Georgy Ivanov emigrated in 1922 and never returned. He lived in Paris, writing poems about things that no longer existed — Petersburg, Russia, his youth. The Disintegration of the Atom, his one work of prose, he himself called "a document of despair."
Born in 1894, he was a Petersburg poet, an Acmeist close to Gumilyov and Akhmatova: beautiful verse, an elegant life. Then came the Revolution, and all of it vanished.
Emigration meant poverty and odd jobs. Roses (1931), Departure for the Isle of Cythera, Portrait Without a Likeness — the late collections, in which the beauty of the rhymes keeps company with an utter despair of meaning.
"Russia is happiness. Russia is light. / Or perhaps there is no Russia at all." He died in 1958, in an old people's home at Hyères.