Poet. One of the few Soviet authors to write in the late romantic tradition. He celebrated post-revolutionary life in the USSR with an exuberant yet unsentimental lyricism. His long narrative poem "The Lay of Opanas" (1926), written in the style of a Ukrainian folk epic and set during the Russian Civil War, is considered his masterpiece. Bagritsky was the pen name of Eduard Georgiyevich Dzjubin, born into a Jewish family in Odessa, Ukraine. He earned a degree as a land surveyor but never practiced the profession, preferring to develop his gifts as a linguist (he was fluent in Ukrainian, English, French and Turkish). His poems first appeared in a local magazine in 1915. Poor health kept him out of military service during World War I but he enthusiastically joined the Red Army at the start of the Civil War, serving with a guerilla unit and on agit-prop trains. Interestingly, Bagritsky's verse of this period praised nature and the distant past, and it was not until 1925, when he settled in Moscow, that he embraced the momentous social changes happening around him. "All works of literature are nothing", he declared, "compared to the biographies of those who witnessed the Revolution and took part in it". "The Lay of Opanas" introduced his new heroic mode and brought him immediate fame; it was further developed in the poetry collection "Southwest" (1928), which also dealt with colorful and dramatic episodes of the Civil War. In his books "The Victors" (1932) and "The Last Night" (1932), he fashioned hymns to Soviet progress that were too original and imaginative to be lumped into the dreary "Socialist Realism" category, and some critics accused him of using style to obscure his otherwise positive "message". The vitality of these poems is all the more remarkable because Bagritsky wrote them when he was virtually housebound with chronic asthma, the cause of his death at 38. His "Collected Works" (1938) included his translations of Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Sir Walter Scott.