Georgy Dmitrievich Samchenko (literary pseudonym — Yegor Samchenko; January 25, 1940, Melitopol, Zaporizhzhia Oblast —August 13, 2002) was a Russian Soviet poet, translator, and literary critic of the 1970s–1990s.
He was graduated from the Zaporizhzhia Medical Institute as a psychiatrist. He worked for the Simferopol newspaper Krymsky Komsomolets. He lived in the Moscow region, in the city of Solnechnogorsk. From 1973, he served as the chief psychiatrist of the Solnechnogorsky District of the Moscow Oblast. He studied in the poetry seminar of Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Years later, Yevtushenko included Samchenko's poems in his one-volume anthology Strophes of the Century. He was a favorite student of Boris Slutsky and one of the poets most highly regarded by Alexander Mezhirov.
He was a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR, and worked as a literary critic for the magazine Smena. He authored three poetry collections published during Soviet times: Hard Carriage (1975), I Help to Live (1987), and Faces of Freedom (1989). In the post-Soviet era, Samchenko's poetry became unclaimed. His work elicited varied responses from critics; however, among poets and critics who valued his work, it was believed that his most significant creation was the poem Ivan the Terrible, written in the 1970s. Due to frequent references to literary classics, his poems became the subject of poetic parodies by Alexander Ivanov, Alexey Pyanov, and others, while Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Mikhail Sinelnikov, Felix Medvedev, and other poets and critics praised his poetry.
He was published in the newspapers Komsomolskaya Pravda and Literaturnaya Gazeta, and in newspapers and magazines Znamya, Yunost, Oktyabr, Smena, Ogonyok, Nash Sovremennik,Literaturnaya Uchyoba, Kuban, as well as in the almanacs Poetry, Day of Poetry, and Russia's Heart. Ideologically, his work is associated with contemporary pochvennichestvo (a Russian literary and ideological movement emphasizing national roots), though among conservative patriotic writers, the Solnechnogorsk poet held his own distinct position. Samchenko's language is studied by cultural scholars and linguists. He is remembered by contemporaries for his poetic talent and volatile personality, which made communication with him challenging. In his later years, he suffered from alcoholism, that provided ample material for memoirists, leading to contradictory judgments about his poetic skills. From the mid-1990s, information about him became scarce, his work was forgotten, and his death went unnoticed. However, since the 2010s, interest in Yegor Samchenko's personality and work has been reviving within Russian literary circles.
Literary biography Samchenko was born on January 25, 1940 in Melitopol, Ukraine. His father, Dmitry Ivanovich Samchenko, a frontline soldier, was born in 1908. According to some sources, he was a junior lieutenant in the 29th Separate Cadet Rifle Brigade, and killed in the Battle of Moscow on November 26, 1941, and buried in a mass grave in the city of Yakhroma. Other sources claim that the poet's father died in the Battle of Stalingrad, while a third account states that Dmitry Samchenko served as a platoon commander in the Second Separate Rifle Battalion of the First Guards Rifle Brigade, rose to the rank of lieutenant, and died on February 18, 1943, during the Battle of Leningrad. He was a Kuban Cossack from the hamlet of Kharkovsky in the Nevinnomyssky District of the Ordzhonikidze Krai, married to Pelageya Ivanovna Samchenko.The poem Frost and Sun: The Chimes Are Ringing, which opens the poet's debut collection, Hard Wagon. According to the biographical data published in the book, George had a younger brother who died during the war at five months of age (poem And Remembered Still...).
In the 1960s, adopting the literary pseudonym Yegor Samchenko, he began publishing in the Simferopol youth newspaper Krymsky Komsomolets. The Krymsky Komsomolets literary studio included, besides Yegor, writers Ruslan Kireev, poet Vladimir Lentsov, and playwright Valentin Krymko, who at the time went by the surname Gurevich and later by Pridatko. All of them later moved to Moscow and became members of the Union of Writers of the USSR. Before becoming an established poet, Georgy used to work as a laborer, soldier, and was a student.
After graduating from the Zaporizhzhia Medical Institute in 1964, Georgy lived in Solnechnogorsk at Baranova Street, 24/9, apt. 47, where he served as the chief psychiatrist of the Solnechnogorsky District of the Moscow Oblast. The psychoneurological department of the Solnechnogorsk District Hospital was established in 1973. In the spring of 1972, together with poets from the Literary Studio at the Moscow City Organization of the All-Union Leninist Communist Youth League: Boris Kamianov, Viktor Gofman, and Sergey Goncharenko, he attended a literary seminar led by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who held a high opinion of the aspiring poet's skill. In the fall of 1972, Yevtushenko handed his students over to Boris Slutsky, another poet of the Sixtiers generation and a colleague from joint at the Polytechnic Museum. For the next few years, they studied under him. The group was joined by Olesya Nikolaeva, Olga Chugai, Gennady Kalashnikov, Yevgeny Blazheevsky, Garry Gordon, Viktor Korkia, and others.
