Ryurik Ivnev

After the death of their father in 1894, the family moved to Kars, where their mother obtained the position of principal in an all-girls secondary school.

In 1913 he graduated from Moscow University with a law diploma and returned to St. Petersburg, where he began his service at the office of government control.

He became a frequent visitor to St. Petersburg literary salons where he met with Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, Mikhail Kuzmin, Nikolay Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Fyodor Sologub and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

At the same time he cooperates with the newspaper Izvestia VTSIK, and took part in the organising of the IV Extraordinary Congress of Soviets of Workers', Peasants', Soldiers' and Cossack's Deputies .

In 1919, Ivnev was sent to the south as head of the organizing bureau of the propaganda train named after A. V. Lunacharsky, and visited Ukraine and Georgia.

With increasing oppression from the Soviet authorities in 1930s and 1940s, Ivnev was reduced to earning his living through translations of foreign-language poetry and writing historical plays.

In the same period Ivnev began to work on another autobiographical novel, Bohemia, which he completed in the month before his death.