Vadim Delaunay
Encyclopedia
Vadim Nikolaevich Delaunay (or Delone, ; 1947–1983) was a Russia
n poet and dissident
, who participated in the
1968 Red Square demonstration
of protest against military suppression of the Prague Spring
.
family of Soviet Intelligentsia. His grandfather, Boris Delaunay
, was a prominent Soviet mathematician and creator of the Delaunay triangulation
. Among his ancestors was marquis
Bernard-René de Launay
, the last governor of the Bastille
, murdered by the attackers on that castle. Delaunay often predicted that he would repeat the fate of his ancestor.
Delaunay studied at Moscow
matshkola ("Mathematical School") No. 2, one of the best in the country at that time, then at the Department of Philology
at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. As a student, he also worked as a freelance author for the Literaturnaya Gazeta
. Delaunay started to write poetry at the age of 13. His poetry was distributed by samizdat
and some of it was published abroad.
protesting the arrest of Alexander Ginzburg
and Yuri Galanskov
as well as articles 70 and 190 of the Soviet Penal Code—"Anti-Soviet agitation" and "Libel against the Soviet Government". He was arrested and given a one-year suspended sentence (incidentally in accordance with article 190 of the Penal Code). His sentence was much lighter than that of another organizer of the same meeting, Vladimir Bukovsky
, who got three years in a labor camp
. Delaunay was distressed by the difference in the sentence, explaining the relative softness of it by the influence of his relatives.
to a friend and pupil of his grandfather, Aleksandr Aleksandrov
. In Novosibirsk
, he continued his philology studies and wrote poetry. At that time, his first official foreign publications appeared in the Paris
magazine Grani N66. Delaunay was an organizer of a concert by the Bard
Alexander Galich
, who was semi-legal at that time.
In the beginning of 1968, after the court hearing for Galanskov and Ginzburg, Delaunay wrote an open letter to Literaturnaya Gazeta in which he praised their bravery. The letter was published in the New York
newspaper Novoe Russkoe Slovo (The New Russian Word).
In June 1968, Delaunay returned to Moscow. On August 25, 1968, he and seven other dissidents organized the now-famous demonstration in support of the Prague Spring
in Red Square
near the Moscow Kremlin
. Delaunay and Pavel Litvinov
held the famous banner with the words "ЗА ВАШУ И НАШУ СВОБОДУ" ("For your freedom and ours").
Seven people were arrested, and in court, Delaunay stated that the five minutes of freedom on the square were worth the years in prison that were probably awaiting him. Efforts of the defense to convince the court in the absence of any criminal element in actions of the demonstrators were vain. There is opinion that the sentence was ready before the court session. Delaunay was sentenced to two years and 10 months in a labor camp that he served in Tyumen Oblast
in northwestern Siberia
.
. In 1979, Delaunay published his story Portraits in a Barbed Frame in the magazine Echo.
in Paris at the age of 35. In 1984, his book of poetry Verses: 1963-1983 was published. In that same year, he was posthumously awarded the Vladimir Dal
prize. His poetry has been published in Russia since 1989.
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n poet and dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
, who participated in the
1968 Red Square demonstration
1968 Red Square demonstration
The 1968 Red Square demonstration took place on August 25, 1968 at Red Square, Moscow, Soviet Union, to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, that occurred during the night of 20–21 August 1968, crushing the so-called Prague spring, a set of...
of protest against military suppression of the Prague Spring
Prague Spring
The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II...
.
Biography
Delaunay was born to a Russian-FrenchFrench people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
family of Soviet Intelligentsia. His grandfather, Boris Delaunay
Boris Delaunay
Boris Nikolaevich Delaunay or Delone was one of the first Russian mountain climbers and a Soviet/Russian mathematician, and the father of physicist Nikolai Borisovich Delone....
, was a prominent Soviet mathematician and creator of the Delaunay triangulation
Delaunay triangulation
In mathematics and computational geometry, a Delaunay triangulation for a set P of points in a plane is a triangulation DT such that no point in P is inside the circumcircle of any triangle in DT. Delaunay triangulations maximize the minimum angle of all the angles of the triangles in the...
