Lev Losev

Lev Vladimirovich Losev was a Russian poet, literary scholar, and essayist, and the son of the poet V. Lifshitz.

He was born in Leningrad in 1937. He studied at Secondary School No. 222 (formerly Petrishule). He graduated from the journalism department of the Faculty of Philology at Leningrad State University. From 1962 to 1975, he worked as an editor for the children’s magazine Kostyor, wrote plays for puppet theater, and wrote poems for children. He took the pseudonym “Losev” so that he would not be confused with his father.

In 1976 he emigrated to the United States. He worked as a typesetter-proofreader at Ardis Publishing, completed postgraduate studies at the University of Michigan, and from 1979 taught Russian literature at Dartmouth College of the University of Vermont. In 1981 he defended a doctoral dissertation in philology.

As a literary scholar, he wrote about The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, Anton Chekhov, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Joseph Brodsky. He was the author of a book on Aesopian language in Soviet literature. Books by Mikhail Bulgakov, Nikolai Oleynikov, and Yevgeny Schwartz were published under his editorship. He translated into Russian poems by K. Cavafy, articles by Seamus Heaney, O. Paz, and Czesław Miłosz, as well as essays and letters by J. Brodsky.

He began writing lyric poems in his student years, but doubted their originality and stopped. He began writing again in 1974. From 1979 on, he began publishing his poems, first in émigré publications and, from 1988, in Russia as well. In all, seven books of his poems were published between 1985 and 2009. In the last years of his life, he worked on a memoir book, Meander.