Benedikt Livshits
Illustration — Portrait by David Burliuk, 1911 Benedikt Konstantinovich Livshits (– 21 September 1938) was a Russian poet and writer of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry and a French–Russian poetry translator. He is best remembered as the author of The One and a Half-Eyed Archer (1933), memoirs on Russian avant-garde that were translated to multiple languages.
Also recorded as Benedikt Konstantinovich Livshits
Benedikt Livshits
Benedict Lifshits · Own work photo by Victor Vizu · Public domain
- Born
- 1886 · Odesa.
- Nationality
- Russian Empire · Soviet Union
- Occupation
- poet · translator · writer · explorer
- Education
- Imperial Novorossiia University · Imperial University of St. Vladimir
- Honours
- Cross of St. George
- Languages
- Russian
VALÉORINE Encyclopedia
VALÉORINE documentary reading
Documentary summary
Illustration — Portrait by David Burliuk, 1911 Benedikt Konstantinovich Livshits (– 21 September 1938) was a Russian poet and writer of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry and a French–Russian poetry translator. He is best remembered as the author of The One and a Half-Eyed Archer (1933), memoirs on Russian avant-garde that were translated to multiple languages.
Admitted source layer · organised and presented by VALÉORINE
Note VALÉORINE
Benedikt Livshits (1886–1938) was an explorer, poet and translator, among other activities, of Russian and Soviet nationality. The explorer was born in Odesa and died in Saint Petersburg.
Benedikt Livshits was educated at Imperial Novorossiia University. The explorer was a member of Hylaea. Languages used include Russian.
Composed from admitted, traceable facts · 26 September 2026
VALÉORINE
Reference Check
Propose documentary evidence for Benedikt Livshits. A contribution is never written directly as fact: identity, source, rights and evidence gates still decide.
Sign in to contribute
Documentary evidence
Evidence Panel
not yet certified
- Identity
- resolved
- Independent source families
- 0
- Admitted assertions
- 0
- Open conflicts
- 0
Authority files
wikidata · Q1976707 · wikipedia · Benedikt Livshits
In this article
Life and career
Life and career
• Illustration — Livshits (second from right) with friends: Osip Mandelstam, Korney Chukovsky, and Yury Annenkov. Photo 1914 Livshits was born to an assimilated Jewish family in Odessa. He studied law at Novorossia University and then moved to Kiev University, where he graduated in 1912. He was conscripted to the Russian army and served in the 88th Infantry Regiment near Novgorod. In 1914, shortly after he converted to Orthodox Christianity, Lifshits again served in the infantry during World War I, where he was wounded and awarded the Cross of St. George. In 1908, "The Exhibition of Modern Art" was staged in Kublin.[1] This exhibition, which included the works of Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and other European postimpressionist painters, made a profound impression on the young Livshits. His first poetry was published in the Anthology of Modern Poetry (Kiev) a year later. In 1910 he worked for Sergei Makovsky's symbolist art magazine Apollon. Lifshits also befriended Alexandra Ekster and other figures of Russian avant-garde in painting. Together with Wladimir Burliuk, David Burliuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Vasily Kamensky he was a member and co-founder of the major Russian Futurist group Hylaea (Russian Gilea). It is said to have been established after Livshits and the Burliuk brothers vacationed at the estate of Count Mordvinov in Chernianka.[2] David Burliuk, Kamensky, and Livshits would form the nucleus of Cubo-Futurism, which became the most influential subdivision of Futurism.[3] He briefly split from the movement in 1914, together with Velimir Khlebnikov, protesting from a nationalist standpoint against the visit of Filippo Marinetti to Saint Petersburg. His own poetry, however, was only tangentially connected with the mainstream of Russian Futurism, let alone Cubo-Futurism, with its predominantly anti-aesthetic, primitivist, and urbanistic imagery and zaum language. Although Lifshits experimented with transferring the procedures of French Cubism and Surrealism into literature (his best-known Futurist text was the short prose People in Landscape, featuring syntactic dislocations and non-figurative imagery), the bulk of his poetry is euphonic, written in traditional Classicist verse and archaic diction, and employs complex metaphors with references to European poetry and Antiquity. Much of his work is underpinned by a shared philosophical conception of nature and culture, as well as a complex Eurasian view of Russia. His four volumes of poetry are Marsyas' Flute (1911), Wolves' Sun (1914; the title quotes Tristan Corbière), Swamp Medusa (a book on Saint Petersburg, partly published in 1919 under the title From Marshy Bogs), and Patmos (1926). In 1928 a book Noon at Crotone appeared, which brought together much of his earlier work. In the 1930s, Lifshits wrote many poems on Georgian themes; he visited Georgia many times, befriended Georgian poets whose verse he also translated, learned the language, and planned to publish a fifth collection, Kartvelian Odes. It did not appear, however, until his posthumous rehabilitation in 1964, in Tbilisi. In 1933 Lifshits published a book of memoirs, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, which is considered one of the best histories of Russian Futurism. In this book, Lifshits notably coined "Amazons" as a sobriquet of female avant-garde painters, Ekster, Natalia Goncharova, and Olga Rozanova. This work also detailed the cultural discomfort of a fully assimilated Jewish artist in Russia.