admirer V. Zlobin and Zinaida Gippius. Afflicted with alcoholism and suffering from despondency, Ivanov sank ever lower. It was in conditions of abject penury and total despair that Ivanov's best poems were created. His art culminated in his last cycle of poems, written in the days preceding his death. In one of his last pieces, Ivanov prophetically promised "to return to Russia as poems". His wife returned to Leningrad during Perestroika and died there in 1990. Following Ivanov's death, his reputation has been steadily augmented. His "poetry of brilliant despair", as one critic put it, is taken by some to presage the tenets of French Existentialism. References Editions Georgy Ivanov, On the Border of Snow and Melt: Selected Poems. Translated and Annotated by Jerome Katsell and Stanislav Shvabrin. Introduction by Stanislav Shvabrin. Santa Monica: Perceval Press, 2011 (bilingual Russian-English edition, 532 pages, ). External links Georgy Ivanov. Poems Georgy Vladimirovich Ivanov Georgy Ivanov: poems, biography English translations of 3 poems The Poems by Georgy Ivanov 1894 births 1958 deaths People from Mažeikiai District Municipality People from Telshevsky Uyezd Russian male poets 20th-century Russian poets 20th-century Russian male writers Soviet emigrants to France Burials at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery