Alexei Purin

Who is Alexei Purin?

Alexei Purin is a Russian poet and critic.

Born in Leningrad, Purin graduated from the Leningrad Technological Institute as a chemical engineer but soon turned to literature. In the 1970s he became part of the group around the poet Alexander Kushner, who opposed the government's socialist realism but also rejected the "underground poetry" often found in samizdat publication.

For Purin and his circle the core concepts of literary art were the ‘everyday word’ of Innokentii Annenski, who inspired the Acmeists, a group of early-20th-century poets reacting against the vagueness and affectations of Symbolism, and Mandelshtam’s ‘nostalgia for a world culture’. Purin’s first book of poems contains the much-discussed cycle ‘Eurasia’, which deals with his years of military service in Karelia on the Finnish border. ‘Never before has the Red Army been written about in this manner,’ said the reviewer of Novii Mir... The combination of earthliness and literary condensation in Eurasia became Purin’s trademark.