Although Benedikt Livshits was a prominent figure in the Russian avant-garde, a superb poet and a theorist of poetic art, he is remembered, first and foremost, as an excellent translator and then as an author of memoirs. To a great extent his image as a marginal poet was shaped by his own self-portrayal as a poetic "loser" and an unsociable nonconformist--a lone thinker who was always tormented by theoretical issues and thus never able to achieve creative plenitude. Almost all of his writings can fit into a single book. Yet, the quality of Livshits's poetic heritage, as well as his insights into the problems of modern art, make him an important figure in twentieth-century Russian poetry.

Benedikt Konstantinovich Livshits was born in Odessa on 25 December 1886. In a questionnaire completed for the revised edition of Semen Afanas'evich Vengerov's Kritiko-Biograficheskii slovar' russkikh pisatelei i uchenykh (Critical-Bibliographical Dictionary of Russian Writers...