Eugen V. Witkowsky (1950-2020) *69

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was a Russian fiction and fantasy writer, literary scholar, poet, and translator. Witkowsky came from a family of Russified Germans who owned a small cardboard factory in Moscow. He spent his childhood in Siberia, Central Asia, and Western Ukraine. From 1967–1971, he was a student of literary studies at Moscow State University, then took a leave of absence and never returned, becoming engaged in literature and dissident activities. Until censorship was lifted in USSR, Witkowsky could only publish poetic translations; he translated and published numerous poems by John Milton, Christopher Smart, Robert Southey, John Keats, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling; by Scottish gaelic poets John Roy Stewart, Duncan Ban MacIntyre, Rob Donn, John MacLean (Bard MacLean), and by Luís Vaz de Camões, Fernando Pessoa, Rainer Maria Rilke, Joost van den Vondel, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry and others.

In the 1990s, he was mostly engaged in literary studies, compiling and editing a four-volume anthology of Russian poetry abroad "We lived on a different planet those days", a three-volume collected works of Georgy Ivanov, works of Ivan Yelagin, Arseny Nesmelov and others. His three-volume historical fantasy "Paul II" was published in 2000, its two sequels, "Saint Vitus Land" and "Chertovar" in 2001 and 2007 respectively. The latter two novels were selected for the short list of the most prestigious Russian F&SF prize, "The ABS Prize" ("Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Prize").

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