Volume 35, Number 15 · October 13, 1988
An Interview with Viktor Sosnora
By Darra Goldstein, Viktor Sosnora
Introductory Note: The life of the poet Viktor Aleksandrovich Sosnora has been one of continual risk. When he was a year and a half, in 1938, he was confined to clinic for three years with osteotuberculosis, and doctors almost had to amputate his arm and leg. When World War II broke out, Sosnora spent a year under the blockade of Leningrad before being evacuated to the Kuban region in the south of the Soviet Union. Soon after he arrived, the Germans overran the Kuban. Sosnora was captured three times by the Gestapo, but because of his youth he was released each time. His grandmother decided that it would be safer for him to live with the partisan detachment led by his uncle, but the Germans captured and executed the partisans, and Sosnora survived only by pretending to be dead after a bullet had grazed his skull. It was in the Kuban that Sosnora began to write, using a twig to etch his poems on the clay paths, which were washed smooth each time it rained.
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