Yi Ning 易宁 / Ivan Alekseev

Ivan Alekseev (Chinese name: Yi Ning 易宁) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Humanities Institute of Southwest Jiaotong University. He is a scholar of modern Chinese and Russian poetry as well as a translator of Chinese poetry into Russian, introducing Russian readers to the works of contemporary poets such as Bei Dao, Yu Jian, and Xi Chuan, and others. His books (in Russian) include Inside the Flames: Poetry by Hai Zi (2021) and Starring: Me. Selected Poems of Xi Chuan (2024).

About his practice of writing poetry, Alekseev writes:

I write both in Chinese and in Russian, though in different styles. In Russian, my native language, I tend toward a kind of minimalist ‘pure poetry’, playing with chance collisions of words and pressing at the limits of the expressible. In Chinese I write a more colloquial modern poetry, incorporating elements of postmodernism, wordplay, and everyday narrative.