“To Russia — with the wind — the lines will come…”: To the 110th anniversary of Igor Chinnov

Russian émigré poet of the “first wave” Igor Chinnov (1909–1996), whose anniversary we celebrate this year, was known in exile not only as the author of eight poetry collections published in the West. He participated in the publishing activities of the émigré community. In post-war Paris, he worked in the book publishing house “Rifma”. Later, while working in the Russian department of the “Svoboda” radio station in Munich, he made broadcasts about writers of the “Russian Paris”. When he went to the USA and became a professor of Russian literature, he joined the campaign of creating an émigré magazine at the university. Chinnov led extensive correspondence with writers and poets whom he knew in emigration. He constantly maintained contacts with Russian publications in the West. His closest contacts were with the oldest émigré magazine of the “first wave”, “The New Review”. There he not only constantly published his poems, but also took a large part in magazine’s fate and became a member of the editorial board. In Chinnov’s letters to writers and literary critics, in correspondence with the editor-in-chief of “The New Review” Roman Gul and his co-editor G. Andreev (Homyakov) he writes about editorial issues, materials from “The New Review” and an anthology of émigré poetry, published in Munich in 1979. Chinnov notes the sad fact of the gradual departure from literature of the writers of the “first” emigration, to which he belonged himself. The published letters are kept in the Cabinet of archival funds of emigrant literature named after I.V. Chinnov, created on the basis of his personal archive and library, which he bequeathed to the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences.