In 1944, anticipating the advance of the Red Army, he fled to Germany and in 1946 entered Hamburg University to pursue Slavic studies and philosophy.

His best-remembered work is Homo Ludens (Играющий человек, 1973), a free-montage autobiography in verse that remained unfinished.

[5] Ivask compiled and edited In the West (На Западе, New York, 1953), an extensive anthology of the poets of the first and the second waves of Russian emigration, and he published books by Georgy Fedotov and Vasily Rozanov, as well as critical essays and Konstantin Leontyev (1974), a monograph upon the controversial Russian religious thinker.

His 1983 poem "A Greeting Word from an Orthodox Man" (Приветствие православного), published in the Polish magazine Kultura in Paris, made a great impression on Pope Paul II, who invited Ivask to the Vatican for an audience.

[1] Ivask died of a heart attack after collapsing near a pond on the campus of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1986.