Background
Yuri Ivask was born in Moscow, son of Pavel Ivask, a merchant of Estonian origins, an his Russian wife.
Yuri Ivask was born in Moscow, son of Pavel Ivask, a merchant of Estonian origins, an his Russian wife.
In 1920 the family moved to Estonia where Ivask enrolled into the Tartu University, which he graduated in 1932.
In 1943 he was mobilized into the German army but has 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 joined there the Hamburg University to study Slavistics and philosophy. In 1949 he moved to the United States of America where in the Harvard University he became the Doctor of the Slav philology.
In 1955 Ivask received the American citizenship.
In 1969-1977 he taught in the Kansas, Indiana and Washington Universities, then became the head of the Russian literature department in the University of Massachusetts in Amhurst. George Ivask (as he was known in the United States) retired in 1977.
Yuri Ivask started publishing poetry in 1929, occasionally using pseudonyms (BAfanasyevsky, GIseako, Bachelor of Arts), 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.
Arguably his best-remembered work is Homo Ludens (Человек играющий, 1973), a free-montage autobiography in verse which remained unfinished.
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, 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. His 1983 poem "A Greeting Word from an Orthodox Manitoba" (Приветствие православного) published in the Polish magazine Kultura in Paris has made a great impression upon Pope Paul II who invited Ivask to Vatican to have an audience with. The archive of Yuri Ivask is collected at the Yale University.
A Tale About (Повесть о стихах, 1987) A Praise to the Russian (Похвала русской поэзии Mosty/Bridges, Munich.
Novy Zhurnal/New Journal, New York 1983-1986 Tallinn, 2002).