Photo: rua.gr
The famous writer, playwright and translator Alexis Parnis celebrated his anniversary, Russian Athens newspaper reports. A representative of Greek and Russian literature turned 95 years old.
Parnis's books were translated into many different languages, and his play The Island of Aphrodite was put on stage in almost all Soviet theaters. During the war years, he participated in the Greek Resistance, fought against the fascists as part of the Greek People’s Liberation Army, liberated Athens from the Nazis. In the early fifties, he came to the USSR and spent more than ten years there.
Alexis Parnis calls himself a Russian poet of Greek origin. Earlier, the writer himself said that he considers Russia his literary homeland. He graduated from the Russian Literary Institute and wrote many poems, which were red by two hundred million people. Although he left the country many decades ago, he never forgot it.
Alexis was friends with Tvardovsky, Polevoy, Simonov, Orlov, with the whole poetical group of “sixties”. He keeps on working as a translator from Russian. Recently, the writer finished working on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, translated into Greek poetry collections by Sergey Yesenin, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva.
Age does not prevent him from making plans for the future: the translations of Alexander Blok and Boris Pasternak are on the waiting list.
His long-time wish came true this year - two novels of Parnis, Everyone has their own Prague and Pasternak Boulevard, written almost half a century ago in Greece, came out in Russian.
Russkiy Mir a
