Tomas Venclova - Andrei Volkonsky (25/88)

307 views · Published 1 November 2017 · 0:45 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Entertainment

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Born in 1937, Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian scholar, poet, author and translator. He lectured at University of California, Berkeley, where he became friends with the poets Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky. He is currently a full professor at Yale University. [Listener: Andrzej Wolski; date recorded: 2011]

TRQANSCRIPT: And my present wife, of course, is completely different, even though they know one another. Marina Kedrova and my present wife know each other quite well.  And Marina, in the circles of the Moscow intelligentsia, was very much her own person. It was through her that I made the acquaintance of the famous composer, Andrei Volkonsky, from the aristocratic Volkonsky family, who was born in Geneva and who was brought to Russia by his parents. He found it very difficult to live there and tried to return, and finally succeeded in leaving for the West. He died not so long ago also in Geneva. A book about him is about to be published, and, as it happens, I wrote some memoirs about him.

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