Yury Dombrovsky

Dombrovsky worked between 1909 and 1978 across writer, poet, literary critic, journalist and translator and 1 further recorded occupations. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

• Birthplace — Moscow, Russian Empire • Died — 29 May 1978 • Place of death — Moscow, RSFSR, USSR • Occupation — Poet, literary critic, novelist, journalist, archeologist • Citizenship — Russian Empire (1909–1917) Soviet Russia (1917–1922) Soviet Union (1922–1978) • Notable Works — The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

Dombrovsky was the son of Jewish lawyer Joseph Dombrovsky and a Russian mother. Dombrovsky fell afoul of the authorities as early as 1932 for his part in the student suicide case described in his novel The Faculty of Useless Knowledge. He was exiled to Almaty in Kazakhstan, where he established himself as a teacher and which provided the setting for his novel The Keeper of Antiquities. This work, translated into English by Michael Glenny, gives several ominous hints as to the development of the Stalinist terror and its impact in remote Almaty. Dombrovsky had begun publishing literary articles in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda by 1937, when he was imprisoned again — this time for a mere seven months, having the luck to be detained during the partial hiatus between the downfall of Yezhov and the appointment of Beria. Dombrovsky's first novel Derzhavin was published in 1938 and he was accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers in 1939, the year in which he was arrested yet again for the third time. By the protocol of the Special Meeting at the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR on March 31, 1940, Dombrovsky was assigned eight years of forced labor camps as a preventive measure. This time he was sent to the notorious Kolyma camps in northeast Siberia, to Sevvostlag, of which we are given brief but chilling glimpses in The Faculty of Useless Knowledge. Dombrovsky, partially paralysed, was released from the camps in 1943 and lived as a teacher in Almaty until 1949. There he wrote The Monkey Comes for his Skull and The Dark Lady. In 1949, he was again arrested, this time in connection with the campaign against foreign influences and "cosmopolitanism". This time, he received a ten-year sentence, to be served in the Tayshet and Osetrovo regions in Siberia. In 1955, he was released and fully rehabilitated in 1956 due to the lack of "corpus delicti". Until his death in 1978, he lived in Moscow with Klara Fazulayevna (a character in The Faculty of Useless Knowledge). He was allowed to write and his works were translated abroad, but none of them were re-issued in the USSR. Nor was he allowed abroad, even to Poland. The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (Harvill), translated by Alan Myers, the sombre and chilling sequel to The Keeper of Antiquities, took eleven years to write, being finished in 1975, and was published in Paris in 1978. A widespread opinion is that this publication proved fatal. The KGB did not approve of the work. Dombrovsky received numerous threats over the phone and through the post; his arm was shattered by a steel pipe in the course of an assault on a bus, and he was finally brutally beaten by a group of unknown persons in the lobby of the restaurant of the Main House of Writers in Moscow. Two months after the incident, on May 29, 1978 he died in hospital from severe internal bleeding caused by varicose veins of the digestive system. An account about Dombrovsky written by Armand Maloumian, a fellow inmate of the GULAG, can be found in Kontinent 4: Contemporary Russian Writers (Avon Books, ed. George Bailey), entitled "And Even Our Tears." Jean-Paul Sartre described Yuri Dombrovsky as the last classic.

Yury Dombrovsky was born on 29 April 1909 in Moscow. Dombrovsky held the nationality of Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Dombrovsky worked as writer, poet, literary critic and journalist, and the authority record catalogues a further 2 occupations under the same name, among them translator and short story writer. Dombrovsky worked in Russian and Kazakh. Dombrovsky died on 29 May 1978 in Moscow. Dombrovsky is buried at Kuzminskoye Cemetery.