Biography

Robert Rozhdestvenskiy is a Soviet and Russian poet, translator, songwriter.

Rozhdestvenskiy was born as Robert Petkevich, in the village of Kosikha, West Siberia. Father - Stanislav Petkevich, worked in the NKVD. In 1941 he was drafted into the Red Army. With the rank of lieutenant, he commanded a platoon of the separate engineer battalion. Killed in action in Latvia in 1945. Mother - Vera Fyodorova, a military doctor, before the war she was the director of a rural primary school, and at the same time studied at a medical institute. His parents divorced when Robert was five years old. Mother remarried, stepfather - Ivan Rozhdestvenskiy, military man. Robert took the surname and patronymic of his stepfather. Since 1934, he lived with his parents and grandmother in Omsk. At the beginning of the war, his mother was called to the front and Robert remained with his grandmother Nadezhda Fyodorova.

Robert's first publication was the poem "My dad goes on a hike with a rifle" ('Omskaya Pravda', July 8, 1941). In 1943 he studied at the military music school. In 1950, the first adult publications of Robert Rozhdestvenskiy's poems appeared in the magazine 'Na rubezhe' (Petrozavodsk). In the same year, Rozhdestvenskiy tries to enter the Literary Institute named after Maxim Gorky, but unsuccessfully. He studies for a year at the historical and philological department of Petrozavodsk State University. In 1951, on his second attempt, the poet managed to enter the Literary Institute (graduated in 1956), he moved to Moscow. At the same time he met Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, and later Bulat Okudzhava and Andrey Voznesenskiy.

In 1955, the young poet's book "Flags of Spring" was published in Karelia. A year later, the poem "My Love" was also published there. In 1955, Robert, while practicing in Altay, met conservatory student Aleksandr Flyarkovsky, with whom the Rozhdestvenskiy's first song, "Your Window," was created.

A characteristic property of Rozhdestvenskiy's poetry is its constantly pulsating modernity, the living relevance of the questions that he poses to himself and to us. These questions concern so many people that they instantly resonate in a wide variety of circles. If you arrange Rozhdestvenskiy's poems in chronological order, you can be convinced that the poet's lyrical confession reflects some essential features characteristic of social life, its movement, maturity, spiritual gains and losses.
- IMDb mini biography by: Bazza the Beast

In 1980, at the opening ceremony of the Moscow 1980: Games of the XXII Olympiad (1980), the Olympic anthem was played in Russian, translated by Robert Rozhdestvenskiy.

He was on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival three times.