Olga Nikolaevna Anstei also Olga Anstey (1 March 1912 – 30 May 1985; uk, Ольга Анстей), was a Jewish-Ukrainian émigré poet from

Kiev Kyiv, also spelled Kiev, is the capital and most populous city of Ukraine. It is in north-central Ukraine along the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2021, its population was 2,962,180, making Kyiv the List of European cities by populat ...

. She was the wife of poet Ivan Elagin ( uk, Іван Єлагін). Olga Anstei is best remembered for writing about the Holocaust. Her " Kirillovskie iary" (another name for Babi Yar) written in 1943, was one of the first-ever literary works on the subject of 1941 massacre of Ukrainian Jews in Kiev. Olga Elagin and her husband

defected In politics, a defector is a person who gives up allegiance to one state in exchange for allegiance to another, changing sides in a way which is considered illegitimate by the first state. More broadly, defection involves abandoning a person, ca ...

together from the Soviet Union to the West in 1943. Their works were published side by side in the poetry anthology entitled ''Berega: Stikhi Poetov Vtoroi Emigratsii'' (Shores: Poetry of the Second Emigration) by Valentina Sinkevich, the first ever collection of works by the second wave of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. They divorced in 1950. She remarried, but divorced again. Olga Elagin died in New York City at the age of 73. She is buried at the Russian Orthodox Convent Novo-Diveevo in Nanuet, New York.

Selected works

* ''Door in the Wall'' (1949) * Stephen Vincent Benet's ''The Devil and Daniel Webster'' (1960); translator * ''In the Way'' (1976)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Anstei, Olga Jewish Ukrainian poets 1912 births 1985 deaths 20th-century poets Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy from Judaism Burials at Novo-Diveevo Russian Cemetery Soviet emigrants to the United States