Emmanuel Sztein

Штейн, Эммануил

Essayist, writer

Born Bialystok, 17 July 1934

Died Orange (Ct), 3 October 1999

Emmanuel Sztein was born in 1934 in the Polish city of Bialystok. In 1940, he and his parents, Jewish artists, managed to escape from the Warsaw ghetto to the Soviet Union. In 1961 he returned to Warsaw, where he taught Russian literature and history at Warsaw University and qualified in chess (he did not become a grandmaster, he did become a master). He was arrested in 1966 for an article describing the actual circumstances of the murder of Polish officers in Katyn and imprisoned for a year. In the prison library was a large amount of Russian emigrant literature, which Sztein eagerly read and which encouraged him to delve deeper into this hitherto barely explored terrain. After his release, Sztein emigrated with his wife to the United States. He taught at Yale University for some time and became the press attaché of the Russian chess player Viktor Kortsnoi. Soon after arriving in the USA, he began concentrating on gathering data on Russian emigration, in particular on everything related to the book editions of the Russian writers and poets who had dispersed all over the world after the Revolution and the Second World War. He not only collected data on these editions in libraries in America and Western Europe, but also tried to get hold of as many as possible, so that what would otherwise be lost would be preserved as many editions were published in small editions and by unknown authors for whom there was hardly any interest. His collection of works by important as well as almost unknown Russian emigré poets would eventually include some 600 names. In 2004 his collection became part of the LS Collection in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (NL)

the sztein collection of poetry in the russian emigration

Part 1

russian poets in the emigration

Part 2

translations

Part 3

almanacs - anthologies - compilations

Article

(in Dutch)

Willem G. Weststeijn