Vsevolod Bagritskii's tomb in Moscow
Vsevolod Bagritskii was born in 1922 in Odessa. His father Eduard Bagritskii was a famous Soviet Jewish poet involved in the literary life of post-Revolution Odessa. In 1926, Bagritskii's family moved to Kuntsevo (outside of the Soviet capital) and then, in 1930, to Moscow itself. In 1934 Vsevolod's father died and in 1937 his mother Lidia was arrested by the NKVD and sent into exile in Karaganda (in Kazakhstan) where she spent nineteen years. In an ironic turn of fate, Lidia was forced to sign in once a week at the local office of the NKVD which was located on a street named after her late husband. Despite his family' experience under the Soviets, Vsevolod was very passionate about modernist drama and revolutionary poetry of the early Soviet period. After graduation from high school, in the late 1930s Vsevolod Bagritskii entered the evening department of the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. He also served as a literary consultant for and published in the newspaper Pionerskaia Pravda and wrote for the newspapers Trud and Literaturnaia Gazeta, as well. He also began to work in the theater studio organized by the director Valentin Pluchek and the playwright Aleksei Arbuzov, which was closed after the beginning of the Soviet-German War in June 1941. From the first days of the war, Vsevolod requested to be assigned to front-line press but due to severe myopia, he was evacuated to the Soviet interior, to Chistopol in Tatarstan.
The well-known Soviet writer Alexander Fadeiev, who was close to the Soviet authorities, helped Vsevolod be accepted into the Red Army and supported his request to write for front-line newspaper. As a result, in late 1941 Vsevolod became a contributor, both in prose and in poetry, to newspaper Khrabrost of the Second Army of the Volkhov Front near Leningrad.
Vsevolod Bagritskii died from a bomb fragment at the age of 19 in February 1942 in the village Dubovik (in the Leningrad District). On his body was found a bag with his poems and with letters to his mother. Twenty-two years later Bagritskii's mother Lidia, together with her close friend Elena Bonner, published a book of poems and letters written by Vsevolod. Bagritskii's fragment-damaged bag is kept in the literary museum in Odessa (Ukraine), in the department dedicated to Eduard and Vsevolod Bagritskii.
