Draft:Georgy Samchenko

Georgy Dmitrievich Samchenko (literary pseudonym — Yegor Samchenko; January 25, 1940, Melitopol, Zaporizhzhia Oblast — August 13, 2002) was a Russian Soviet poet, translator, and literary critic of the 1970s–1990s.

He was graduated from the Zaporizhzhia Medical Institute. By profession, he was a psychiatrist. He worked for the Simferopol newspaper Krymsky Komsomolets. He lived in the Moscow region, in the city of Solnechnogorsk. From 1973, he served as the chief psychiatrist of the Solnechnogorsky District of the Moscow Oblast. He studied in the poetry seminar of Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Years later, Yevtushenko included Samchenko's poems in his one-volume anthology Strophes of the Century. He was a favorite student of Boris Slutsky and one of the poets most highly regarded by Alexander Mezhirov.

He was a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR. He worked as a literary critic for the magazine Smena. He authored three poetry collections published during Soviet times: Hard Carriage (1975), I Help to Live (1987), and Faces of Freedom (1989). In the post-Soviet era, Samchenko's poetry became largely unclaimed. His work elicited varied responses from critics; however, among poets and critics who valued his work, it was widely believed that his most significant creation was the poem Ivan the Terrible, written in the 1970s. Due to frequent references to literary classics, his poems became the subject of poetic parodies by Alexander Ivanov, Alexey Pyanov, and others, while Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Mikhail Sinelnikov, Felix Medvedev, and other poets and critics praised his poetry with the highest accolades.

He was published in the newspapers Komsomolskaya Pravda and Literaturnaya Gazeta, and in newspapers and magazines Znamya, Yunost, Oktyabr, Smena, Ogonyok, Nash Sovremennik,Literaturnaya Uchyoba, Kuban, as well as in the almanacs Poetry, Day of Poetry, and Russia's Heart. Ideologically, his work is, with some reservations, associated with contemporary pochvennichestvo (a Russian literary and ideological movement emphasizing national roots), though among conservative patriotic writers, the Solnechnogorsk poet held his own distinct position. Samchenko's language is studied by cultural scholars and linguists. He is remembered by contemporaries for his extraordinary poetic talent and his volatile personality, which made communication with him challenging. In his later years, he suffered from alcoholism, and his alcohol-related demoralization and associated outbursts provided ample material for memoirists, leading to contradictory judgments about Samchenko as a poet. From the mid-1990s, information about him became scarce, his work was largely forgotten, and his death went unnoticed. However, since the 2010s, interest in Yegor Samchenko's personality and work has been reviving within Russian literary circles.