Igor Kholin

Igor Sergeyevich Kholin (11 January 1920, Moscow - 15 June 1999, Moscow) was a Russian poet and fiction writer and a member of the 'Lianozovo Group'. Igor Kholin was born in Moscow in a family of a seamstress and an officer in the Imperial Russian Army, whose surname was, according to different versions, either Lvov or Kholin. The account of his father’s death is also controversial - one version says he died of typhoid, the other that he was fighting for the White Movement in the Russian Civil War, then turned Bolshevik, was taken hostage and executed by Admiral Kolchak. An account provided by Kholin’s relatives says that the poet’s grandfather owned a ballet school in Moscow, on Tverskaya street, and that his father married a country girl despite the will of the family. Neither of those stories can be confirmed, though, since Kholin was inclined to mystify his own life. Evgeniy Lobkov, a literary critic, said that Igor Kholin’s biography is mythological and that it is not known how and where his childhood, boyhood and youth had been spent. During the Russian Civil War Kholin’s widowed mother placed both of her children in an orphanage, fearing not to be able to provide for them. Kholin was then transferred to a different orphanage in Ryazan that was located in a former monastery, where children were sleeping in bedrooms with murals depicting martyrs’ sufferings, such as the beheading of John the Baptist. Kholin ran away from the orphanage and started living on the streets. At one point he found himself in Novorossiysk, where he entered a military college and served in the Red Army Music Corps.