Queer Places:
Vosel'naya Ulitsa, 10, Sankt-Peterburg, Russia, 199106
Northern Cemetery, Pargolovo, Vyborgsky District, St Petersburg, Russia, 194361
Andreĭ Nikolaevich Egunov
(September 14, 1895 - October 3, 1968) was a poet and prose writer, as
well as a scholar and translator of classical Greek and Latin texts.
Beyond Tula: A Soviet Pastoral (1931) was the only work of fiction he
managed to publish in his lifetime.
Born in a military family. His family moved to St. Petersburg in 1905. He graduated from the Tenishev School (1913) and the classical department of the Department of History and Philology (1918). He graduated from St. Petersburg State University in 1918 with a degree in classics and subsequently embarked on postgraduate studies in Russian literature.
He taught at the new "workers' faculties" (rabfak) and as a private tutor, and also continued his work in classical philology and was active as a translator. He was a member of the translation circle of classical philologists ABDEM ( A. V. Boldyrev , A. I. Dovatur , A. M. Mikhankov and E. E. Wiesel ), published a translation of Plato's Laws (1923) [1] , participated in collective translations of antique novels - “Ethiopians” by Heliodorus and “ Leucippus and Clitofont ” by Achilles Tatius .
In 1931 his novel “Beyond Tula” was published (in the 1960s, Egunov gave him the subtitle “A Soviet Pastoral”). Another novel of the time, “Vasily Ostrov,” has not yet been discovered. In addition to the classical philologists, Egunov was friends with Mikhail Kuzmin , K. K. Vaginov , and Yury Yurkun .
In 1931 he taught English at the Naval Engineering School. F. E. Dzerzhinsky , reading at the cadets, especially during training swimming in the summer of 1932 in Sweden [2] .
Arrested in 1933 under suspicion of anti-Soviet activity in the case of R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik, he spent 3 years in exile in Siberia in the village of Podgornoye, Tomsk Region. In 1938, after exile, deprived of Leningrad registration, he settled in Novgorod.
According to the historian I. G. Ermolov, during the German occupation of the Novgorod region in 1942, Egunov became the head of the Novgorod department of public education, popularized relations between medieval Novgorod and Germany in lectures for teachers, and revised the library collections of the city, seizing communist literature [3] . It was later taken to Germany, in Neustadt [4]. In 1945-1946 he taught German in the Soviet tank units in Berlin . On September 25, 1946 (on the eve of his birthday) he fled to the American sector , was extradited by the Americans, and sentenced by the Special Conference to 10 years in the camps (served his sentence in Western Siberia and Kazakhstan ).
After his release in 1956 he lived in Ukhta, then was able to return to Leningrad. He was widowed in 1955, married for the second time on June 25, 1956 to Anna Nikolaevna Vasilyeva. He lived with his wife and two stepsons in a communal apartment on Peter Lavrov Street. In 1960 he received a room on Veselnaya Street, house 10, apartment 18 [5]]. His stepson is the writer Dmitry Balashov .
He worked at the Institute of the History of Science and Technology at the Lomonosov Museum, then at the Pushkin House , translated ancient authors (continued translations from Plato and prepared a new edition of Ethiopics), published the monograph of Homer in Russian Translations of the 18th-19th Centuries.
In the 1960s, philologists, translators, and close friends gathered in the house of Egunov in Gavan : A. K. Gavrilov , G. G. Shmakov , Yu. M. Piryutko , L. N. Chertkov , T. N. Nikolskaya, V. I Somsikov , to whom Egunov bequeathed his archive.
The first publications of Egunov’s poems took place in the West - in the collection “The Soviet Secret Muse” ( Munich , 1961, compiled by B. Phillipov ) and in the almanac “Part of Speech” ( New York , 1980, prepared by G. G. Shmakov ).
Egunov died on October 3, 1968 in Leningrad. He was buried in the Northern cemetery in Pargolov .
My published books:
