Igor Georgievich Vishnevetsky (Russian: Игорь Георгиевич Вишневецкий; born 5 January 1964)[1] is a Russian-born poet, novelist, screenwriter, and editor. He has been a contributor and editor in numerous literary journals, anthologies, and scholarly periodicals since the 1980s. Some of his work has been published in English, including a translated version of his first novel, Leningrad (2010).
Biography
Igor Vishnevetsky was born in Rostov-on-Don in 1964 to Georgiy and Alla Vishnevetsky. Vishnevetsky originally aspired to become a composer. He studied piano performance in school and audited music theory courses at Rostov State Rachmaninoff Conservatory before attending Moscow State University to pursue a degree in philology. After graduating in 1986, Vishnevetsky became an active member of the poetry and art scenes in Moscow and St. Petersburg prior to the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Vishnevetsky emigrated to the United States in 1992. Since that time his creative work has been done chiefly in North America.
In 1996 he received a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from the Department of Slavic Languages of Brown University. Subsequently, he taught at Emory University for five years. In the 2000s, he has also become a notable music historian, and is considered an authority on Sergei Prokofiev[2] and the Russian-American composer Vladimir Dukelsky.
He also was a visiting professor of Russian and Film at Carnegie Mellon University.[2] During this time, he wrote his experimental novel Leningrad which describes the dehumanizing effects of the Finno-German siege of the city during World War II and deals with transformation of former Russian capital into a Soviet city. Praised for its insights into the minds of the people who experienced the collapse of everything associated with humanity, Leningrad won a 2010 award for the best fiction published in Russia's leading literary periodical Novyi mir. In 2012 it won a prestigious "New Verbal Art (Novaya Slovesnost', or NoS)" literary award.
Since 2010 he had been working on a film version of Leningrad.[3][4] The film was completed in 2014 (a slightly shorter version in 2015) and received a number of awards.[5][6] Film historian and critic Andrei Plakhov called it "an absolutely amazing experiment,",[7] while film critic Evgeny Maisel considered Visnevetsky's film "a true challenge to contemporary professional film production."[8] Since 2018 he teaches English and Russian literature at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.[2]
Vishnevetsky is an Eastern Orthodox Christian.[2] His son is film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky.
