Queer Places:
Bremgartenfriedhof Bern
Bern, Verwaltungskreis Bern-Mittelland, Bern, Switzerland
Baron Anatoly Sergeyevich Shteiger (Russian: Анато́лий Серге́евич Ште́йгер; July 20, 1907 — October 24, 1944) was a Russian poet, one of the most significant poets of first wave of emigration. Poems, while preserving the author’s individuality, to a large extent express the aesthetics of the Parisian note [fr].[1]
There were gay writers among emigres, among them the memoirist
Georgy Ivanov and the poet Anatoly
Shteiger. Anatoly Steiger wrote the following poem in Paris, suggesting how melancholy a time it must have been:
Where is he now, I wonder?
And what's his life like?
Don't let me sit by the door
Expecting a sudden knock:
He will never come back.
Was it to hurt me, or himself?
(Or maybe he was lucky.)
Descended from an old Swiss family. Father Sergei Shteiger (1868–1937), country leader, leader of the nobility of Kanevsky District, deputy to the IV State Duma (1913).
He had two sisters, one of whom Alla (in Golovina marriage) was a poetess known in Russian abroad. The family emigrated to Constantinople in 1920, later Shteiger lived in Czechoslovakia, in France and (from 1931) in Switzerland.[2] During World War II he was passively involved in the Resistance, wrote anti-Nazi pamphlets. The Nazi authorities in the areas bordering on Switzerland even appointed an award for his head.[3]
An important literary and human document is the extensive correspondence of Shteiger and
Marina Tsvetaeva (a personal meeting between them took place only once). Steiger is the addressee of Tsvetaeva's poetic cycle Poems to the Orphan (August–September 1936).
The author of collections of poems This Day (1928), This Life (1931), Ingratitude (1936); the final collection Twice Two Four was published posthumously (1950; under the same name, the most complete collection of poems in New York was published in 1981). He gained fame mainly as one of the representatives of the so-called Paris Note, the literary movement in the poetry of the Russian Diaspora, which existed in 1930s. The work of Steiger was promoted by the literary critic
Georgy Adamovich spiritually close to him.[3] In poetry, marked by the influence of
Mikhail Kuzmin,
Georgy Ivanov,
Georgy Adamovich, but at the same time deeply individual, lyrical miniature dominates (one or several stanzas, often with an additional super schematic last line), motives of loneliness, nostalgia, fragility the world, foreboding of death. In the metric, he mainly developed classical sizes, also used a 3-ic dolly.[3]
Since childhood, he was sick with severe tuberculosis, from which he died at the age of 37 years.[1]
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