Yuriy Dombrovskiy

Yury Osipovich Dombrovsky was a Russian Soviet writer, poet and literary critic, memoirist, and biographer of Derzhavin and Shakespeare. He was also known as an archaeologist and art historian. He was the author of six novels, books of poems, and short stories.

Yury Dombrovsky was raised in an intelligentsia family: his father, Iosif Vitalyevich (Gdalyevich) Dombrovsky, was a Moscow lawyer, Socialist Revolutionary, and chairman of the regional consumer cooperative in Samara. His grandfather, Yakov-Saul Dombrover (Yakov Savelyevich Dombrovsky), a native of Kovno Governorate, was exiled to Siberia in 1833 as a participant in the Polish uprising; after moving to Irkutsk, he took up distilling and trade, acquired gold mines, and became a first-guild merchant. His mother, Lidia Alekseyevna, was a scholar in the field of anatomy and plant cytology and an associate professor at the Moscow Agricultural Academy.

Dombrovsky studied at the former Khvostov Gymnasium in Krivoarbatsky Lane in Moscow. In 1928 he entered the Higher Literary Courses (“Bryusov” courses), which were closed in 1929. In 1930–31 he studied at the Central Courses for Publishing Proofreaders of OGIZ of the RSFSR. In 1933 he was arrested and exiled to Alma-Ata. He worked as an archaeologist, art historian, journalist, and teacher. He published in Kazakhstan Truth and in the journal Literary Kazakhstan.

The second arrest took place in 1936, but after several months Dombrovsky was released. He published the first part of the novel Derzhavin, or The Collapse of an Empire. In 1939 he was arrested for the third time and sentenced to 8 years in corrective labor camps, to be served in Sevvostoklag. In 1943 he was released early on disability grounds and returned to Alma-Ata. He worked in the theater and lectured on Shakespeare at the university. He wrote the antifascist book The Monkey Comes for Its Skull and the novel The Dark Lady: Three Novellas about Shakespeare. But in 1949 he was arrested again