“I Didn’t Think It Was So Hard to Live Here...” I.V. Chinnov about Russian Paris of the 1940–1950s in Letters and Interviews

Abstract:

Materials about the life of the poet of the first wave of emigration I.V. Chinnov (1909–1996) in the 1940–1950s are kept from the Office of Russian Emigrant Literature Archives named after I.V. Chinnov of the Department of Manuscripts of the IWL RAS. The letters are addressed to Chinnov’s friend Yu.P. Iwask (1907–1986) and his wife. The correspondence began in 1944. This year Chinnov ended up in a German POW labor camp in Wuppertal. After the end of the war and liberation from the camp, Chinnov wrote to Iwask from Paris. Iwask and his wife were at that time in a camp for displaced persons in Hamburg. In the letters of the late 1940s the theme of Iwask’s move to America arises. In the letters the friends discussed an anthology of Russian foreign poetry (New York, 1953), which was compiled by Ivask, and the first collection of poems by Chinnov Monolog. In 1953, in his last published letter, Chinnov announced that he had the opportunity to go to work in Munich at Radio Liberty. We publish an interview with I.V. Chinnov, where he talks about his life in Russian Paris in the postwar years. Chinnov recalls how he was initiated into the Freemasons, about the meetings at the lodge “Astraea.” He also visited Ivan Bunin and Alexei Remizov. Chinnov used to visit Nikolai Berdyaev’s house on “Sundays.” Chinnov came to Berdyaev with Georgi Adamovich, whom he calls his friend. The introductory article describes Chinnov’s trips to Russia in the early 1990s, summarizes the biography of Chinnov and Iwask, and describes the literary activities in the first postwar years of the Russian writers with whom he was then acquainted in Paris.

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