Biography Sasha Chorny

Sasha Chorny “Sasha Black” (Russian: Александр Михайлович Гликберг (1880–1932) is poet, satirist and children’s writer. He was born in Odessa in a Jewish family. In the age of 10, he was christened and went off to St. Petersburg to start formal schooling. However he soon flunked out of school, as his family stopped paying for his education. Sasha began a life of a beggar. A journalist reported about “a homeless kid and his “Dickensian” circumstances of a fall from middle class grace” (Calvin), and a local benefactor K. K. Roche adopted him and gave him an education. In gymnasium Sasha Chorny began to write poems, and in 1904, he first got his poems published in the Zhitomir newspaper Volhynian Messenger. His satirical pieces would often get Chorny in trouble. In 1905 the publication of his satirical work Nonsense (Chepukha) in the satirical magazine Onlooker resulted in the closing of the magazine. Between 1906 and 1907, Sasha Chorny lived in Germany and studied at the Gendelberg University. In 1908, he returned to St. Petersburg and published his poems in The Satyricon, which was a periodical for educated big-city dwellers at the turn-of-the-century. The magazine assured not only a relatively wide readership for Chorny but also “the people who appreciate a well-woven lyric as much as a good joke” (Calvin 2018).

In his poetry, Chorny managed to “combine a sense of comic irreverence with an appreciation of the sublime” (see further discussion in Calvin). During World War I, Sasha Chorny served as a private at a field hospital. He did not accept the October revolution, and his country, where certainly was no place for satirists. The poet almost immediately emigrated to  Vilnius, then to Berlin, where he continued to write and engaged in publishing. He worked for the Berlin magazine Fire-bird, and published a book of verse Thirst (1923). As an editor at the publishing house Facets and the eponymous literary almanac he helped Vladimir Nabokov in selecting poems for his early collection and publishing it in 1922.

Then he move on to France, where he worked for the Parisian Russian newspaper. As Chorny developed as a satirical poet, he also published books of children’s poems. His links with the carnevalesque traditions combined with the grotesque and the sublime made him an excellent narrator and a writer of prose with keen observations. Among his selections of stories published abroad are the following Unserious Tales (1928) and Soldiers’ Tales (published posthumously in 1933).

In 1929, Chorny moved to a French village located in the province of Provence named La Favier. Being genial and fairly charismatic, he made a lot of friends while involving himself in the village life and regularly performing with readings at the local Russian communities.

In 1932, he passed away from a sudden heart attack, after saving people from a burning farmhouse in his neighborhood.

In 1960, Dmitrii Shostakovich brought a few of Chorny’s poems to life in music composing a short cycle The Satires for one of Russia’s great soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. Shostakovich chose five of Chorny’s poems that are a mixture of anecdotes, parodies of nineteenth-century Russian verse and aphorisms. All songs in the series subtitling Pictures of the Past are idiosyncratic in many ways as Shostakovich employed parody in music and relished the irony of the biting poems to underline that these songs were all about the present.

Sources

Calvin, Aleksey. Laughter in the Night: Sasha Chorny’s Life and Work. 2018.

Vishnevskaya, Galina. Galina: A Russian Story. Translated by Guy Daniels. Hodder and Stoughton, 1984.