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Valery Pereleshin
(1913 - 1992) Russia

Valery Pereleshin

Poet

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Pseudonym of Valery Frantsevich Salatko-Petrishche. Born in Irkustsk, Siberia, into the family of a civil servant, he found himself at the age of seven, with his mother and brother, in Harbin, Mancuria, one of the main centres of Russian émigré life after Bolshevik revolution.

In 1935 he received a law degree from the local Russian-language university, where he stayed on as a researcher; however the university was closed by Manchuria's Japanese occupying authorities in 1937.

In 1938, he took monastic vows and soon moved to Beijing, where he worked at the Russian church mission, at the same time pursuing studies of Chinese language and literature.In 1943, he mved to Shanghai, where at the end of WWII he renounced his monastic vows and briefly worked for the Soviet news agency.

In 1950, he attempted emigrating to the US, but was deported back to China on suspicion of being a communist sympathizer. In 1953, after many travails, he arrived with his mother in Rio de Janeiro, where he lived for the rest of his life.

There were gay writers among emigres, however, among them one of the most prolific gay poets, saw Valery Pereleshin. Pereleshin's classically formed poems express his multicultural background - he translated from Chinese and wrote poetry in Portuguese.

His verse memoirs, Poem without an Object, describe his gay love affairs, and he warns his readers, "My chronicle will not be to the tastes of uncles and aunts - for half a century we haven't gotten on, the breeders and I."

Pereleshin's tour de force, Ariel (1976), contains 169 sonnets, a poetic epistolary love affair with a young literary scholar, a married man, living in Moscow.

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Source: excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History, from WWII to Present Day, Routledge, London, 2001 - et alii

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