Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky (1907–1989) is one of the great voices of twentieth-century Russian poetry. He was born on June 25, 1907, in Elisavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine), into an educated family, and grew up in an environment where literature and music played an essential role.
Drawn to poetry from an early age, he moved to Moscow in the 1920s and became part of literary circles. However, unlike many of his contemporaries, Tarkovsky published very little during the Stalinist decades. His poetry—demanding, introspective, and not aligned with the norms of Socialist Realism—did not fit within the official ideological framework. To make a living, he devoted himself primarily to translation, a field in which he excelled: he translated, among others, Eastern poets (Turkmen, Arabic, Persian), as well as Georgian and Armenian authors, thereby enriching Soviet culture with diverse influences.
During the Second World War, he served as a war correspondent. He was severely wounded in 1943, which led to the amputation of a leg—an experience that deeply marked him and contributed to the gravity and depth of his later work.
It was only from the 1960s onward, in the context of the post-Stalin “Thaw,” that Tarkovsky began to publish his own poetry more widely. His first major collection, Pered snegom (“Before the Snow,” 1962), revealed to the public a poetry of great spiritual intensity. His work is characterized by a constant meditation on time, memory, nature, death, and the moral responsibility of human beings. His style, both classical in form and deeply personal in inspiration, clearly sets him apart from the dominant trends of Soviet poetry.
Arseny Tarkovsky is also known as the father of the renowned filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Their artistic relationship is profound: several of Arseny Tarkovsky’s poems are incorporated into his son’s films, notably Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979), and Nostalghia (1983), where they contribute to creating a meditative and metaphysical atmosphere.
