Igor Vishnevetsky

Igor Georgievich Vishnevetsky (Russian: Игорь Георгиевич Вишневецкий) (born January 5, 1964 in Rostov-on-the-Don, USSR) is a notable Russian poet and novelist. He has been a contributor and editor in numerous Russian literary journals and anthologies since the 1980s. Some of his work has been published in English, including a translated version of his first novel, Leningrad (2010).

Igor Vishnevetsky was born in Rostov-on-the-Don in 1964 to Georgiy and Alla Vishnevetsky. Vishnevetsky originally aspired to become a composer, and studied music in school before attending Moscow State University to pursue a degree in philology. After graduating in 1986, Vishnevetsky became an active member of the poetry and art scenes that existed in Moscow and St. Petersburg prior to the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Vishnevetsky emigrated to the United States in 1992. In 1996 he received a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from the Department of Slavic Languages of Brown University. Subsequently, he taught at Emory University for five years. In the 2000s, he has also become a notable music historian, and is considered an authority on Sergei Prokofiev and the Russian-American composer Vladimir Dukelsky.

He also was a visiting professor of Russian and Film at Carnegie Mellon University. It was in Pittsburgh where he composed his experimental novel "Leningrad" which describes dehumanizing effects of the Finno-German siege of the city during World War II and deals with transformation of former Russian capital into a Soviet city. Praised for its insights into the minds of the people who experienced the collapse of everything associated with humanity, "Leningrad" won a 2010 award for the best fiction published in Russia's leading literary periodical "Novyi mir". In 2012 it won a prestigious "New Verbal Art (Novaya Slovesnost', or NoS)" literary award.

Since 2010 he had been working on a film version of "Leningrad". The film was completed in 2014 (a slightly shorter version in 2015) and received a number of awards. Film historian and critic Andrei Plakhov called it "an absolutely amazing experiment,", while film critic Evgeny Maisel considered Visnevetsky's film "a true challenge to contemporary professional film production."

His son is film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky.