Yuri Kolker (14 March, 1946; Russian: Ю́рий Ко́лкер, Hebrew: יורי קולקר) is a Russian poet. He is also known as an essayist, literary critic, and as a translator. Yuri Kolker was born in Leningrad in 1946, to a Russian mother and a Jewish father. Since childhood, he attended various officially authorised literary associations. In 1969, he graduated with honours from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute and got his PhD in Physics and Mathematics in 1978. From the 1960s, he became part of the Russian Samizdat culture. By 1975, in addition to pure lyrics, civic motifs appeared in his poetry, and thereby he joined the Movement of the Soviet Dissidents. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Yuri Kolker quit his work in a state science research institution, cut off his few remaining ties with the Soviet officialdom and became a labourer. He lived in a communal slum, in severe poverty, making a living as a boiler-room operator. By early 1983, while being hounded the KGB, he completed for Samizdat the first ever annotated collection of poems by the then forbidden in the USSR poet Vladislav Khodasevich in two volumes. The collection was immediately re-published in Paris by La presse libre, the publishing house of the newspaper La pensée russe. In June 1984, after years as a refusenik struggling for an exit visa, he emigrated to Israel. In October 1989, he joined the London BBC Russian Service where he went on to edit the radio magazines Paradigma (1990–1999) and Yevropa (1999–2002). More information...
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