Arkady Steinberg

**Arkady Steinberg** (November 28, 1907, Odessa – August 7, 1984) was a Russian and Soviet poet, translator and painter, father of artists Eduard Steinberg and Borukh Steinberg. He was also the first Soviet poet to translate John Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1976.

## Biography

Arkady Steinberg was born in Odessa in a family of a physician in the sphere of internal and nervous diseases, a health care organizer and publicist, Honorary citizen Akim Pinkhusovich Steinberg and Zinaida Moiseyevna Steinberg (née Azovskaya). Studied at the Odessa Real School of St. Paul. In 1921 he moved to Moscow with his family. In 1925 he enrolled Vkhutemas - the Russian State High Art and Technical school. In 1927 he got transferred to the Odessa Fine Art School named after M. B. Grekov, but returned to Vkhutemas a year later. In 1929 he left Vkhutemas after his third year and did not resume his studies. In the summer of 1937 he lived wiith his family in a small town of Tarusa not far from Moscow and worked with Yugoslav-Montenegrin Communist émigré poet Radule Stijenski (1901–1966) on the translation of his poem “Cradle of Warriors”. But in November 1937 he was arrested after Radule Stijenski informed the NKVD of his impudent utterances about pecuilarities of Soviet life and politics, and sentenced to eight years of hrd labour. However, in 1939 Steinberg's mother implored the Supreme Court of the USSR to review his case, and in November 1939 the sentence was overturned and Arkady Steinberg returned to Moscow and to freedom.

In 1941 Steinberg became member of the Soviet Writers' Union. Since the outbreak of WW2, he served in the Army and was awarded the Medal "For Military Merit" (1941) and the Order of the Patriotic War 1st degree in 1944.

In 1944, while he served in the political department of the 8th Army (USSR) under the command of Leonid Brezhnev, who recommended him to join the party, he was arrested on October 22, 1944 by SMERSH for “anti-Soviet agitation and again sentenced to eight years in prison, which he served this time in full.

When Steinberg was set free in 1953, he was prohibited to live in the capital of the USSR and the capitals of all its 15 republics as well as in all big cities, and therefore went to live to a small town of Tarusa which was situated farther than 100 km from Moscow and thus exempt from those settlement restrictions, which he knew well from his pre-war stay there. Tarusa bacame his new home town for the next decades, and his life and work were inextricably linked with this town on the Oka river.

When Steinberg was set free in 1953, he was prohibited to live in the capital of the USSR and the capitals of all its 15 republics as well as in all big cities, and therefore went to live to a small town of Tarusa which was situated farther than 100 km from Moscow and thus exempt from those settlement restrictions, which he knew well from his pre-war stay there. Tarusa became his new home town for the next decades, and his life and work were inextricably linked with this town on the Oka river.

In Tarusa, Arkady Steinberg was a prominent representative of Sixtiers - important group of free-thinking Soviet intelligentsia which for a brief period after Stalin’s death in 1953 set the tone in Soviet culture and opposed the totalitarian political system and strict censorship.

In the late 1960s, after his divorce from his third wife Valentina Alonicheva, he was forced to sell his Tarusa house to his youngest son Borukh (Boris) and later bought himself a house in the village of Yuminskoye in Kimry District, where he spent every summer and where he finally died.

Steinberg was buried at the Kuntsevskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

## Family

- First wife (1926-1930) — Eleonora Aleksandrovna Taktyshnikova, model.
    - Son — Yasen (1929-?).
- Second wife (1931-1934) — Vera Mikhailovna Mukhar (1909-1995), artist, Steinberg's classmate at VKHUTEMAS.
- Third wife — Valentina Georgievna Steinberg (née Alonicheva, 1915-1976).
    - Son — Eduard Steinberg (1937-2012), abstractionist artist, representative of the "geometric" movement
    - Son — Boris Steinberg (1938-2003), artist, author of assemblages, "metal paintings".
- Fourth wife — Natalia Ivanovna Egorova (née Timofeeva).

### Poetry collections

Until the early 1930s, Steinberg occasionally published poems in magazines and newspapers, and later became a translator of poetry of the peoples of the USSR. Among his works are a book of poems by the classic of Jewish poetry in Yiddish Osher Shvartsman, an adaptation of the Yakut epic poem-tale "Bogatyr on a Bay Horse" and the poem-tale "Andriesh" by Emilian Nesterovich Bukov.

Together with Konstantin Paustovsky and Nikolai Otten, he was one of the initiators, compilers and editors of the dissident-spirited literary almanach "Tarusa Pages", printed in Kaluga in 1961, where the first and only lifetime full-fledged selection of his own poems was published. "Tarusa Pages" literally gave its pages to works of formerly prohibited and dissident authors like Marina Tsvetaeva, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Naum Korzhavin, Vladimir Kornilov, Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Maksimov, Frida Vigdorova, and was quickly prohibited for further printing and distribution in the USSR.

The most famous works in the genre of poetic translation are the epic poem by John Milton “Paradise Lost” and the book of poems by the Chinese poet and artist of the Tang era Wang Wei.

