Veniamin Blazhenny

Who is Veniamin Blazhenny?

Veniamin Mikhailovich Blazhenny was Russian Christian poet. His literary pseudonym, "Blazhenny" means Fool for Christ or "blessed".

Blazhenny was born in a poor Jewish family. After studying one year in the Vitebsk Teachers' Institute, he worked as a history teacher. In 1946, he returned to Belarus and lived in Minsk. He worked as a bookbinder and a photographer in a manufacture team for people with disabilities. He started writing his first poetry in 1943 and had a correspondence with Boris Pasternak, Viktor Shklovsky and Arseny Tarkovsky who admitted his talent. However, his work remained unpublished and unknown to public due to censorship and other publishing constraints in the Soviet Union. Being on the lowest-paying jobs and having his poetry unpublished, Blazenny lived in extreme poverty and has been involuntary incarcerated in a Soviet psychiatric institution for having a "delusion" that he was a poet. Blazhenny remained bedridden during last years of his life and survived because of help by his wife. He died two weeks after her death