Lev Loseff Russia

Lev Loseff writes:
“I was born (in 1937) and grew up in Leningrad, and graduated
from the Department of Journalism in the Faculty of Philology
at Leningrad State University. For a short time I worked on a
newspaper in northern Sakhalin, and then, from 1962 to 1975, I
was an editor on The Campfire, a magazine for children. I wrote
plays for the puppet theatre, poetry for children, and things like
that. To avoid confusion, my father, the well-known children’s
writer and poet Vladimir Lifshits, invented the pseudonym ‘Losev’
for me. After I moved to America in 1976 I made this former
pseudonym my legal name (Lev Lifschutz Loseff).

In America I worked as a compositor and proofreader for
the Ardis publishing house, took my Ph.D. at the University of
Michigan, and since 1979 I have been teaching Russian literature
at Dartmouth College in northern New England. I have published
a book about Aesopian language in Soviet literature and a large
number of articles, mainly about Russian poetry.

I wrote some lyric poetry when I was a student, but I had
doubts about its originality and abandoned it. I began writing
this poetry again, to my own surprise, in 1974, and have been
publishing it since 1979, at first in émigré journals, and then
from 1988 in Russia.”
From Collected. Poems, Prose (Ekaterinburg, 2000)

Lev Loseff died in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA, on 6 May
2009. In 2011, his copiously annotated two-volume edition of the
poetry ofJoseph Brodsky was published in the prestigious ‘New
Poet’s Library’ series in St. Petersburg. His uniquely authoritative
biography of Brodsky, published in Russia in 2006, came out in
Jane Ann Miller’s translation as Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life
in 2011 from Yale University Press.

(2012)