George Ivask


George Ivask was a Russian poet and literary critic; in his later years he was an American scholar of Russian literature. Ivask was born to a family of an Estonian-German father and Russian mother and he identified culturally as a Russian.

Biography

George Ivask was born in Moscow, the son of Pavel Ivask, a merchant of Estonian origin, and his Russian wife. In 1920 the family moved to Estonia, where Ivask enrolled in Tartu University, which he graduated from in 1932. In 1943 he was mobilized into the German army but never made it to the front due to poor health. 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. In 1949 he moved to the United States, where he earned his Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University. In 1955 Ivask received American citizenship. From 1969 to 1977 he taught at the University of Kansas, Indiana University Bloomington, and Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and then he became the head of the Russian literature department at University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts. Ivask retired in 1977. He was married to Tamara Ivask.

Career

George Ivask started publishing poetry in 1929, occasionally using pseudonyms, mostly in Put, a magazine founded by Nikolai Berdyaev, who exerted a major influence upon him, as well as Georgy Fedotov. Ivask's first book, Severny Bereg, came out in 1938 in Warsaw. He characterized his style as 'neo-barocco', while considering himself a follower of Gavriil Derzhavin. His best-remembered work is Homo Ludens, a free-montage autobiography in verse that remained unfinished.
Ivask compiled and edited In the West, 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, a monograph upon the controversial Russian religious thinker. His 1983 poem "A Greeting Word from an Orthodox Man", 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. The papers from George Ivask's estate are held by Yale University.
Ivask died of a heart attack after collapsing near a pond on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1986.

Select bibliography

Poetry

Prose

Criticism

  • An Apology of Pessimism. K. Leontyev and Nietzsche
  • Yuri Rozanov and Rev. P. Florensky
  • The Life and Works of Konstantin Leontyev
  • Things That Leontyev Revered, Valued and Loved
  • ''A Praise to the Russian Poetry''