Yury Osipovich Dombrovsky

Jekaterina Shulga (University College London)

Ed. by Andrei Rogatchevski, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 2.2.1.00: Slavic and Russian Writing and Culture: Old, Medieval and Tsarist, 700-1917.
Vol. editors: Neil Cornwell (University of Bristol), Roman Koropeckyj (University of California, Los Angeles), Andrei Rogatchevski (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway)

Dates

Born 12 May 1909
Died 29 May 1978

Places

Born in Russia
Active in Russia

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

Dombrovsky's Works

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Iurii Dombrovskii/ Yury Dombrovsky was born in Moscow in 1909. His mother, Lidiia Alekseevna Kraineva, of Polish origin, was a Biology teacher, and his father, Iosif Vital’evich, of Jewish origin, a lawyer. Dombrovskii often played with his national identity. At different stages in his life, he had called himself Jewish, Polish and Russian, and after many years in labour camps decided to adopt the identity of a Gypsy. In a short exposé written about Gypsies, “Tsygane shumnoiu tolpoi” [“In a Boisterous Crowd the Gypsies...”], published posthumously in

Voprosy literatury

[

Literary Questions

] in 1983 and written in the mid-60s, Dombrovskii explains that he sees the identity of a Gypsy as a way of life, rather than as a genetic lineage. It was the love of freedom that the Gypsy…

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2941 words

Citation: Shulga, Jekaterina. "Yury Osipovich Dombrovsky". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 May 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12908, accessed 21 November 2024.]