Arseny Tarkovsky lived in the shadow of two men: the great father he never became, and the great son his own son became. Andrei Tarkovsky made "Mirror" — and his father's poems sounded through it. Only then did people begin to read Arseny in earnest.
He was born in 1907 in Yelisavetgrad. He studied in Moscow and wrote verse from his youth, but did not publish it: the times were wrong. He worked as a translator — from Turkmen, Georgian, Arabic. The translations fed him. The poems waited.
His first collection appeared in 1962, when he was fifty-five. "Before the Snow," "To the Earth What Is Earthly," "The Messenger" — late, ripened lyric poetry in which every word stands in its place. Poems about time, memory, death, and light.
He lost a leg in the war. He lived eighty-two years. To the end, he wrote.