[4] In 1934, a large book of translations from French poetry, From Romantics to Surrealism appeared. An analysis of his translation works noted his tendency to uphold the structure of the material being translated as a whole and to maintain close proximity to the original.[5] In 1937, Livshits became a victim of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.[6] He was arrested in October 1937 and summarily executed with other Leningrad writers on 21 September 1938 as an "enemy of the people", after ostensibly admitting, under torture, to having planned terrorist acts with the Trotskyite Victor Serge and naming dozens of literary figures as his accomplices. His dossier was falsified to state that he died of heart failure on 15 May 1939.[7] His large archive and library was destroyed by NKVD. Lifshits' translations were re-published since 1960s, and memoirs and original poetry since 1989. Lifshits was married twice: first to Vera Arngold-Zhukova, an actress and cousin of Andrey Bely, and then to Ekaterina Skachkova, a ballerina and later his fellow translator from French. He had two sons, one from each marriage, neither of whom survived past their teens; his younger son, Kirill, was killed in 1942 in the Battle of Stalingrad. Lifshits’s widow, Ekaterina, was also imprisoned in the 1940s and later struggled for his rehabilitation and for the publication of his works. Her memoirs and letters were collected in 2019.
Literary works
Literary works
• The Flute of Marsias (1911, printing was destroyed by government censorship). • Sun of wolves (Volch'e solntse), 1914. • The One and a Half-eyed Archer (Polutoraglazyj strelets), 1933[8] – memoirs about the Futurist movement.
Автограф поэта Бенедикта Лифшица на его книге "Стихотворения".
Benedict Lifshits · Own work photo by Vizu
Life and career
Dated record
Life and career
The full dated record · 2 entries
1886
Benedikt Livshits born at Odesa.
1938
Benedikt Livshits died at Saint Petersburg.
Places
Named by the record
Places
Only places the record itself states, plotted where the house gazetteer settles their coordinates. Nothing is inferred from a name or a nationality.
Odesa.
Birth place
Saint Petersburg.
Death place
Primary material
Documents and archives
Institutional database
- Wikidata, structured authority record Q1976707: Benedikt Livshits
Scholarly · Wikimedia Foundation
reference work
- “Benedikt Livshits”, English Wikipedia, consulted as further reading
Reputable secondary · Wikipedia
authority file
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Markov, Vladimir. Russian Futurism: A History. University of California Press. 38. 1968.
- 2.Berghaus, Günter. 2016. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. 251. 978-3-11-046253-1.
- 3.Rann, James. The Unlikely Futurist: Pushkin and the Invention of Originality in Russian Modernism. University of Wisconsin Press. 8. 2020. 978-0-299-32810-8.
- 4.Livak, Leonid. The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature. Stanford University Press. 419. 2010. 978-0-8047-7562-5.
- 5.Baer, Brian James. Russian Writers on Translation: An Anthology. Routledge. 2014. 978-1-317-64002-8.
- 6.Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. California Slavic Studies, Volume VIII. University of California Press. 143. 2021. 978-0-520-31556-3.
- 7.Dich, Z. L. Распятые: Писатели – жертвы политических репрессий. Severo-Zapad. 1994.
- 8.(Harvard Biographies (I–L)) at www.people.fas.harvard.edu
References
Citations
References
Each reference names the institution holding it, so a reader may go to the document itself.
Institutional database
Wikidata, structured authority record Q1976707: Benedikt LivshitsWikimedia Foundation
Verifiedreference work
Partially resolvedauthority file
Partially resolved
Further particulars
Held on the record
Further particulars
Open the remaining particulars
The authorities additionally record the heading Benedikt Konstantinovich Livshits. His recorded language was Russian. Recorded as poet, translator, writer and explorer.
Identity and origins
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 15 August 2026.
Elsewhere in Books
38,661 published records in this field, each with its sources named.
- Benedict Wallet VilakaziAuthor
- Benedict WellsAuthor
- Benedikt KotruljevićAuthor
- Benedikt LedeburAuthor
- Benedikt NieseAuthor
- Bengt AnderbergAuthor
- Bengt LidnerAuthor
- Bengt OhlssonAuthor
Best supported in this field
For owners
Own a work by Benedikt Livshits?
A specialist will read what you send and tell you what the house can establish, what it cannot, and whether the object is suited to sale. There is no charge and no obligation. The object stays with you throughout; nothing is shipped to us unless it is arranged in writing beforehand.