Boris Zaytsev (writer)

For other people of the same name, see Boris Zaytsev (disambiguation).

Boris Zaytsev
Born	(1881-02-10)10 February 1881 Oryol, Russia
Died	Paris, France

Boris Konstantinovich Zaytsev (Russian: Бори́с Константи́нович За́йцев; 10 February 1881 – 22 January 1972) was a Russian prose writer and dramatist, and a member of the Moscow literary group Sreda.

Biography

Zaytsev was born in Oryol. He attended the Imperial Technical Institute in Moscow, the Institute of Mines in Saint Petersburg, and the Law School at the University of Moscow, without graduating from any of them. He first began publishing his fictional works in 1901, and several of his stories were published in the journal The New Direction ran by Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius. His first collection of stories was published in 1906. His first novel, A Distant Journey, appeared in 1912.

He was chairman of the Moscow Union of Writers from 1921 to 1922. In 1922 he was allowed to move to Paris for health reasons, where he became one of the leading emigre writers. He published many works in exile, including his novel of love set in Russia, Anna (1929). He was also a biographer and a translator; among his biographical works were lives of Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov; he translated The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri into Russian. The key influences on Zaytsev's fiction writing were Mikhail Lermontov, Vasily Zhukovsky, and Alexander Blok. He died, aged 90, in Paris.

English translations

• Anna, (novel), translated by Natalie Duddington, Henry Holt and Co, NY, 1937.
• Avdotya-Death, The Heart of Abraham, and A Conversation with Zinaida, (short stories), from A Russian Cultural Revival, University of Tennessee Press, 1981. ISBN 0-87049-296-9