My name is Victoria Lugovskaya, I’m a Russian poet and writer living in Lima, Peru. I’m 36.
I started writing poems at the age of 5, and since then have accumulated lots of drafts and fewer completed poems. I easily find inspiration and write the opening and often the final lines of a poem. My major challenge is to turn all my drafts into finished works.
My biggest inspiration is the poetry of Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet and a genius of classic rhymed verse. My favorite poets, beside Pushkin, are William Shakespeare, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Lord Byron, and John Keats.
I currently write poems in Russian, English, and Spanish. I also collect the best poetry in these three languages and manage the blog Rhyme dedicated to rhyming poetry in English.
Formal verse has a strong tradition in Russian poetry. Almost all poets use this style, because the language calls for it: not only verbs, but nouns and adjectives, too, have endings, which facilitates the use of rhyme. Having written rhymed verse in Russian all my life, I naturally adopted this style of poetry for writing in English.
I deeply love the English language. For me it’s an amazing new terrain to explore, a wonderland where I play like a child discovering more and more of its treasures as I learn and write. English is a great language for writing rhymed poetry: it is rich in rhymes and synonyms, and the polysemic nature of its vocabulary can create wonderful metaphors, shades of meaning and word play unthought of in other languages.
Victoria Lugovskaya 