Gennady Aigi, 71, Russian Poet
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Russian poet Gennady Aigi, who was often considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature, died Tuesday in Moscow. He was 71.
His poems, written in the indigenous language of the Chuvashia region, were translated into many other languages.
His father was a village teacher who translated Pushkin into Chuvash. Aigi’s first book came out in 1958 and in the same year he was rejected from the Gorky Literature Institute “for writing hostile books of poems that undermine the basis of the socialist-realist method.”
He began writing in Russian in 1960 at the advice of novelist Boris Pasternak, but his Russian-language poems were only sparsely published in the Soviet Union and he became better known abroad than at home. His books began appearing in the Soviet Union amid the reforms of the late 1980s.
Many of Aigi’s poems are characterized by short even one-word lines and terse pastoral images such as misty fields and smoke rising from the chimneys of peasant huts.
