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RUSSIAN POET Boris Ryzhy killed himself on the night of May 7, 2001, at the age of twenty-six. He tightened a noose that he had attached to the handle of a door.
Trying to identify the factors leading to an individual suicide is almost always senseless: often the causes are insignificant and fleeting, unlike the tragic, permanent result to which they contribute. Ryzhy was young, handsome, successful, and had already achieved considerable literary fame. By no means did he face the kind of objective desperation that led Marina Tsvetaeva to hang herself in the terrible, hungry conditions of wartime following her evacuation from Moscow to the Central Asian city of Elabuga in 1941. Sometimes subjective factors are, however, more important than objective circumstances. Besides, the poet's lifestyle did leave him "at risk": alcohol is constantly mentioned in his verse; in the last years of his life an even more sinister means of making peace with the world began to figure in his poems. Boris's persistent efforts to fight his tragic compulsions were not successful.
Ryzhy spent his entire brief life in the Urals, a region in the geographic center of Russia that has from time immemorial been known for mining and metallurgy, heavy industry, and military plants. Born in Chelyabinsk on September 8, 1974, Ryzhy was still a child when his family moved to Yekaterinburg or, as the city was called throughout most of the Soviet period, "Sverdlovsk." This name honored one of the principal functionaries of the Bolshevik government, Yakov Sverdlov, the man who ordered the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family in 1918 when they were being held under arrest in a local building known as the Ipatiev house. Ryzhy graduated from high school and the university in Sverdlovsk. He became a mining engineer like his father, a leading specialist in the field. As far as I know, however, Boris never saw mining as his calling; his real passion was literature.
During Gorbachev's perestroika campaign and Yeltsin's presidency, the Ural region emerged as one of the most significant centers for the production of contemporary Russian art. Rock groups and literary associations that became famous throughout the country originated there; the Sverdlovsk publication Ural competed successfully with the thick journals of Moscow...