Aleksey Petrovich Tsvetkov was a Russian poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator.

He was born in 1947 in Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivsk) and grew up in Zaporizhzhia. He studied at the Faculty of Chemistry of Odesa University, the Faculty of Journalism, and the Faculty of History of Moscow State University.

He was a member of the poetry group “Moscow Time.” Arrested and deported from Moscow in 1975, he was forced to emigrate to the United States. He graduated from the University of Michigan, defended his dissertation in 1983, and held a PhD. He edited a local Russian-language newspaper and taught Russian literature.

From 1989, he worked in Munich and Prague for Radio Liberty as an editor and host of the programs “Seventh Continent” and “Atlantic Diary.” Since 2007 he lived in Washington; in early 2009 he moved to New York. In 2018, Tsvetkov repatriated to Israel and lived in Bat Yam.[1] He wrote and published poetry online, on his Facebook page. Once a month he appeared on air in Alexander Genis’s program “Beyond the Barriers — American Hour” as a guest on Radio Liberty.

In the late 1980s he stopped writing poetry and turned to prose. The unfinished novel “Just a Voice,” created in the form of the autobiography of a Roman soldier (brought only to adolescence), reflects Tsvetkov’s view of Roman civilization as one of the high points in human history, and in terms of poetics is distinguished by its polished style and abundance of lyrical-philosophical digressions, directly inheriting from the prose of Vladimir Nabokov and Sasha Sokolov.

In 2004, after a 17-year break, Aleksey Tsvetkov returned to poetry, composing a new book of poems in less than a year and a half. He translated Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. An excerpt from the translation was published in 2008 in the journal Novy Mir. In 2010, the translation was published by Novoe Izdatelstvo together with a translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth by the contemporary poet Vladimir Gandelsman.

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