Boris Khersonsky

Boris Khersonsky

Boris Grigorovich Chersonskij ( Ukrainian Борис Григорович Херсонський ;. Scientific transliteration Borys Hryhorovyč Chersons'kyj * 28. November 1950 in Czernowitz ) is a Ukrainian Russian-language writer , poet , essayist , translator , clinical psychologist and psychiatrist . He is married to the poet Lyudmila Chersonskaya.

biography

Boris Chersonsky comes from a family of writers and doctors. His paternal grandfather, Robert (Reven 1896–1954), was a well-known pediatric neurologist in Odessa and shortly after the Russian Revolution in 1919 and 1949 he published satirical verses under the pseudonym “Ro”, “All of Odessa in epigrams” and “Sirens”. His father Grigory was also active as a writer and published a volume of poems "Students" in 1949 and a collection of poems "Return" in 2004. The mother's family came from Bessarabia and after the war lived in Chernivtsi , where Chersonsky was born. Khersonsky spent his childhood and youth in the eastern Ukrainian Starobilsk Oblast Luhansk , where the writer Serhiy Shadan was later born. After finishing school, he studied at the medical institutes of Ivano-Frankivsk and Odessa. After completing his studies, he first worked as a neurologist in the Odessa region, then as a psychologist and psychiatrist at the Odessa State Clinic. From 1996 he worked at the Department of Psychology at the National University of Odessa, and in 1999 he moved to the Department of Clinical Psychology. After retiring in 2015, he began teaching at the Moses Wulf Institute for Psychiatry in Odessa, and since 2017 he has also been teaching at the Kiev Institute for Contemporary Psychology and Psychotherapy. In the years before and during perestroika he began to publish in Russian, partly as an important samizdat author, occasionally abroad, and partly in the city press of Odessa, and thus became known in cultural Odessa and beyond. Later his books were officially published, often in Moscow , in St. Petersburg in 2014 . Boris Chersonskij is married to Lyudmila Chersonskaya and has a daughter and a son.

plant

Khersonsky published his first poems during his student days. In the following years, in which the discussion about human rights was intense in Europe, he was one of the brightest minds of the unofficial poetry of Odessa and the samizdat authors. Today he is one of the few contemporary authors in Odessa, who also include Mikhail Schwanetskij (* 1934) and Valery Chait (* 1939), a generation older. Officially, his books did not appear until the 1990s. As usual with the genre of poetry, numerous texts appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. His poems have been translated into Ukrainian, Georgian, Bulgarian, English, Finnish, Italian, Dutch and German. - One of Chersonsky's best and best-known works, which have therefore also been translated into German and Dutch, is his collection of poems “Family Archives”, a title that is reminiscent of Natalia Ginzburg's and Zsuzsa Rakovszky's prose texts. In this work, which was first published in 1997 in Odessa , he describes the difficult fate of his Jewish family history in southern Ukraine over four generations throughout the 20th century. Khersonsky poured his impressions of the violently ending and warlike revolution of Maidan into the lamenting collection of poems “Mass in Times of War”. Since then, he has accompanied the ongoing abstruse and complex war situation in eastern Ukraine with short poems, comments and articles on his Facebook page and in magazines. After a newspaper interview, a bomb exploded in front of his apartment door on February 10, 2015. His "Open Diary", published in the summer of 2015, reports on the times of crisis since the Maidan, with a particular focus on Odessa. The activity as a psychologist shapes Chersonsky's poetry. His everyday working life is characterized by often absurd stories and poetically formulated patients. The answer is economical, concise and clear diagnoses that fit on a prescription block. Instead of nature - as a mirror - with Chersonskij the human being stands directly in the center of his poetry, which mostly finds a bound rhyme form. He makes distinctions with great serenity, diagnoses clearly, and thereby gains his powers of persuasion and authority. He trained his style at times through concentrated translations and revisions of the Biblical Psalms and the Psalms of Solomon, which he translated from Hebrew and Greek.

