Arkady Shtypel
The ‘last futurist poet’ Arkady Shtypel was born in 1944 in Kattakurgan, a town in modern day Uzbekistan, and spent his childhood and teenage years in Dniepropetrovsk, now a part of the Ukraine. He enrolled in the Physics faculty of Dniepropetrovsk but was expelled for subversive literary activities and the distribution of dissident material in 1965.
A writer of both Russian and Ukrainian verse, he was accused of being a Ukrainian nationalist as well as anti-Soviet. After completing his studies and his army service in 1968, however, Shtypel moved to Moscow and has lived there ever since.
In Moscow he has had a wide variety of jobs; working as everything from an acoustic engineer, radiologist and Maths teacher to photographer and watchman. It was not until 1989 that Shtypel was first published – some of his work appearing in an anthology of underground poetry,’ Граждане ночи’ (‘Citizen Nights’).
Since then his poetry has been printed in numerous journals including ‘Arion’, ‘Kreschatik’ and ‘Avtornik’. Shtypel has won several prizes in the Ukraine and Russia and is well known in avant-garde poetry circles in both countries. He has also published Russian translations of Dylan Thomas and William Shakespeare. He describes himself as ‘a Ukrainian nationalist by virtue of long service’ and is married to the poet Maria Galina (herself a writer of Ukrainian origin living in Moscow).
A hallmark of Shtypel’s poetry is its lyrical playfulness matching a complex structure - demanding from the reader an active, if constrained, co-operation. Vladimir Gubailovsky of ‘Русский журнал’ (‘Russian Journal’) has said of Stypel that ‘he is, above all else, clear. This does not mean,’ Gubailovsky continues, ‘that his verse is in any way basic – in fact quite the contrary. What really stays with you after reading Shtypel is a sense of poetic clarity’.
