodya). Seven childhood years were spent in Uglich on the Volga. From 1954 the household was based in Leningrad, and from 1956 to 1968 in Pushkin (Tsarskoye Selo). In a Colta.ru interview Khanan recalled learning only at school that his documents listed him as Khanan, and that he later turned the given name into his literary surname.

Khanan studied at Leningrad State University. Encyclopedia entries note coursework in economics and philology before he completed the history faculty with a specialization in the history of the USSR. He did not receive a diploma. Historical training later fed poems on Cicero, Scythian archaeology, and classical myth. He also attended informal literary education in Alexander Kushner's LITO and in apartment salons rather than through the Writers' Union path.

Before perestroika Khanan belonged to Leningrad's second literary culture. He published in samizdat (Chasy, Mitin zhurnal) and abroad, and appeared in Konstantin Kuzminsky's anthology U goluboi laguny. Domestic official magazines largely shut him out; he later said the problem was not that he wrote anti-Soviet verse, but that he refused to write Soviet verse. After repatriation to Israel in 1996 he issued a long sequence of books from Jerusalem and Saint Petersburg presses, including One-Day Guest, Aura of Fact, Indefinite Article, Up the Staircase Leading to the Windowsill, Autumn Motifs of the Capital and the Provinces, Return, And the Wind Returns, a three-volume Selected Works, State of the Organism, and On the Edge. His work ran in Zvezda, Znamya, Volga, Interpoeziya, Jerusalem Journal, Article, Seagull, and many other journals. He also wrote more than two hundred publicistic articles for Israeli and American Russian periodicals and contributed plays that appeared in print though not on major stages.

Khanan lived for decades in Leningrad and Pushkin before moving to Jerusalem in 1996. Autobiographical prose mentions a wife, a daughter, and a grandson, without naming them in published sources consulted for this memorial. He described friendships across the unofficial literary and artistic scene, including long ties with Vladimir Erl, Viktor Shirali, Pyotr Cheigin, and others. Odd jobs (fitter, watchman, boiler operator) framed both livelihood and social life in the Soviet years. In Jerusalem he lived in the Katamon area and remained active in Russian-language literary circles.

Khanan rejected the romantic myth of an underground conspiracy. He argued that Leningrad's second culture issued open typescript magazines and crowded apartment readings, and that freedom later scattered circles that nonfreedom had held together. He opposed joining Club-81 because, in his view, writers should not accept KGB conditions such as a ban on Western publication. Culturally he identified with a Petersburg, Europe-facing classical discipline rather than with Moscow's looser groupings, and he claimed the poets of the Silver Age as adoptive teachers. Jewish memory, biblical allusion, and classical myth run through his poems and essays; he also wrote extensively on contemporary Israeli and Russian public debates.

Khanan left a body of work that documents both the Petersburg unofficial literary world and the Russian-Israeli diaspora after 1996. His books, journal publications across a dozen countries, festival appearances, and recorded readings preserve a voice that joined classical craft to underground independence. Encyclopedia and map-of-literature entries place him among the late-Soviet Leningrad poets who refused official assimilation and then rebuilt careers abroad. Readers and fellow writers continue to encounter him through Chayka, 45 Parallel, New Literature, Article, and the Ot Avtora video archive.

Public sources emphasize publication and festival participation more than formal prizes. Khanan appeared at the Petersburg Bridges festival (2012), Baltic Ring in Tartu (2018), and related literary programs. He served on the board of the Jerusalem Russian-language writers' association Stolitsa. His poems entered major anthologies of unofficial and Israeli Russian writing, and a three-volume Selected Works (Jerusalem, 2016) marked a late-career consolidation. No major state literary prize is consistently listed in the biographical encyclopedias consulted.

Selected books include One-Day Guest (Jerusalem, 2001); Aura of Fact (2002); Indefinite Article (2002); Up the Staircase Leading to the Windowsill (Jerusalem-Moscow, 2006); Autumn Motifs of the Capital and the Provinces (2007); Return (Saint Petersburg, 2010); And the Wind Returns (2014); Selected Works in three volumes (2016); State of the Organism (2020); and On the Edge (2024). Under the pen name Artemy Luger he also issued the online novella To Be a Killer (2016). Video records include a GOLOS poetry library reading, an Ot Avtora fragment filmed at the Gulag History Museum (2017), a 2012 Uglich visit talk, a 2026 Jerusalem Russian Library Petersburg Note program, and a reading of Elena Ignatova's poems.

Khanan's sharpest institutional conflict was his refusal to join Club-81 in the early 1980s. He argued publicly that accepting KGB terms for limited recognition compromised literary independence, and he later called the club the underground's one serious sin. Within the unofficial scene he also described post-perestroika splits between Westernizing and Russophile camps. His journalism in Israel sometimes took polemical positions on Russian and Israeli politics; those essays belong to the record of emigre debate rather than to a single scandal. No criminal case or major literary plagiarism dispute is documented in the sources used here.

Vladimir Khanan died in Jerusalem on 3 October 2026 at the age of 81. The Israeli Russian news service NEWSru.co.il reported his death the same day, summarizing his Petersburg underground beginnings, 1996 repatriation, and long Jerusalem publishing career. The cause of death was not made public in that report.