Alexander Strakhov - poet and scientist

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

About the work of this figure, Russian literary critic Danila Davydov wrote that his poems "sparingly and seriously reflect the experience of a certain isolation, separability, denial of common values."

Alexander Strakhov is a poet, as well as an ethnographer and linguist. He currently authored 8 collections of poems and many scientific publications.

Biography

The future poet and scientist, whose full name is Alexander Borisovich Strakhov, was born in 1948 in the USSR.

Higher education received at Moscow State University, where in 1972 he graduated from the Faculty of Philology. In 1986, having defended his dissertation at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Strakhov was awarded the degree of Candidate of Sciences in Philology.

In the afterword to one of the collections, the poet writes that he began to compose poems as a child. But the start of professional literary activity can be considered 1968, when, under the guidance of Yefim Druts, a poet,writer and ethnographer, Alexander Strakhov participated in the work of a literary association called "Spectrum", created on the basis of the Moscow Institute of Chemical Engineering. This was followed by a break of 10 years, and in 1979 Strakhov began to write poems again. Philologist and versifier Maxim Shapir dedicated several of his works to the poet's work.

In the mid-1980s, Alexander Strakhov decided to devote himself entirely to science. After moving to the USA, the city of Boston, after some time he took the position of editor of a magazine about Slavic folklore, which he is now.

It is known that Alexander Strakhov is married, he has two adult children: Daniil, born on March 2, 1976 and known to many as one of the actors in the series "Brigada"; as well as daughter Elizabeth, who currently lives in the United States, like her father.

Literary activity

Under the name of Alexander Strakhov, the following collections were published: "Awakening", "Face in the Crowd", "In the Constellation of the Cat", "Proud Knot", "From A to Yu", "To the Change of Weather", "The Seventh Sorrow "," Eight autumn. The latest book to date was published in 2015 by the publishing house of Nikolai Filimonov.

In his poems, Alexander Strakhov often touches on such an eternal and familiar theme for poetry as the confrontation between the soul and the body of a person. He conveys his thoughts to readers with the help of atypical, rich, memorable images: for example, the sky can be depicted as … a cat, and the earth -like a house full of mice (it's easy to guess that in this case, mice mean people).

Strakhov is a specialist in Slavic ethnography, and often in his poems he uses the same theme as in his studies, interpreting it in different ways. While reading, you can find many philological and historical quotes - both hidden and explicit.

Scientific activity

Scientific publications by Alexander Strakhov are devoted to the subject of ancient Slavic culture and its traditions, the history of Ancient Russia. His most important works are considered to be a study of the cult of bread among the Eastern Slavs; an article comparing Western and Slavic Christmas rites; publication about the principles of text design in Ancient Russia.