German Plisetsky

German Borisovich Plisetsky (; born 17 May 1931 in Moscow; died 2 December 1992, in Moscow) was a notable Russian poet and translator.

Personal life

German Plisetsky was born in a Jewish family. His parents, Boris Naumovich Plisetsky (1906-1991) and Maria Plisetskaya (born Kulkina, 1905-1991), worked at a printing factory. After graduating from Department of Philology of Moscow State University in 1959, Plisetsky studied at Academy of Arts in Leningrad. Since 1965, he lived in Khimki near Moscow. Plisetsky was married three times and had son Dmitry. His son became a chess master and journalist, deputy chief editor of "Chess in the USSR", who helped Garry Kasparov with creating the series My Great Predecessors. German Plisetsky is a remote relative of Maya Plisetskaya.

Poetry translations In the late 60's Plisetsky translated 450 poems from Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to Russian, which according to literary critics, made him the person "responsible for shaping the national attitude towards Khayyam. His translations of Omar Khayyam were published by Nauka and became enormously popular in Russia. His another famous poem, "Tube", was about thousands people who died in the stampede on Trubnaya Square (literally "Tube's Square") in Moscow during Stalin's funeral in 1953. It was written twelve years after the event. The poem ends by words: "Avant, avant! Retreat has been cut off, closed like a hatch, not liftable by hand... And that is all we are let to understand". His work was known in Russia only through samizdat and from publications abroad in émigré magazines Grani (published in Frankfurt, 1967) and Kontinent (1980). A small collection of his poetry was published in Russia only in 1990. The first full collection of his poems and selected translations "From Khayyam to Ecclesiastes" was released in Moscow in 2001