DMITRIDRAGILEW
Poet · Author · Jazz Musician
The saddest tune is better than silence
after Ojārs Vācietis, translated by Oleg Chukhontsev — the line Dragilew chose as the title of his essay on Rosner and Strock
Works
Eleven books — poetry, a novel, jazz and tango history.
→Poetry
Poems in the original — and read by the author.
→Music
Four ensembles, his own songs, a century of swing and tango.
→
The new novel
«Некоронованные»
His major prose work: its hero, a journalist and Russian Berliner, is obsessed with mysterious, mutually replacing calendars to which he ascribes the contradictions of the age. A novel about the meeting of émigré generations — metaphor-rich, musical, tragicomic. At its center: the myth of the invented philosopher Khuuchin Zaltai (“the Old Trickster”), creator of the “fourth calendar” and the “anchor clocks” — a sage between Borges, Pavić and Pelevin.
About the book ↗Dmitri Dragilew, born in Riga in 1971, lives in Berlin — a poet, prose writer and jazz musician at once. His poetry belongs to the tradition of the Russian metarealist school and has been translated into German, English, Ukrainian, Polish and Sorbian. As pianist, arranger and bandleader he brings the swing and tango world of Oskar Strock and Eddie Rosner back to the stage. He chairs the association of Russian-language writers in Germany (SLOG) and is a member of Exile PEN. His novel The Uncrowned appeared in 2025.
Chairman of SLOG · member of Exile PEN · Latvian Writers' Union · co-founder of the International Strock & Rosner Society