Awards

Khersonsky was honored with a number of prizes and grants:

• 2006 and 2007 winners of the 4th and 5th Voloshin competitions
• 2007 special price of the "Moscow bill"
• 2008 winner of the 7th and 8th Voloshin competitions
• 2008 winner of the “Kiever Lavra” festival
• 2008 Anthologia Prize from the magazine "Novij Mir"
• 2008 Brodsky grant
• 2010 Special Literaris Prize from the Bank Austria jury for "Family Archives"
• 2010 Russian Prize for "It's not dark yet" (2010)
• 2015 HC Artmann grant (Salzburg)
• 2019 Maksym Kyrijeno Voloschyn Literature Prize for his Odessa Diary (2017)

bibliography

Literary publications

• Vos'ma častka [The eighth part]. 1993.
• Knihga chvalenij [Book of Praises = Psalms]. 1994.
• Vne ogrady [outside the fence]. Moscow 1996.
• Semeyny archive. Odessa 1997. Moskva 2006. Family Archives. Translated by Erich Klein u. Susanne Macht. Klagenfurt et al. 2010. 2014.
  • Family research. Translated by Thomas Langerak. Amsterdam 2014.
  • Rodynnyj archive ta inši virši. Translated by Marianna Kijanovska. Lviv 2016.
• Post Printum. 1998.
• Tam i togda [there and then]. Odessa 2000.
• Svitok [paper rolls]. Odessa 2002.
• Narisuj čelovečka [Draw a man], in: Slovo 45/2005.
• Ploščadka pod zastrojku [The square under construction]. Moscow 2008.
• Vne ogrady [outside the fence]. Moscow 2008.
• Mramornyj list [marble letter]. Moscow 2009.
• (Hg./Forw.), Psalmy i odi Solomona. Kharkiv 2009.
• Spiričuėls. Moscow 2009.
• Poka ne stemnelo [it's not dark yet]. Moscow 2010.
• Poka ešče kto-to [as long as there is someone else]. Kiev 2012
• Novyj Estestvoslov [The New Nature of the Word]. Moscow 2012.
• [together with Sergej Kruglov], Natan. New York 2012.
• Missa in tempore belli / Messa vo vremena vojny [Mass in times of war]. Saint Petersburg 2014.
• (Contributor), Jevromajdan. Lirycna chronika. Breast Uriv 2014.
• Kaby ne raduga [If it weren't for the rainbow]. Kharkiv 2015.
• Kosmosnash [our cosmos]. Kharkiv 2015.
• Otkrytyj dnevnyk [Open Diary]. Kiev (Duch i litera) 2015.
• Klaptikova kovdra [patchwork]. Kiev (Duch i litera) 2016.
• Vspyška sverchnovoj [Supernova] Kiev (Duch i litera) 2016.
• together with A. Gritsman, Svitki. Biblejskie stichi. California (NUMINA PRESS) 2016.
• Vspyška Sverovnoj: Roždestvenskie stichi. Kiev (Duch i litera) 2017.
• Stractnaja Sedmica. Kiev (Duch i litera) 2017.
• Notes from this year, in: Wespennetz 171 (2017) pp. 80–82.
• Odesskij dnevnik 2015–2016 [Odessa Diary]. Kharkiv (Folio) 2017.
• Odesskaja intelligencija [Odessa intelligentsia]. Kharkiv (Folio) 2018.
• Vklonytysja derevu. Lviv (Vydavnyctvo Staroho L'eva) 2019.

scientific publications

• Metod piktogramm v psichodiagnostike psichičeskich zabolevanij [The pictogram method in the psychodiagnostics of mental illnesses]. Kiev 1988. (Biblioteka praketičeskogo vraca).
• Psichologija i psichoprofilaktika semejnych konfliktov [Psychology and psycho-prophylactic measures in family conflicts]. Kiev 1991.
• (with others), Nestandartizirovannye psichodiagnostičeskie metodiki issledovanija myšlenija-obespečenie sopostavimosti i nadežnosti dannych Metod. Posobie [non-standardized psychodiagnostic methods ...]. Saint Petersburg 1995.
• Glubinnaja psichologija [depth psychology]. Odessa 1998.
• Kladez 'bezsumstva [warehouse of madness]. Moscow 2012.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ cf. his Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/borkhers?fref=nf
2. ↑ Interview articles in the FAZ appeared in German in February and March 2015, on July 22, 2015 3Sat Kulturzeit broadcast a six-minute portrait "Ukraine on the couch" created by Galina Breitkreuz, cf. http://www.3sat.de/mediathek/?mode=play&obj=53071 (accessed on July 23, 2015).