Alexei Tsvetkov

Alexei Tsvetkov was a Russian-language poet, essayist and translator who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1975 and later settled in Israel.

1947 to 2022Russian-language émigré poetryCo-founding the Moscow Time groupBroadcasting for Radio LibertyThe Andrei Bely Prize

Born: 2 February 1947, Ivano-Frankivsk
Died: 12 May 2022, Holon
Occupation: poet, translator, writer, literary critic
Education: Lomonosov Moscow State University

Alexei Tsvetkov was born in 1947 in Ivano-Frankivsk

Alexei Tsvetkov was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, in 1947 and grew up in Zaporizhzhia. He studied chemistry briefly at Odesa University. He then studied history and journalism at Moscow State University.

With Sergey Gandlevsky, Bakhyt Kenjeev and Alexander Soprovsky, he founded the unofficial poets' group Moscow Time. In 1975 he was arrested, deported from Moscow and emigrated to the United States. From 1976 he edited the émigré newspaper Russkaya Zhizn in San Francisco.

He earned a PhD at the University of Michigan in 1983 and taught Russian at Dickinson College. He worked as a broadcaster for Voice of America, and from 1989 to 2007 for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich and Prague. He stopped writing poetry in the late 1980s, then returned to it in 2004 and received the Andrei Bely Prize.

After years as a freelance writer in New York City, he made aliyah in 2018 and lived in Bat Yam. He died at Wolfson Hospital in Holon in 2022 and was buried in Yarkon Cemetery.