Gnedich, Nikolai

Gnedich, Nikolai Ivanovich 

Born Feb. 2 (13), 1784, in Poltava; died Feb. 3 (15), 1833, in St. Petersburg. Russian poet and translator.

Born into a noble family, Gnedich studied in 1800-02 at the Moscow University Pension. A member of the Society of Lovers of the Russian Word, he also became close to the Free Society of Amateurs of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts, to K. N. Batiushkov and I. A. Krylov, and to the literary salon of A. N. Olenin. He maintained ties with the Decembrists.

Gnedich is the author of the idyll Fishermen (1822) and of the translation Modern Greek Folk Songs (1825). He wrote little after the defeat of the Decembrists. In 1829 he published a complete translation of the Iliad, on which he had labored more than 20 years. Gnedich’s translation of the Iliad was hailed for its affinity with Decembrist civic poetry. A. S. Pushkin assessed the poet’s work as the completion “of a deed of high glory. The Russian Iliad lies before us” (Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 7, 1958, p. 97).

WORKS

Stikhotvoreniia. Introduction, preparation of the text, and notes by I. N. Medvedeva. Leningrad, 1956.

REFERENCES

Medvedeva, I. N. “N. I. Gnedich i dekabristy.” In the collection Dekabristy i ikh vremia. Moscow-Leningrad, 1951.
Istoriia russkoi literatury XIX v.: Biblioaraficheskii ukazatel’. Moscow-Leningrad, 1962.

IU. M. LOTMAN