George Ivask was born in Moscow, the son of Pavel Ivask, a merchant of
Estonian origin, and his Russian wife. In 1920 the family moved to
Estonia, where Ivask enrolled in
Tartu University, which he graduated from in 1932. From 1969 to 1977 he taught at the
University of Kansas,
Indiana University Bloomington, and
Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and then he became the head of the Russian literature department at
University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts. Ivask retired in 1977. He was married to Tamara (née Mezak) Ivask (1916–1982).
Career George Ivask started publishing poetry in 1929, occasionally using pseudonyms (B. Afanasyevsky, G. Issako, A.B.), mostly in
Put, a magazine founded by
Nikolai Berdyaev, who exerted a major influence upon him, as well as
Georgy Fedotov. Ivask's first book,
Severny Bereg (The Northern Shore), came out in 1938 in
Warsaw. He characterized his style as 'neo-barocco', while considering himself a follower of
Gavriil Derzhavin. His best-remembered work is
Homo Ludens (Играющий человек, 1973), a free-montage autobiography in verse that remained unfinished. Ivask compiled and edited
In the West (На Западе, New York, 1953), an extensive anthology of the poets of the first and the second waves of Russian emigration, and he published books by
Georgy Fedotov and
Vasily Rozanov, as well as critical essays and
Konstantin Leontyev (1974), a monograph upon the controversial
Russian religious thinker. His 1983 poem "A Greeting Word from an Orthodox Man" (Приветствие православного), published in the Polish magazine
Kultura in Paris, made a great impression on
Pope Paul II, who invited Ivask to the
Vatican for an audience. The papers from George Ivask's estate are held by
Yale University. Ivask died of a heart attack after collapsing near a pond on the campus of the
University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1986. ==Select bibliography==