Childe Harold of Dysna

The Yiddish language writer Moyshe Kulbak was born in 1896 in Smarhon (present-day Belarus, then in the Russian Empire) to a Jewish family, and later lived in Kovno (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania). After the Soviet Revolution he moved to Vilna (today Vilnius, Lithuania), and then in 1920 to Berlin. In 1923 he came back to Vilna, which after the war had become part of newly independent Poland, and was a centre of Yiddish literary culture. By 1928 he had become disappointed with the literary atmosphere in Poland, and moved to Minsk (by then capital of Soviet Belarus). In 1937 Kulbak was arrested during a wave of Stalinist purges, accused of espionage, and was executed a month later together with many other Belarusian writers and intellectuals. In 1956, after Stalin's death, he was officially rehabilitated by the Soviet authorities. Moyshe Kulbak wrote poems, fantastical or mystical novels, and, after moving to the Soviet Union, what have been described as 'Soviet satires'.