Aigi is an outstanding representative of the Russian poetic avant-garde. He wrote in Russian from the late 1950s, but he was a Chuvash, belonging to a Turkic people who live on the Volga close to Kazan. He was born on August 21 1934 in the village of Shaimurzino, in the south of the Chuvash republic. His original name was Lisin, which he later changed to Aigi (a Chuvash tribal name). His father, a village teacher of Russian, translated Pushkin into Chuvash; his mother was the descendant of a line of “pagan” priests. After attending a teacher’s college in Chuvashia, he went in 1953 to the Gor’ky Literary Institute in Moscow, but in 1958 he was expelled from the Komsomol and the Institute, largely because of his friends

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First published 18 April 2006

Citation: France, Peter. "Gennadi Aigi". The Literary Encyclopedia. 18 April 2006.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11710, accessed 21 November 2009.]