The aspiring poet's first book of poems —Hard Carriage— was published in 1975 by the Sovremennik publishing house, and in 1976, after the release of just one book, he was accepted into the Union of Writers of the USSR. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Samchenko worked as a critic for the magazine Smena. In 1978, the magazine organized its first single-poem competition under the motto I Sing My Fatherland, and Samchenko's task was to review poetic manuscripts sent to the editorial office from across the Soviet Union. He submitted the selected manuscripts for evaluation to the magazine's editor-in-chief, Albert Likhanov. A similar reader's competition was later held by the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. In Smena, the poet-critic published a review of the collection Spring by Pravda publishing house in 1980, which featured winners of the newspaper's poetry contest. However, some time later, the poet lost his job at Smena and was dismissed from the editorial staff.M. I. Sinelnikov writes that Samchenko was expelled for unsanitary pranks: he urinated in the wastebasket "with rejected poems, which probably deserved such treatment". Sinelnikov's partiality to Samchenko allows him, on the one hand, to consider that the surname Samchenko is unsound and indecent, and its owner was an idler making immodest proposals to servant ladies, and on the other hand, to call the poems about Ivan the Terrible brilliant.Sinelnikov M. I. Russian wall newspape. 27 September 2017. Lekhaim. 2002. No. 127 (November). pp. 50—52. His next book, I Help to Live, was published in 1987 by Soviet Writer. As noted in the book's annotation, it is permeated with a sense of history (poems such as The Solitude of Dmitry Donskoy, Ivan the Terrible, Avvakum's Bonfire, and other poems from the section Russian, Russia). In the same year, Yegor Samchenko engaged in a dialogue with writer Daniil Granin about perestroika.
The third book, Faces of Freedom, was published in 1989, again by Sovremennik. The collection was named after a poem published in the previous book. The publisher's annotation described the new book as sharply social, with its lyrical theme spanning from Pythagoras to N. F. Fyodorov. It included some works from the previous collection I Help to Live (Autumn Priapus, Lenin, The Secret of Blok, Sparrow, On Saturday, at the End of the Day..., and others). Unlike the two previous books, the author included his own preface, in which he shared some creative principles. He described how the poem The Secret of Blok was created: "When I was writing The Secret of Blok, I was a bearer of Blok". He linked ecology and ethics topics: "It seems to me that thought is a completely moral organization, absolutely excluding evil. That's not enough. A collective field of morality is required, under which, perhaps, superconductivity is only possible. <...> By solving the problem of ecology, we protect ourselves. It's very possible that we are not only protecting ourselves".
In his final years, according to M. I. Sinelnikov, Yegor Samchenko was addicted to alcohol, lost his job, and was abandoned by his wife and daughter, with his few remaining friends turning away. All those events are reflected in many lines of the book titled I Help to Live, published in 1987. The fallen poet pestered Sinelnikov and Alexander Mezhirov with late-night calls. Out of pity for Samchenko's plight, Mikhail Sinelnikov lent him a substantial sum of money without conditions, enough to last several months, but Samchenko squandered it in a few days. Upon learning of Sinelnikov's failed patronage, poet Yevgeny Rein reproached him: "How could you give money to someone like <...> Samchenko!"
After that, Sinelnikov and Mezhirov decided not to support Samchenko's addiction with money, but to provide him with work. Alexander Mezhirov suggested that Samchenko translate poems from Yiddish by Aron Vergelis. A secondary goal was to temper Samchenko's antisemitism. The idea was that the "instinctive fears of a Little Russian toward Jewry" would dissipate through direct interaction with the editor-in-chief of the magazine Sovetish Heymland, who also promised a decent fee for the work. However, Samchenko's translations were deemed unsatisfactory, and Vergelis refused to publish them.
Still being published in the 1990s, in the magazine Nash Sovremennik, Yegor Samchenko soon became unclaimed there as well. He died in obscurity, as reported in a blog by his fellow student from the literary seminars of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Boris Slutsky, Georgy Yelin. A decade after the publication in Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poetic anthology, few remembered Samchenko except his poet friends. However, a Russian language and literature teacher from Kazan, F. Kh. Mustafina, when teaching the topic of Vocabulary, suggested that her students read a poem by "a certain poet E. Samchenko" titled So Freely, Somehow Light!...It was first published in the almanac Day of Poetry in 1972 and later concluding the collection Hard Carriage in 1975. In her article Language Culture as Part of National Culture, published in the proceedings of the republican scientific-practical conference "Russian Language as a State Language in the National-Regional Conditions of Tatarstan" on December 7, 2007, she notes that this poem by Yegor Samchenko, despite its pathetically enthusiastic tone, provoked a storm of indignation among her students.
In the 2000s and 2010s, his contemporaries' memoirs began to be published (M. I. Sinelnikov, G. A. Yelin, O. A. Nikolaeva, Y. M. Polyakov, S. K. Vermisheva). Poet and entrepreneur D. A. Mizgulin, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Victory, initiated the publication of a fifteen-volume poetic anthology War and Peace edited by B. I. Lukin as part of the publishing project Literary Fund Road of Life. In the ninth book of this anthology, for the first time in twenty-five years since Yevgeny Yevtushenko's publication in Strophes of the Century (not counting the publication of translations into Russian of the crown of sonnets The Trunk of Life by Chuvash poet N. A. Tevetkel in the magazine Lik in 2011), a selection of four poems by Yegor Samchenko dedicated to the war theme was published: Frost and Sun. The Chimes Strike...; I Still Remember, // How During the War...; Uncle Fedya; Interview with Pokryshkin. The publication included a brief biographical note, which, due to the scarcity of information, listed Samchenko's death date as 1994 (the date of his last publication in Nash Sovremennik) with a question mark.
Artistic work and criticism Failures in Poetic Translations