Svyatoslav Belza

Svyatoslav Igorevich Belza (; 26 April 1942 – 3 June 2014) was a Soviet Russian literary and musical scholar, critic and essayist, and a prominent TV personality who's launched and hosted several TV programs aimed at popularizing classical music, theatre, and ballet, including Music on Air and Masterpieces of the World Music Theatre. Belza has received high-profiled honors in three countries, among them the Russian Order of Merit for the Fatherland, the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, and the Ukrainian Order of Saint Nicholas.

Biography Svyatoslav Belza was born on 26 April 1942 in Chelyabinsk, to Igor Fyodorovich Belza (1904–1994), a Warsaw-born Soviet musician, composer, and art scholar, and Zoya Konstantinovna Belza-Doroshchuk ( Gulinskaya, 1921–1999). Belza joined the Gorky Institute of the world literature at the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1979 he started regularly contributing to Literaturnaya Gazeta, initially as a foreign literature reviewer.

Belza authored more than 300 essays, the majority of which focus on either the Western literature, or the Russian authors' links with European culture. Among his notable works are "Bryusov and Dante" (Dante and the Slavs anthology, 1965), "Bryusov and Poland" (1966), "Don Quixote in Russian Poetry" (1969), "The Polish Connections of Pyotr Vyazemsky" (Polish-Russian Literary Relations anthology, 1970), "Graham Greene" (English Literature, 1945–1980, 1987), "Pushkin and the Slavic Nations Cultural Unity" (1988), "Dante e la poesia russa nel primo quarto del XX secolo" (from Dantismo russo e cornice europea, Firenze, 1989), "Rozanov and his Readership" (Vasilij Rozanov. Milano, 1993), and "The Slovak Literature" (The History of the World Literature, Vol. 8, 1991). He provided forewords and prefaces for more than 100 publications of works by William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, Jules Verne, Graham Greene, C. P. Snow, Edgar Allan Poe, Jan Parandowski, Stanisław Lem, Sławomir Mrożek, Teodor Parnicki, and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, among others.

Accolades During his life Belza was awarded many distinctions. In 1988, Belza received the Polish Cultural Merit award. In 1994, he was honoured with the People's Artist of Russia title. He received the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, as well as the Ukrainian Order of Saint Nicholas in 1997.