Oleg Haslavsky

Haslavsky was born on 8 July 1948 in Taganrog, Russia.[1] Until the age of seven, he lived with his parents in Lviv. During his school years he studied painting in Taganrog's Art Studio under the supervision of Valentina Russo.[1]

In 1964, after graduating from the secondary school nr. 10, he entered the French-German department of the faculty of foreign languages of the Taganrog State Pedagogical Institute (TGPI; now: Taganrog State Pedagogical University, TGPU).[1] During his university studies, his views and interests (particularly regarding French poetry) were greatly appreciated by the docent Jury Felichkin who was teaching French in the pedagogical institute at the time. After Felichkin left the TGPI, Oleg Haslavsky was expelled from the Taganrog's Pedagogical Institute. In 1972 he graduated from the faculty of foreign languages of the Kolomna's Pedagogical Institute.[1]

In the period of 1974 until 1986, Haslavsky worked as a clinical psychologist in the Taganrog's psychiatric clinic. From 1980 until 1982, he worked in the R&D Institute of the Taganrog State Radio-technical Institute (OKB "RITM"). In 1986, he became a project director in the international research centre "Delta-Inform". From 1990 until 1992, he lived in Bulgaria for research purposes. From 1999 until 2003, he lived in Israel.[2]

Haslavsky speaks and translates from French, English, Bulgarian, Polish and Ukrainian. Also, he has a good knowledge of German and Italian.

He has translated various poems of François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Maeterlinck, Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Bolesław Leśmian, Taras Shevchenko, poetry and prose of Tadeusz Borowski, as well as Edmond Rostand's comedy "Cyrano de Bergerac".

In 2002 he translated Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".[3][4]

He never sought publication of his poetry. The first representative publication took place only in 2008 in the Moscow Journal "Corostel. Provincial letters".[5] The first book, published in 1998, was called "Selected works".

He lives and works in Taganrog, Russia.

• Олег Хаславский. Избранное. — Таганрог: Антон, 2009. — 196 с. — ISBN 978-5-88040-065-2.
• Олег Хаславский. Трилистник таганрогский. — Измаил: Чеширский Кот, 2010. — 32 с.
• Олег Хаславский. На пышном берегу. — Красный Сулин: Сулинполиграфсервис, 2014. — 248 с.

• «A poet is a surreal entity who attempts at achieving indescribable results with means unknown to himself»[3] — Oleg Haslavsky, 2009.
• «Living in a multi-language environment (not taking into account variations of one’s own native language) denunciates consciousness to literary existence, to a literary title, even when no single line has been written. Oleg Haslavsky is a literature figure with the initial advantage, I would even say a littérateur by default. A writing litterateur. I consciously use this definition, ‘littérateur’, though essentially one would need to talk about Haslavsky as a poet, a prose-writer, a translator (a fortiori since Oleg often works with literature pieces previously translated by very big names), and perhaps also as personality, and all of those may be referred to separately by using superlatives. But I say ‘littérateur’ referring to such an exact realisation, nowadays being so rare, of the means of consciousness existence in the language. And I would emphasize it: in the language»[6] — Igor Burenin, 1989.

• Oleg Haslavsky on the website "Unofficial Rostov"
• Media related to Oleg Haslavsky at Wikimedia Commons