Irina Odoevtseva

Irina Vladimirovna Odoevtseva (a pseudonym; real name Iraida Gustavovna Geynike) was a Russian poet and prose writer.

She was born in Riga into a lawyer’s family. In 1914 the family moved to St. Petersburg.

In Petrograd/Leningrad she became a member of the second “Workshop of Poets” and the “Sounding Shell” group, where she enjoyed the special favor of N. Gumilev. Her first poem was published in 1921. She printed works in the collections House of Arts and The Sounding Shell, and shortly before her emigration brought out the poetry collection The Court of Miracles (Petrograd, 1922).

In 1923 she left abroad after her husband, the poet Georgy Ivanov, settling first in Berlin and then in Paris, where she spent most of her life.

She published poems in various journals, but mainly turned to prose (the novels The Angel of Death, 1927; Isolde, 1931; Abandon Hope, 1954, and others). She returned to poetry in the postwar period, publishing several small collections that included revised versions of early works alongside new texts. In Paris she also wrote the memoir dilogy On the Banks of the Neva and On the Banks of the Seine. Along with lyric poems with an Acmeist flavor, she composed several long ballads thematically tied to the first post-revolutionary years in Russia.

Odoevtseva began work on the memoir book On the Banks of the Neva in the early 1960s. In the “Foreword” she wrote: “I am writing not about myself and not for myself, but about those whom I was given to know ‘on the banks of the Neva.’” Odoevtseva tells of the role the “Workshop of Poets” played in the life of revolutionary Petrograd, and gives vivid portraits of N. Gumilev, O. Mandelstam, A. Bely, G.