. Among his ancestors was marquis
Marquis
Marquis is a French and Scottish title of nobility. The English equivalent is Marquess, while in German, it is Markgraf.It may also refer to:Persons:...
Bernard-René de Launay
Bernard-René de Launay
Bernard René Jourdan, marquis de Launay was the French governor of the Bastille, the son of a previous governor, and commander of its garrison when it was stormed on 14 July 1789 .-Early life:...
, the last governor of the Bastille
Bastille
The Bastille was a fortress in Paris, known formally as the Bastille Saint-Antoine. It played an important role in the internal conflicts of France and for most of its history was used as a state prison by the kings of France. The Bastille was built in response to the English threat to the city of...
, murdered by the attackers on that castle. Delaunay often predicted that he would repeat the fate of his ancestor.
Delaunay studied at Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
matshkola ("Mathematical School") No. 2, one of the best in the country at that time, then at the Department of Philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. As a student, he also worked as a freelance author for the Literaturnaya Gazeta
Literaturnaya Gazeta
Literaturnaya Gazeta is a weekly cultural and political newspaper published in Russia and Soviet Union.- Overview :...
. Delaunay started to write poetry at the age of 13. His poetry was distributed by samizdat
Samizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
and some of it was published abroad.
Political activism
On January 22, 1967, Delaunay took part in a demonstration on Pushkin SquarePushkin Square
Pushkinskaya Square or Pushkin Square in Moscow, historically known as Strastnaya Square and renamed for Alexander Pushkin in 1937, is located at the junction of the Boulevard Ring and Tverskaya Street, 2 km northwest of the Kremlin...
protesting the arrest of Alexander Ginzburg
Alexander Ginzburg
Alexander Ilyich Ginzburg , was a Russian journalist, poet, human rights activist and dissident.During the Soviet period, Ginzburg edited the samizdat poetry almanac Sintaksis. Between 1961 and 1969 he was sentenced three times to labor camps...
and Yuri Galanskov
Yuri Galanskov
Yuri Timofeyevich Galanskov was a Russian poet, historian, human rights activist and dissident. For his political activities, such as founding and editing samizdat almanac Phoenix, he was incarcerated in prisons, camps and forced treatment psychiatric hospitals ...
as well as articles 70 and 190 of the Soviet Penal Code—"Anti-Soviet agitation" and "Libel against the Soviet Government". He was arrested and given a one-year suspended sentence (incidentally in accordance with article 190 of the Penal Code). His sentence was much lighter than that of another organizer of the same meeting, Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky is a leading member of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s, writer, neurophysiologist, and political activist....
, who got three years in a labor camp
Labor camp
A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons...
. Delaunay was distressed by the difference in the sentence, explaining the relative softness of it by the influence of his relatives.
Dissidence
Delaunay's sentence required him to move away from Moscow, so he went to Novosibirsk State UniversityNovosibirsk State University
Novosibirsk State University was founded in May 1959 in the USSR by Soviet academicians Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentiev, Sergei Lvovich Sobolev and Sergey Alekseyevich Khristianovich in a program of establishing a Siberian branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences...
to a friend and pupil of his grandfather, Aleksandr Aleksandrov
Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov
Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov , and Alexandrov ) , was a Soviet/Russian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and mountaineer.- Scientific career :...
. In Novosibirsk
Novosibirsk
Novosibirsk is the third-largest city in Russia, after Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and the largest city of Siberia, with a population of 1,473,737 . It is the administrative center of Novosibirsk Oblast as well as of the Siberian Federal District...
, he continued his philology studies and wrote poetry. At that time, his first official foreign publications appeared in the Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
magazine Grani N66. Delaunay was an organizer of a concert by the Bard
Bard (Soviet Union)
The term bard came to be used in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, and continues to be used in Russia today, to refer to singer-songwriters who wrote songs outside the Soviet establishment, similarly to beatnik folk singers of the United States...
Alexander Galich
Alexander Galich
Alexander Galich , was a Russian poet, screenwriter, playwright, and singer-songwriter. Galich is a pen name, a sort of acronym of his last name, first name, and patronymic: Ginzburg Alexander Arkadievich. He adopted this name to conceal his Jewish ancestry in the face of antisemitism in the Soviet...
