Ilya Selvinsky

Ilya Lvovich Selvinsky (Russian: Илья Львович Сельвинский, 24 October 1899 – 22 March 1968) was a Soviet poet, dramatist, memoirist, and essayist born in Simferopol, Crimea.

In 1919, Selvinsky graduated from a gymnasium in Yevpatoria, spending his summers as a vagabond and trying his hands at different trades, including sailing, fishing, working as a longshoreman and circus wrestler, and acting in an itinerant theater.

Extensive travel and turbulent adventures fueled Selvinsky's longer narrative works and cycles, "loadified" (term used by the Russian constructivists) with local color.

Selvinsky briefly joined the anarchist troops in the Russian Civil War but later fought on the side of the Reds.

In the late 1920s, the LtsK counted among its members poets Eduard Bagritsky, Vera Inber, and Vladimir Lugovskoy; critic Kornely Zelinsky; prose writer Yevgeny Gabrilovich; and others.

In the middle to late 1920s, after the publication of Records, The Lay of Ulyalaev (1924) and the narrative poem Notes of a Poet (1927), Selvinsky achieved fame and acclaim.

"Portrait of My Mother" (1933) contains a constructivist bitter comment about Jewish-Soviet assimilation: "Henceforth her son's face will remain defiled/Like the Judaic Jerusalem,/Having suddenly become a Christian holy site."

During World War II, Selvinsky served as a military journalist and combat political officer in his native Crimea, North Caucasus, and Kuban.

"), composed in January 1942 and published shortly thereafter, Selvinsky depicted the aftermath of the mass execution, in November–December 1941, of thousands of Jews at the so-called Bagerovo anti-tank ditch outside the Crimean city of Kerch.

Especially devastating was the February 10, 1944 resolution of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, "About I. Selvinsky's Poem 'To whom Russia sang a lullaby….'"

One of the principal Soviet literary witnesses to the Shoah, Selvinsky treated the topic of the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices in two other works of 1942, "Kerch" and "A Reply to Goebbels," and in other wartime poems.

Selvinsky's uneclipsed literary achievements include the epic poem The Lay of Ulyalaev and the novel in verse Fur Trade (1928).