Sergey Zavyalov

Biography

Sergey Zavyalov was born into a family that originated from Mordovia, from 1970 to 2004 he lived in St. Petersburg. In 1985 he graduated in classical philology, Leningrad State University. Between 1988 and 2004 Zavyalov taught Greek, Latin and classical literature at high school and university level. In 2004 he emigrated to Finland; and has lived in Winterthur (Switzerland) since 2011.

Literary activity

Zavyalov’s first published poems appeared in Leningrad Samizdat. In 1986-1988 he was a member of the creative group Club-81 (a kind of Leningrad union of writers, an alternative to the union of Soviet writers). In the second half of the 1990s, Zavyalov participated in several joint literary actions with a group of St. Petersburg poets, later on to be known as postmodernists (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Alexander Skidan, Dmitry Golynko and others). Within the thirty years of literary activity, Zavyalov’s poetry has gradually developed from vers libre to prose poetry and from the lyrical to the epic. In the 2000s he published a number of essays analysing Soviet poetry as evidence of traumatic experience. His second special topic is postcolonial studies in the reconstruction and deconstruction of Mordvinian and, more generally, Finno-Ugric identity.

Translations into English and other languages

English:

Est modus in rebus. (Transl. by Thomas Epstein), Through The Teeth. I. The final judgement of mr. Terreo, II. Time of destruction. (Transl. by Simona Schneider)

Collections of Zavyalov’s poems in Finnish, Swedish, Estonian and Italian: