Today is the birthday of two geniuses of the Russian and world poetry of the modern era.
One was born in Leningrad and died in New York. The other came into the world in the Russian Far East, spent his childhood and youth in Ukraine and Moscow, and died in Cologne, Germany.
Both died at the heartbreakingly early age of 55.
One was world-famous and comported himself accordingly. The other -- taciturn and unassuming to a fault -- was known, and admired, largely in the rarified strata of international academe and amid the necessarily narrow overlapping circles of the readers and practitioners of the intellectually charged and experimental (without the oft-inevitable quotation marks) poetry.