Samuil Marshak

Samuil Marshak was born on 22 October (3 November) 1887 in Voronezh, into a Jewish family. His father, Yakov Mironovich (1855–1924), worked as a foreman at a soap factory. His mother, Yevgenia Borisovna Gitelson, was a housewife. The surname “Marshak” is an abbreviation (Hebrew מהרש"ק‎), meaning “Our teacher Rabbi Aaron Shmuel Kaidanover,” and belongs to the descendants of this well-known rabbi and Talmudist (1624–1676).

Marshak spent his early childhood and school years in the town of Ostrogozhsk near Voronezh. He studied from 1898 to 1906 at the Ostrogozhsk, Third Petersburg, and Yalta gymnasiums. At the gymnasium, a literature teacher instilled in him a love of classical poetry, encouraged the future poet’s first literary attempts, and considered him a prodigy.

One of Marshak’s poetry notebooks came into the hands of V. V. Stasov, a well-known Russian critic and art historian, who took a warm interest in the young man’s fate. With Stasov’s help, Samuil moved to Petersburg and studied at one of the best gymnasiums. He spent whole days in the public library where Stasov worked.

In 1904, at Stasov’s home, Marshak met Maxim Gorky, who took a great interest in him and invited him to his dacha in Yalta, where Marshak lived from 1904 to 1906. He began publishing in 1907, when he issued the collection Sionidy, devoted to Jewish themes; one of the poems was written on the death of Theodor Herzl. At the same time he translated several poems by Chaim Bialik from Yiddish and Hebrew.

When Gorky’s family was forced to leave Crimea because of the Tsarist government’s repressions after the Revolution of 1905, Marshak returned to Petersburg, where his father had by then also moved, working at a factory beyond the Nevskaya Zastava.

In 1911, Samuil Marshak, together with his friend, the poet Yakov Godin,