Innokenty Annensky

Biography

Annensky was born into the family of a public official in Omsk on 1 September [O.S. 20 August] 1855. In 1860, while still a child, he was taken to Saint Petersburg. Annensky lost his parents early on, and was raised in the family of his older brother, Nikolai Annensky, a prominent Narodnik and political activist.

In 1879, Annensky graduated from the philological department of St. Petersburg University, where he concentrated on Historical-comparative linguistics. He became a teacher, and taught classical languages and ancient literature studies in a gymnasium in Tsarskoe Selo. He served as the Director of this school from 1886 until his death in 1909. Nikolai Gumilev graduated from this school and called Annensky "the last of Tsarskoe Selo's swans."

Annensky was somewhat reluctant to publish his original poems and first gained fame with his translations of Euripides and the French Symbolists. From 1890 until his death in 1909, he translated all the works of Euripides from Ancient Greek . At the beginning of the 1900s, Annensky wrote a series of tragedies modelled after those of ancient Greece: Melanippe the Wise (1901), King Ixion (1902), Laodamia (1906), and Thamyris the Citharode (1913).

As a literary critic, Annensky published Book of Reflections and Second Book of Reflections on Russian and European novelists, poets, and playwrights. His essays were sometimes termed "critical prose" because of the artistic value of these texts. During his last months, Annensky worked as an editor of Sergei Makovsky's journal Apollon, in which he published some essays on poetry theory. Nikolai Gumilev valued these theoretical works very highly and considered Annensky to be the first true acmeist.

In literary history, Annensky is remembered primarily as a poet. He started writing poetry in the 1870s but did not publish it. He decided not to publish any works until he was 35, advice that was given by his older brother Nikolai. His first collection of poems, entitled Quiet Songs, was published in 1904 under the pseudonym Nik. T.-o (i.e., Никто, "No one" in Russian). Because Annensky was a director of a public school at the time, publishing this avant garde work under his real name would have been controversial. The book gained moderate praise from leading Symbolists, some of whom didn't suspect that Annensky was the author. Annensky's second book, The Cypress Chest (1910), is his best known collection of poetry. Many of his unpublished pieces were later edited and released posthumously in the 1920s by his son, Valentin Krivich.

On 13 December [O.S. 30 November] 1909, while heading to a meeting to discuss an unpublished essay about Euripides at the Society of Classical Philology, Annensky died from a heart attack at the Tsarskoe Selo railway station in Saint Petersburg.