30 November] 1909, Saint Petersburg) was a poet, critic, scholar, and translator, representative of the first wave of Russian Symbolism, although he was not well known for his poetry until after his death.

Instead, he spent his career in academia as a full-time professor and administrator, translator of classic Greek works, and writer of essays and reviews.

Annensky was somewhat reluctant to publish his original poems and first gained fame with his translations of Euripides and the French Symbolists.

At the beginning of the 1900s, Annensky wrote a series of tragedies modelled after those of ancient Greece: Melanippe the Wise (1901), King Ixion (1902), Laodamia (1906), and Thamyris the Citharode (1913).

During his last months, Annensky worked as an editor of Sergei Makovsky's journal Apollon, in which he published some essays on poetry theory.

Because Annensky was a director of a public school at the time, publishing this avant garde work under his real name would have been controversial.

30 November] 1909, while heading to a meeting to discuss an unpublished essay about Euripides at the Society of Classical Philology, Annensky died from a heart attack at the Tsarskoe Selo railway station in Saint Petersburg.

Shown below are the poems "October Myth" and "Tears Fall in My Heart" by Annensky and the French Symbolist Verlaine respectively.

Мне невмочь, Я шаги слепого слышу: Надо мною он всю ночь Оступается о крышу.

И мои ль, не знаю, жгут Сердце слёзы, или это Те, которые бегут У слепого без ответа,

Ô bruit doux de la pluie Par terre et sur les toits!