Aleksey Mateevich Moldovan poet and translator Date of Birth: 27.03.1888 Country: Moldova

Biography of Alexei Mateevich

Alexei Mateevich, a Moldovan poet and translator, was born on March 27, 1888 in the village of Kainary in Bessarabia. He was the son of the priest Mikhail Mateevich and his wife Nadezhda. The family later moved to the village of Zaim, now in the Kaushany district of Moldova.

From 1897 to 1902, Mateevich studied at the Kishinev Spiritual School, and from 1902 to 1910, he attended the Theological Seminary. In 1906, he published an essay called "Autumn" and articles titled "What do we need?" and "The Struggle of Moldovans for their Rights" in the newspaper "Bessarabia". In 1907, a poem called "Dorul" ("Desire") was published in "Bessarabia" under the pseudonym "Al. M.", which was attributed to the oral folk art of Bessarabia. Mateevich also published poems under the pseudonym "Al. Matveesku" in the section "Lyra Bessarabii" in the same newspaper.

From 1910 to 1914, Mateevich studied at the Kiev Theological Academy. During his studies, he translated poems by Lermontov, Pushkin, Nikitin, Khomyakov, and A.K. Tolstoy into Moldovan. In 1914, Mateevich married Feodosia Borisovna Novitskaya and became a Greek language teacher at the Kishinev Theological Seminary. He continued to translate poems, including Nadsone's "Christian Girl" in 1915.

On September 11, 1915, Mateevich was mobilized as a military priest and sent to the Galician front, and later transferred to the Romanian front. He participated in the Congress of Moldovan Teachers in May 1917 in Kishinev. In June 1917, he wrote the famous poem "Limba noastra" ("Our Language"). The poem was read by the author himself at the opening of the Moldovan Teachers' Course in Kishinev. Mateevich returned to the front and contracted typhus, and died on August 13, 1917, in the 1st Kishinev Hospital.

Mateevich's first collection of poems was published in Bucharest in 1926. It was reissued 10 years later in the same city. In Kishinev, his translations of 19th-century Russian poetry were published separately. In 1954, a collection of Mateevich's selected works entitled "Opere ales" ("Selected Works") was published in Moldova. His name is honored with a street named after him in Kishinev, and a bust by Alexander Plamediala is placed on his grave in the central city cemetery. A memorial plaque is also installed on the building of the former Theological Seminary. In 1990, a bust of Mateevich by sculptor Dmitry Rusu-Skvortsov was installed in the Alley of Classics.