Poet Gennady Aygi died

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On February 21, after an enduring illness people’s poet of Chuvashia Gennadiy Aigi died in hospital, the poet’s relatives informed a REGNUM correspondent.

Gennady Aigi was born on August 21, 1934 in Shaimurzino village of Batyrev district in Chuvashia. In 1953-1958, he was a student of Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow (expelled for “writing a book of hostile poems, destroying fundamentals of socialistic realism’s method”), being a friend of Boris Pasternak. 1961-1971, Aigi is an employee of Mayakovsky museum. In the USSR, his books had not been published till 1987. By that time, his poems were already translated into many European languages and they were widely recognized.

Being people’s poet of Chuvachia, Knight of Legion d’Honneur, Andrey Bely Price Laureate in 1987, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize.