Ivan Elagin (poet)

Ivan Matveyev was born in Vladivostok in Siberia and studied medicine in Kiev in the 1930s.

[4] Elagin and his wife Olga left the Soviet Union to the West with the retreating German army in 1943.

Their works were published side by side in the poetry anthology entitled Berega: Stikhi Poetov Vtoroi Emigratsii (Shores: Poetry of the Second Emigration) by Valentina Sinkevich, the first ever collection of works by the second wave of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union.

Elagin became professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh; a post held until his death from cancer in 1987.

He was appointed as Visiting Poet-Lecturer in 1969 by Robert L. Baker, Dean and Director of the Russian Summer School.