lit a candle 3h agoMy professor read Nevidimy provodnik out loud in a translation seminar my last year of college and something about those island images just stayed with me. I found a used copy of his poems in English a year later and still have it by my desk. Sending love to his wife Olga tonight.
Their story
Yevgeny Chigrin was a Russian poet and essayist whose richly musical, travel-haunted verse was published in the leading Russian literary journals and translated into more than a dozen languages. He was a member of the International PEN Club and the Union of Writers of Moscow. Yevgeny Mikhailovich Chigrin was born…
Yevgeny Chigrin was a Russian poet and essayist whose richly musical, travel-haunted verse was published in the leading Russian literary journals and translated into more than a dozen languages. He was a member of the International PEN Club and the Union of Writers of Moscow.
Yevgeny Mikhailovich Chigrin was born on 16 September 1961 in Malaya Viska, in the Kirovograd region of Soviet Ukraine. His childhood was spent on the move, in Vilnius in Lithuania, in Yermak in Kazakhstan and in the Vinnytsia region of Ukraine. From 1988 to 2002 he lived in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on the island of Sakhalin, and the sea, islands and far horizons of those years run through much of his poetry. In 2002 he settled in Moscow and nearby Krasnogorsk.
His poems appeared in Novy Mir, Druzhba Narodov, Zvezda, Neva, Arion, Yunost, Ural, Baikal and many other journals, and he wrote regularly for Literaturnaya Gazeta. His collections included Pogonshchik (The Drover, 2012), Nespyashchaya bukhta (The Sleepless Bay, 2014), Podvodny shar (The Underwater Sphere, 2015), Nevidimy provodnik (The Invisible Guide, 2018) and Bolotny ogon (Marsh Fire). Books of his poems were published in Ukrainian in Kyiv, in Polish in Bydgoszcz and in Serbian in Belgrade, and he compiled the anthology Moscow Year of Poetry.
He read at festivals from Trois-Rivieres in Quebec to the Struga Poetry Evenings in North Macedonia, Warsaw, Belgrade, Lake Baikal and the Voloshin festival in Koktebel, and gave author evenings in Russia, Poland, Tunisia and Armenia. His honours included the Arseny and Andrei Tarkovsky International Prize, the Gorky Literary Prize, the Pavel Bazhov Prize and the Golden Delvig, as well as the Konstantin Simonov and Nikolai Gogol medals. Critics including Yevgeny Rein, Andrei Bitov and Pavel Basinsky wrote about his work.
Chigrin lived with a serious illness for many years, and the themes of leaving and farewell grew stronger in his last books. He died on Sunday 25 October 2026, little more than a month after his 65th birthday. His wife, Olga Chigrina, announced his death and said details of the farewell would follow. Vechernyaya Moskva, which had published his last interview days earlier, wrote that even in his saddest poems there was light.
Biography adapted from Russian Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), Vechernyaya Moskva, Moskovsky Komsomolets, Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Wikipedia ↗
Photos
1Yevgeny Chigrin in 2007
by People Forever
That seminar sounds wonderful, I wish more people translated him