Yuri Ivask

George Ivask (Russian: Yuri Pavlovich Ivask, Юрий Павлович Иваск, Estonian: Jüri Ivask; September 14, 1907 – February 13, 1986) was a Russian Empire–born Estonian poet and literary critic; in his later years he was an American scholar of Russian literature.

George Ivask was born in Moscow, the son of Pavel Ivask, a merchant of Estonian origin, and his Russian wife.

He was married to Tamara (née Mezak) Ivask (1916–1982).

In 1920 the family moved to Estonia, where Ivask enrolled in Tartu University, which he graduated from in 1932.

George Ivask started publishing poetry in 1929, occasionally using pseudonyms (B. Afanasyevsky, G. Issako, A.B.), mostly in Put, a magazine founded by Nikolai Berdyaev, who exerted a major influence upon him, as well as Georgy Fedotov.

Ivask's first book, Severny Bereg (The Northern Shore), came out in 1938 in Warsaw.

He characterized his style as 'neo-barocco', while considering himself a follower of Gavriil Derzhavin.

In 1943 he was mobilized into the German army but never made it to the front due to poor health.

In 1944, anticipating the advance of the Red Army, he fled to Germany and in 1946 entered Hamburg University to pursue Slavic studies and philosophy.

In 1949 he moved to the United States, where he earned his Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University.

Ivask compiled and edited In the West (На Западе, New York, 1953), an extensive anthology of the poets of the first and the second waves of Russian emigration, and he published books by Georgy Fedotov and Vasily Rozanov, as well as critical essays and Konstantin Leontyev (1974), a monograph upon the controversial Russian religious thinker.

In 1955 Ivask received American citizenship.

From 1969 to 1977 he taught at the University of Kansas, Indiana University, and Washington University in St. Louis, and then he became the head of the Russian literature department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

His best-remembered work is Homo Ludens (Играющий человек, 1973), a free-montage autobiography in verse that remained unfinished.

Ivask retired in 1977.

His 1983 poem "A Greeting Word from an Orthodox Man" (Приветствие православного), published in the Polish magazine Kultura in Paris, made a great impression on Pope Paul II, who invited Ivask to the Vatican for an audience.

The papers from George Ivask's estate are held by Yale University.

Ivask died of a heart attack after collapsing near a pond on the campus of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1986.