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Tomas Venclova (born September 11, 1937, Klaip?da) is a Lithuanian scholar, poet, author and translator of literature.

Tomas Venclova is son of poet and Soviet politician Antanas Venclova. He was educated at the Vilnius University. As an active participant in the dissident movement he was deprived of Soviet citizenship in 1977 and had to emigrate. He is one of the founders of Lithuanian Helsinki Watch group (December 1, 1976). Since 1980 he has been a member of the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, after receiving his PhD from the department in 1985. He is currently a full Professor. He is author of collections of poems, poetry-translations, essays, articles.

Venclova studied at Tartu University and was strongly influenced by the brand of structuralism prevalent there in the 1970s and 1980s. In Venclova's case, the rigorously analytical structuralism of Yurii Lotman's early work on poetry was particularly influential. Venclova was also fond, at least in his work and teaching in the eighties, of making use of Saussure's work on hidden anagrams (see Jean Starobinski's Words upon Words.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tomas Venclova", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0