Margarita Aliger

Margarita Iosifovna Aliger (Маргари́та Ио́сифовна Алиге́р; October 7 1915 – August 1, 1992) was a Soviet and Russian poet, translator, and journalist.

She was born in Odessa in a family of Jewish office workers; the real family name was Zeliger (Зейлигер).

As a teenager she worked at a chemical plant.

Aliger's second and final husband was the Central Committee official Igor Chernoutsan (1918–1990).

She survived all her husbands and children, dying shortly after her daughter Maria Enzensberger.

Margarita Aliger is buried in Peredelkino next to her daughters.

From 1934 to 1937 she studied at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute.

The main themes of her early poetry were the heroism of the Soviet people during industrialization (Year of birth, 1938; Railroad, 1939; Stones and grass, 1940) and during World War II (Lyrics, 1943).

From 1940 to 1950, the poetry of Aliger was characterised by a mix of optimistic semi-official verses ("Leninskie mountains", 1953), and poems in which Aliger tried to analyse the situation in her country in a realistic way ("Your Victory", 1944 - 1945).

Her first husband was the composer Konstantin Makarov-Rakitin, who was killed at the front near Yartsevo in 1941 after the death of their infant son (their daughter Tatyana [1940-1974] became a poet and translator), a double tragedy that left her devastated.

Her most famous poem is "Zoya" (1942), about Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a young girl killed by Nazis.

This work was one of the most popular poems during the Soviet era.

In 1956, in a gathering of Khrushchev with the intelligentsia he admonished the writers for interfering with the political system.

It is noted that Aliger was the only writer to speak up against him at the event.

It was after the retirement that he apologized to her for his behavior.

Aliger wrote numerous essays and articles about Russian literature and her impressions on travelling ("On poetry and poets", 1980; "The return from Chile", 1966).

The following year she had an affair with the author Alexander Fadeyev; from this union was born a daughter Maria (Masha Enzenberger), who married Hans Magnus Enzensberger and lived abroad for twenty years, killing herself shortly after a brief return to Russia in 1991.