Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Kopys, Vitebsk Region, Belarus
About Veniamin Blazhenny
- Veniamin Mikhailovich Blazhenny (Russian: ???????? ?????????? ?????????, real surname Eisenstadt; born on October 15, 1921, village of Kopys; died on July 31, 1999, Minsk) was a Russian Christian poet.
- His literary pseudonym, "Blazhenny" means Fool for Christ or "blessed". Blazhenny was born in a poor Jewish family.
- After studying for a year in the Vitebsk Teachers' Institute (the Institute was evacuated during World War II in 1941), he worked as a history teacher.
- In 1946, he returned to Belarus and lived in Minsk.
- He worked as a bookbinder and a photographer in a manufacture team for people with disabilities.
- He started writing his first poetry in 1943 and had a correspondence with Boris Pasternak, Viktor Shklovsky and Arseny Tarkovsky who admitted his talent.
- However, his work remained unpublished and unknown to the public due to censorship and other publishing constraints in the Soviet Union.
- Being on the lowest-paying jobs and having his poetry unpublished, Blazenny lived in extreme poverty and was involuntary incarcerated in a Soviet psychiatric institution for having a "delusion" that he was a poet.
- Blazhenny remained bedridden during the last years of his life and survived because of help from his wife.
- He died two weeks after her deathThe first journal publications by Blazhenny appeared in 1982, and his first book was published only in 1990.
- He became a central figure of Russian poetry circles in Minsk and influenced other authors, including Dmitry Strotsev.
- His poetry was set to music and frequently performed as songs by Elena Frolova. His poetry attracted attention by strong spiritual component and emotion.
- The most common subjects of his poetry include love, pity, death, destiny and appeal to God.
- His lyrical hero often complains to God for the suffering of all the small creatures of the world, including people and animals.
- Sometimes he appears as a yurodivy who sleeps with homeless cats and dogs, suffers from the cold and hunger, bitterly complains to the higher powers for misfortune, and finally dies, but his spirit remains:
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