Semyon Kirsanov

Semyon Kirsanov (sometimes spelled as Semen Kirsanov Семён Исаакович Кирсанов) (18 June 1906 in Odessa &mdash; 10 December 1972 in Moscow) was a Russian poet. Still in his teens, Kirsanov was the organizing force in his native Odessa in 1921 behind the Southern Association of Futurists. In 1925, Vladimir Mayakovsky published two of his poems in his Constructivist journal LEF, having met the younger poet on a visit to Odessa. Upon moving to Moscow the same year, Kirsanov began an apprenticeship with Mayakovsky and the poet Nikolay Aseev and, in the public imagination, inherited his mentor's torch after Mayakovsky's death in 1930. For a more complete biography, see Maxim D. Schrayer's An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, Vol. 1.