Alexis Rannit


Alexis Rannit was an Estonian poet, critic and literature researcher.

Biography

He was born in Kallaste, in the Governorate of Livonia of the Russian Empire. He spent his childhood in Saint Petersburg. In 1939, he graduated from the University of Tartu. He studied applied arts. He did research on Lithuanian literature and knew personally many Lithuanian authors. From 1938 to 1940 he worked as a correspondent of the Riga newspaper Segodnya.
In 1940 he married Lithuanian opera singer :lt:Gražina Matulaitytė|Gražina Matulaitytė, moved to Kaunas, where he worked until 1941 as a translator at the Kaunas State Drama Theatre, and later as a librarian at the Lithuanian National Library.
In 1944, as the Red Army was approaching, Rannit emigrated to Germany, where he continued with his studies at the Institute of applied arts in Freiburg.
In 1953 he moved to the US. He remarried. From 1954 to 1960 he worked as librarian in the Art and Architecture division of the New York Public Library.
In 1956 he defended his master's thesis on arts history at the Columbia University. He worked as a research fellow and curator of Slavic and Eastern European collections at the University of Yale. Rannit was honorary doctor of a number of European, American and Korean universities, founding member of International Association of Arts Critics, represented the Estonian authors at the PEN club, belonged to the editorial staff of Continent.
Аlexis Rannit died on 5 January 1985 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

Works

Rannit started writing poems in Russian, since 1930 wrote in Estonian. Rannit translated Lithuanian poets' works) into Estonian. He has published seven collections of poetry. Rannit's works have been translated into English, Russian, Hungarian, Lithuanian and German language.

Footnotes