Background
She was born in Odessa in a family of Jewish office workers. The real family name was Zeliger (Russian: Зейлигер).
journalist linguist translator writer poet
She was born in Odessa in a family of Jewish office workers. The real family name was Zeliger (Russian: Зейлигер).
From 1934 to 1937 she studied at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute.
As a teenager she worked at a chemical plant. 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).
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. 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).
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, who married Hans Magnus Enzensberger and lived abroad for twenty years, killing herself shortly after a brief return to Russia in 1991.
USSR Union of Writers.