Constantin Aleksandrovich Shapiro, born Asher ben Eliyahu Shapiro and known by the pen name Abba Shapiro, was a Hebrew lyric poet and photographer.
13 Facts About Constantin Shapiro
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Constantin Shapiro was born to a religious Jewish family in Grodno, where he received a traditional yeshiva education.
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Constantin Shapiro began writing secular poetry in his youth, much to the consternation of his father, who used all means to prevent him from following the path of the Haskalah.
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Constantin Shapiro's parents married him off at the age of 15, but the marriage was shortly annulled.
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Constantin Shapiro fell gravely ill with typhus, at which time he found out that his Russian girlfriend was pregnant.
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Constantin Shapiro became the personal photographer of many prominent Russian officials, including members of the royal family.
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Constantin Shapiro was a close friend of Fyodor Dostoevsky, and photographed Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, and other leading Russian writers.
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Constantin Shapiro recorded performances by Vasilii Andreev-Burlak for a photo series devoted to Nikolai Gogol's short story Diary of a Madman, published as an album in 1883.
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Constantin Shapiro was awarded a silver medal by Emperor Alexander II in 1883.
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Constantin Shapiro's first published poem, "Me-Hezyonot Bat 'Ammi", garnered him a place in the foremost rank of Hebrew poets.
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Constantin Shapiro published "Turgenev ve-Sippuro Ha-Yehudi", a critical essay on Ivan Turgenev's story The Jew, in Ha-Melitz.
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Constantin Shapiro died in 1900 in St Petersburg, leaving several tens of thousands of rubles to the Odessa Committee, which supported Jewish settlements in Palestine of the First Aliyah.
13.
Constantin Shapiro's poetry was collected in one volume and published posthumously in 1911 by Ya'akov Fichmann under the title Shirim Nivharim.