Mirra Lokhvitskaya

Who was Mirra Lokhvitskaya?

Mirra Lokhvitskaya was a Russian poet who rose to fame in the late 1890s and, due to the flamboyantly erotic sensuality of her works, was regarded as the "Russian Sappho" by her contemporaries, which did not correspond with her conservative life style of dedicated wife and mother of five sons. In her short lifetime Lokhvitskaya published five books of poetry, the first and the last of which received the most coveted Russian literary award of the day, the Pushkin Prize. Completely forgotten in Soviet times, in recent years Lokhvitskaya's legacy has been totally reassessed. She is generally regarded now as one of the most original and influential voices of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry and the first in the line of modern Russian women poets, having paved the way for the likes of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. Lokhvitskaya's younger sister Nadezhda became a well-known humorist writer under the pseudonym Teffi, and their brother Nikolay Lokhvitsky, a Russian army general and a one-time associate of Kolchak, fought against the Red Army forces in Siberia.