Culture Connection: Visual Arts and Documentary Films on Nabokov, Brodsky and Akhmatova

Yuri Leving lives in Princeton, New Jersey. He discovered his passion for photography at the age of 6, when he stumbled upon a pack of antique postal cards and photographic curiosities from his great-grandfather’s collection in a family drawer. These sepia pictures from the turn of the twentieth century featured bearded women, three-breasted beauties, circus wrestlers and Soviet actors… plus there was an old camera lens made of copper (Leving’s great-grandfather worked as a retoucher at a photographic studio). Since then Leving morphed from an avid reader and spectator to documentary filmmaker and writer. When Yuri is not teaching literature and cinema at Princeton University, he travels around the world shooting everything that comes into his viewfinder.