Ilya Kutik

Ilya Kutik was born in Lviv (Ukraine) and moved to Moscow in 1977. His poetic mentor was the poet Arsenii Tarkovsky (father of the filmmaker, Andrey). In 1990, Kutik was brought to the USA by Allen Ginsberg for his first reading tour here and was supported by Joseph Brodsky for a professorship at Northwestern University (1993), where he is a professor of Russian poetry and film. Ilya Kutik’s poems have been translated into 19 languages (including volumes published in Danish, Swedish, German, English, and Japanese) and are included in the major Russian and translated anthologies of Russian poetry of the 20th century. He is one of the founders of the Russian Metarealist group/school of poets. With audacity and wit and allusiveness, the Metarealists have explored a variety of metaphor that defies reality yet can be understood and even visualized—such as “it’s not the driver’s eyes, but rather the car’s headlights that see the road at night.” (For a brief account, see… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metarealism) Kutik is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry in Russian; titles, translated into English, are: Pentathlon of the Senses (Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii, 1990); Swedish Poets: Translations and Variations (Moscow: Mir Kultury, MP Fortuna LTD, 1992); Odysseus’ Bow (St. Petersburg: Sovetskii Pisatel, 1993); Ode on Visiting the Belosaraisk Spit on the Sea of Azov (bilingual edition, New York: Alef, 1995); Death of Tragedy, in 2 volumes: Persian Letters (vol. 1) and Civil Wars (vol. 2) (Moscow: Kommentarii, 2003); and Epos (Moscow: Russkii Gulliver, 2011). He also published three collections of essays in English (The Ode and the Odic: Essays on Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and Mayakovsky (Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1994); Hieroglyphs of Another World: On Poetry, Swedenborg, and Other Matters (2000) and Writing as Exorcism: The Personal Codes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol (2004; both books published by Northwestern University Press); and a monograph on the contemporary Russian artist duo Igor & Marina (Skira, 2016).