Semyon Nadson

Origins and early life

Semyon Yakovlevich Nadson was born in Saint Petersburg on 26 December 1862; his father, Yakov Nadson, a civil servant, was of Jewish origin and had been baptised into the Greek Orthodox Church, and the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 states that his father was a Jew who had entered that church, while the Encyclopaedia Judaica describes him as the grandson of an apostate Jew.

Work and career

The fiche notes the divergence between the two accounts, and both place the Jewish descent within the degrees the site recognises. His father died when he was two and his mother when he was thirteen, and he was raised by relatives on his Russian mother's side, one of whom, his uncle Mamontov, taunted him for his Jewish blood. He was sent to a military school, served briefly as an officer, and left the army as tuberculosis took hold.

His poetry, published from 1878 and collected in 1885, spoke of doubt, pity and the exhaustion of a generation with nothing left to believe in, and it made him the most widely read Russian poet of the 1880s, his collected verse running through many editions. He answered the pogroms of the period with the poem I grew up a stranger to you, O disowned people, addressed to the Jews and to his own descent, one of the rare direct replies in Russian verse to the violence of those years.

He died at Yalta on 31 January 1887, aged twenty-four, and the YIVO Encyclopedia calls him the first Jewish poet to achieve national fame in the Russian Empire.