Yuri Kazarnovsky

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Yuri Alexandrovich Kazarnovsky (1904/5–1960?) was a Russian poet from Rostov-on-Don. As a student he joined a subversive literary circle called Vremennik and was arrested in 1926–1927. From 1928 to 1932 he was in the Solovki labor camp, where he wrote poems about camp life that appeared in the prison journal Solovetsky Islands. He also helped build the White Sea–Baltic Canal. In 1936 he published his only book, Stikhi (Poems). In 1937, during Stalin’s purges, he was sent to the Kolyma gulag, where he stayed from 1938 to 1942. It is thought he may have been one of the last people to meet the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag in 1938. He also worked in a camp at Mariinsk in Siberia. In his later years he lived in poverty and struggled with addiction, living in Tashkent and Moscow, and he corresponded with poet Ilya Selvinsky. He was rehabilitated in 1955 and is believed to have died in 1960.