, who was semi-legal at that time.
In the beginning of 1968, after the court hearing for Galanskov and Ginzburg, Delaunay wrote an open letter to Literaturnaya Gazeta in which he praised their bravery. The letter was published in the New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
newspaper Novoe Russkoe Slovo (The New Russian Word).
1968 Red Square demonstration
Main article: 1968 Red Square demonstration1968 Red Square demonstration
The 1968 Red Square demonstration took place on August 25, 1968 at Red Square, Moscow, Soviet Union, to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, that occurred during the night of 20–21 August 1968, crushing the so-called Prague spring, a set of...
Prague Spring
The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II...
in Red Square
Red Square
Red Square is a city square in Moscow, Russia. The square separates the Kremlin, the former royal citadel and currently the official residence of the President of Russia, from a historic merchant quarter known as Kitai-gorod...
near the Moscow Kremlin
Moscow Kremlin
The Moscow Kremlin , sometimes referred to as simply The Kremlin, is a historic fortified complex at the heart of Moscow, overlooking the Moskva River , Saint Basil's Cathedral and Red Square and the Alexander Garden...
. Delaunay and Pavel Litvinov
Pavel Litvinov
Pavel Litvinov is a Russian physicist, writer, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident. He is the grandson of Maxim Litvinov, Joseph Stalin's foreign minister during the 1930s, and as such was born and raised amongst the Soviet elite...
held the famous banner with the words "ЗА ВАШУ И НАШУ СВОБОДУ" ("For your freedom and ours").
Seven people were arrested, and in court, Delaunay stated that the five minutes of freedom on the square were worth the years in prison that were probably awaiting him. Efforts of the defense to convince the court in the absence of any criminal element in actions of the demonstrators were vain. There is opinion that the sentence was ready before the court session. Delaunay was sentenced to two years and 10 months in a labor camp that he served in Tyumen Oblast
Tyumen Oblast
Tyumen Oblast is a federal subject of Russia . Its administrative center is the city of Tyumen. The oblast has administrative jurisdiction over two autonomous okrugs—Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. Tyumen is the largest city, with over half a million inhabitants...
in northwestern Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
.
Emigration
In June 1971, Delaunay finished serving his sentence and returned to Moscow. In 1973, his wife I. Belgorodkaya was arrested for her involvement with an underground journal, Хроника Текущих Событий (Chronicle of Current Events). In 1975, she was freed, and they both emigrated to FranceFrance
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. In 1979, Delaunay published his story Portraits in a Barbed Frame in the magazine Echo.
Death
On 13 June 1983, Delaunay died of a heart attackMyocardial infarction
Myocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...
in Paris at the age of 35. In 1984, his book of poetry Verses: 1963-1983 was published. In that same year, he was posthumously awarded the Vladimir Dal
Vladimir Dal
Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was one of the greatest Russian language lexicographers. He was a founding member of the Russian Geographical Society. He knew at least six languages including Turkic and is considered to be one of the early Turkologists...
prize. His poetry has been published in Russia since 1989.
External links
- Biography
- Biography and works
- http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25D0%2594%25D0%25B5%25D0%25BB%25D0%25BE%25D0%25BD%25D0%25B5,_%25D0%2592%25D0%25B0%25D0%25B4%25D0%25B8%25D0%25BC_%25D0%259D%25D0%25B8%25D0%25BA%25D0%25BE%25D0%25BB%25D0%25B0%25D0%25B5%25D0%25B2%25D0%25B8%25D1%2587&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2525D0%252592%2525D0%2525B0%2525D0%2525B4%2525D0%2525B8%2525D0%2525BC_%2525D0%25259D%2525D0%2525B8%2525D0%2525BA%2525D0%2525BE%2525D0%2525BB%2525D0%2525B0%2525D0%2525B5%2525D0%2525B2%2525D0%2525B8%2525D1%252587_%2525D0%252594%2525D0%2525B5%2525D0%2525BB%2525D0%2525BE%2525D0%2525BD%2525D0%2525B5%26hl%3Den%26newwindow%3D1%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26hs%3DNxaVadim Delaunay Russian Wikipedia article]