Anatoly Yakobson

Anatoly Yakobson was a Soviet Jewish literary critic, teacher, poet and translator who was a central figure in the Soviet human rights movement.

1935 to 1978Soviet human rights movementEditing the Chronicle of Current EventsLiterary translation and criticism

Born: 30 April 1935, Moscow
Died: 28 September 1978, Jerusalem
Occupation: writer, poet, translator, human rights defender
Education: Moscow Pedagogical State University

Anatoly Yakobson was born in 1935 in Moscow

Yakobson was born in Moscow in 1935 to a Jewish family. From 1953 to 1958 he studied history at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute.

He taught literature and history at Mathematical School No. 2 in Moscow. His lessons included writers left off the official syllabus, such as Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Akhmatova and Mandelshtam. He also translated Verlaine, Gautier, Tumanyan, Hernández and García Lorca.

In 1966 he wrote an open letter to the court against the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial. In 1968, under growing KGB attention, he left the school. In 1969 he co-founded the Initiative Group on Human Rights in the USSR, and later left it.

After Natalya Gorbanevskaya was arrested in December 1969, he became chief editor of the samizdat bulletin Chronicle of Current Events. He prepared issues 11 to 27 until the end of 1972.

Facing the threat of arrest, he emigrated to Israel in 1973 with his wife Maya Ulanovskaya and son Alexander. In 1978 Andrei Sakharov nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. He took his own life in Jerusalem on September 28, 1978.