Russian poet George Ivask, a retired professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has died of an apparent heart attack, officials said Friday. He was 78.
Mr. Ivask was pronounced dead on arrival Thursday at the Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton after he was found on a sidewalk near a pond at the center of the university`s campus, university spokesman Peter O`Neil said.
Mr. Ivask, a professor in the Slavic languages and literature department, became a U.S. citizen in 1955 and taught at the University of Washington and Vanderbilt University in Tennessee before coming here in 1969.
Pope John Paul II granted Mr. Ivask an audience about three years ago after being deeply moved by a poem Mr. Ivask wrote him regarding the Polish Solidarity labor movement, said Laslo Tikos, a fellow professor at the University of Massachusetts.
Mr. Ivask published several volumes of poetry and was regarded as a leading Russian poet in the United States.
Mr. Ivask was known as an ”intellectual poet” and a product of the Paris school of Russian poetry, which was an offspring of the symbolist and alchemist movements in Russia at the turn of the century, Tikos said.