Alexis Rannit
Alexis Rannit was an Estonian poet, critic and literature researcher.
Biography
He was born in Kallaste, in the Governorate of Livonia of the Russian Empire. He spent his childhood in Saint Petersburg. In 1939, he graduated from the University of Tartu, where he studied applied arts. He conducted research on Lithuanian literature and personally knew many Lithuanian authors. From 1938 to 1940, he worked as a correspondent of the Riga newspaper Segodnya.In 1940, he married Lithuanian opera singer Gražina Matulaitytė and moved to Kaunas, where he worked until 1941 as a translator at the Kaunas State Drama Theatre, and later as a librarian at the Lithuanian National Library.
In 1944, as the Red Army was approaching, Rannit emigrated to Germany, where he continued with his studies at the Institute of Applied Arts in Freiburg.
In 1953, he moved to the US and remarried. From 1954 to 1960, he worked as a librarian in the Art and Architecture division of the New York Public Library.
In 1956, he defended his master's thesis on arts history at Columbia University in New York. He worked as a research fellow and curator of Slavic and Eastern European collections at the University of Yale. Rannit was an honorary doctor of a number of European, American and Korean universities. He was a founding member of International Association of Arts Critics, represented the Estonian authors at the PEN club, and was part of the editorial staff of Continent.
Аlexis Rannit died on 5 January 1985 at his home in New Haven, Connecticut.