Separate editions in Steinberg's translation were published of books of poems by Nguyen Zu (from Vietnamese) and George Topyrceanu (from Romanian), the poem "The Tale of the Oak" by Anatoly Moiseevich Guzhel, a collection of poets of Azerbaijan (together with Arseny Tarkovsky). Also among the translated authors: from English - William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Robert Southey, Lord Byron, John Keats, Henry Longfellow, Rudyard Kipling, Dylan Thomas; from Armenian - Hovhannes Tumanyan; from Chinese — Li Bo, Chu Guangxi, Qian Qi, Zu Yong; from Korean — Kim Sissup; from German — Walther von der Vogelweide, Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich Heine, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, Stefan George, Börries von Münchhausen, Hans Carossa, Gottfried Benn, Johannes Becher, Bertold Brecht, Hans Magnus Enzensberger; from Macedonian - Slavko Yanevsky, Atso Shopov; from Polish - Nikolai Bernatsky, Adam Asnyk, Lucian Rydel, Tadeusz Mitsinsky, Yulian Tuvim, Bruno Jasensky, Constanty Galchinsky; from Romanian — Mihai Eminescu, Ion Minulescu, Demostene Botez, Cicerone Teodorescu, Eugen Zhebeleanu, Ion Brad, Tiberiu Utan; from Slovak — Jan Golly, Janko Yesensky, Ivan Krasko, Andrei Plavka, Pavol Gorov; from Slovenian — Matej Bor; from Ukrainian — Mykola Bazhan; from French — Arthur Rimbaud (co-authored with Eduard Bagritsky); from Croatian — Miroslav Krleža. Steinberg was one of the main Russian translators of the Montenegrin communist poet Radule Stijenski, who in 1937 became one of the key witnesses at the first arrest of Steinberg.

Among his disciples in the field of literature, poetry and translation were Lyudmila Vagurina, Dmitry Vedenyapin, Evgeny Vitkovsky, Tatyana Gringolts, Roman Dubrovkin, Pavel Nerler, Yan Probshtein, Vladimir Tikhomirov and others. Steinberg's paintings and graphics influenced Boris Sveshnikov, Valentin Vorobyov, Igor Vulokh, Ülo Sooster, Eduard Gorokhovsky, Evgeny Rukhin, Boris Zhutovsky, Ivan Chuikov, Mikhail Roginsky.

## References and sources

- References

- Sources
- Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry (1985). Simon Karlinsky, Cambridge University Press p18 ISBN 9780521275743
- Applebaum, Anne (2003). Gulag: A History. Doubleday. p. 446. ISBN 978-0-7679-0056-0.
- "No Love Without Poetry: The Memoirs of Marina Tsvetaeva's Daughter", published by Northwestern University Press, August 2009)
- Karlinsky, Simon and Appel, Alfred (1977). The Bitter air of exile: Russian writers in the West, 1922–1972. p72 University of California Press ISBN 978-0-520-02895-1
- Воспоминания, 2008, В. А. Бугаевский. Библия Акимыча
- Павел Нерлер. «Наше главное творение — мы сами…» Лехаим (11 декабря 2017). Дата обращения: 17 августа 2021. Архивировано 27 февраля 2021 года.
- Штейнберг Аркадий Акимович | Филологический некрополь. Дата обращения: 3 февраля 2024. Архивировано 3 февраля 2024 года.
- Вадим Перельмутер. Дарёный конь. Книга о стихах и прозе. — М.: ОГИ, 2015. — 510 с. — 2000 экз. — ISBN 978-5-94282-771-7.
- Аркадий Штейнберг. К верховьям. Собрание стихов. О Штейнберге: Материалы к биографии. Мемуары. Заметки. Стихи. М., 1997
- Аркадий Штейнберг. Вторая дорога. Стихотворения. Поэмы. Графика. М., 2007
- Воспоминания об Аркадии Штейнберге. «Он между нами жил...» М., 2008
- Аркадий Штейнберг. Золотой мяч. Избранные переводы. М., 2014
- Аркадий Штейнберг. Избранное. «Библиотека для избранных», 2017
- Одесса — Москва — Одесса. Юго-западный ветер в русской литературе. М., 2014
- Fleishman, Lazar (1990). Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-07905-2.
- Slater, Maya, ed. (2010). Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence 1921–1960. Hoover Press. ISBN 978-0-8179-1025-9.
- Griffiths, Frederick T.; Rabinowitz, Stanley J.; Fleishmann, Lazarus (2011). Epic and the Russian Novel from Gogol to Pasternak (pdf). Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press. p. 241. ISBN 978-1-936235-53-7. OCLC 929351556.

### Other websites

- https://web.archive.org/web/20011203171354/http://a88.narod.ru/4561.htm Музей Аркадия Штейнберга в Интернете
- http://www.insocinf.com/4561.htm Аркадий Акимович ШТЕЙНБЕРГ (1907—1984) Поэт, художник, переводчик
- http://www.vekperevoda.com/index1.htmСобрание стихотворений в библиотеке «Века перевода»
- http://www.vekperevoda.com/1900/ashtejnberg.htm|Страница
- http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/23/Dubrovkin-2.shtml Роман Дубровкин. Уроки Штейнберга
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LLcgzgOcM0  Марк Чульский. Жизнь и творчество Аркадия Штейнберга, иллюстрированный доклад