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# Yesterday we read the verse of Apollon Korinfsky; today let us see what he looked like
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/vchera-chitali-stikhi-apollona-korinfskogo-a-segodnia-posmotrim-kak-on-vygliadel/
- Published: 2026-04-16T06:32:54.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:18.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Books, People, Ethnography

Yesterday we read the verse of Apollon Korinfsky; today let us see what he looked like. The photograph, from 1914, shows Apollon Korinfsky with his family on holiday.

Apollon Apollonovich Korinfsky was born in 1868 in Simbirsk and died in 1937 in Tver, in exile, by then quite an elderly man. Between those two dates lies a fate that can hardly be called simple.

He received his surname not from his parents but, if one may put it so, from architecture. His maternal grandfather, a Mordvin peasant named Mikhail Varentsov, ran away from his village, learned his letters from a parish clerk, made his way to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts and submitted at his final examination a design in the Corinthian style. For this he received a medal, a patent of nobility and a new surname. Later many supposed that Korinfsky was a handsome pseudonym in the manner of the Symbolists.

The poet himself was orphaned early: his mother died at his birth, and his father was gone when the boy was five. At the Simbirsk gymnasium he spent seven years in the same class as Vladimir Ulyanov, and there is evidence that the young Lenin visited Korinfsky's house and made use of his library. Korinfsky was later expelled for reading forbidden books and for his ties with political exiles.

Then came journalism in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, dozens of collections of verse, and translations of Heine, Coleridge, Mickiewicz and Shevchenko. He collected folklore, recorded the ritual songs of the Volga region and published calendars of folk customs. His book «Narodnaya Rus» («Folk Russia») became his chief contribution to culture outside poetry proper.

After the Revolution he could find no place for himself. And with such a schoolfellow, one might think! He scraped by on translations, worked as a school librarian and lived outside Leningrad. In 1929 he was exiled to Tver, where he worked as a proofreader on the regional newspaper until his death.

> Beneath the starry cloak of night  
> The Russian village sleeps;  
> The whole road, with soft and heavy  
> White snow, is covered deep.

From the poem «Khristoslavy» («The Carol Singers»).

Bryusov wrote of him in a detached and haughty tone:

> «In the heap of Korinfsky's volumes of verse there glimmers a small flame of poetic inspiration, but it barely smoulders, and the rare artistic lines are separated by whole dozens of stock ones».