Vadim Delaunay
Vadim Nikolaevich Delaunay (or Delone, Russian: Вадим Николаевич Делоне; 1947 – 1983) was a Russian poet and dissident, participant of the 1968 Red Square demonstration of protest against military suppression of the Prague Spring.
Childhood
Vadim Delaunay was born to a Russian-French family of Soviet Intelligentsia. His grandfather, Boris Delaunay, was a prominent Soviet mathematician and creator of the Delaunay triangulation. Among his ancestors was marquis Bernard-René de Launay, the last governor of the Bastille, murdered by the attackers on that castle. Vadim often predicted that he would repeat the fate of his ancestor.
Poet
- Пуcкай грехи мне
- не простят -
- К тому предлогов слишком много,
- Но если я просил
- у Бога,
- То - за других,
- не за себя.
- Let my sins
- not be forgiven
- the reasons for this are many
- but if I ever prayed
- to God for something
- it was for others
- never for myself
Vadim Delaunay
Vadim studied in Moscow matshkola ("Mathematical School") No. 2, one of the best in the country at that time, then at the Department of Philology at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. As a student, he also worked as a freelance author for the Literaturnaya Gazeta.
Vadim started to write poetry at the age of 13. His poetry was distributed by samizdat, and some of it was published abroad. On January 22, 1967 he took part in a demonstration on Pushkin Square protesting the arrest of Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov as well as articles 70 and 190 of the Soviet Penal Code - Anti-Soviet agitation and Libel against the Soviet Government. Delaunay was arrested and given a one year suspended sentence (incidentally in accordance with article 190 of the Penal Code). His sentence was much lighter than that of another organizer of the same meeting, Vladimir Bukovsky, who got three years in a Labor camp. Vadim was distressed by the difference in the sentence, explaining the relative softness of it by the influence of his relatives.
Dissident
Vadim's sentence required him to move away from Moscow, so he went to Novosibirsk State University to a friend and pupil of his grandfather, Aleksandr Aleksandrov. In Novosibirsk, he continued his philology studies and wrote poetry. At that time, his first official foreign publications appeared in the Paris magazine Grani N66. Vadim was an organizer of a concert by the Bard Alexander Galich, who was semi-legal at that time. In the beginning of 1968, after the court hearing on Galanskov and Ginzburg, Delaunay wrote an open letter to Literaturnaya Gazeta where he praised the bravery of those people. The letter was published in the New York newspaper Novoe Russkoe Slovo ("The New Russian Word").
In June 1968, Delaunay returned to Moscow. On August 25, 1968 Delaunay and the other seven dissidents organized the now famous demonstration in support of the Prague Spring on Red Square near the Moscow Kremlin. He and Pavel Litvinov were actually holding the famous banner with the words "ЗА ВАШУ И НАШУ СВОБОДУ" (For your freedom and ours).
Seven people were arrested, and in court, Delaunay stated that the five minutes of freedom on the square are worth the years in prison that were probably awaiting him. Efforts of defense to convince the court in the absence of any criminal element in actions of the demonstrators [1] were vain. There is opinion that the sentence was ready before the court session [2]. Delaunay was sentenced to 2 years and 10 months in a labor camp that he served in Tyumen Oblast in North-Western Siberia. [3].
Emigration
In June 1971, Delaunay finished serving his sentence and returned to Moscow. In 1973, his wife I. Belgorodkaya, was arrested as a participant in an underground journal Chronicle of Current Events (Хроника Текущих Событий). In 1975, she was freed, and they both emigrated to France. In 1979, Delaunay published his story Portraits in a Barbed Frame in the magazine Echo.
On 13 June, 1983 Delaunay died of a heart attack. In 1984, his book of poetry Verses: 1963-1983 was published. In that same year, he was posthumously awarded the Vladimir Dal prize. His poetry has been published in Russia since 1989.
External links
- ^ Talk by Sofia Kallistratova в защиту in defense of V.Delaunay. (in Russian) http://www.memo.ru/library/books/sw/chapt49.htm
- ^ Yuliy Kim. Lawyer's Waltz.(In Russian: Advokatskij Val's - Адвокатский вальс). http://www.memo.ru/library/books/sw/chapt18.htm
- ^ Andropov to the Central Committee. The Demonstration in Red Square Against the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia. September 20, 1968 http://www.yale.edu/annals/sakharov/documents_frames/Sakharov_008.htm
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