He spent his childhood in Podolsk, near Moscow, and the youth in the United States. Getting a good education at Harvard University, he owned four, no, five languages! The fifth language can be considered poetic. Vladimir Dixon wrote poetry and prose, painted, traveled, lived in Paris, rotating among the literary circles of Russian emigrants and… missed Russia. He wrote amazing poems about God.
Vladimir Dixon was born in the town of Sormovo Nizhny Novgorod province in 1900. His father, Walter Frank Dixon, an American engineer, arrived in Russia to work at the locomotive factory in Sormovo. In the same year, the family, the Dicksons, along with a three-month son Vladimir moved to the city of Podolsk, Moscow province, where his father began working in the company “singer”.
The education of Vladimir has a mother and a Mademoiselle. In nine years, he, Podolsky student of the school, spoke French, English, wrote poetry in Russian.
When the revolution broke out, parents sent Vladimir to his father’s homeland — in America. In February 1918 he entered the Massachusetts Institute of technology on the course of mechanical engineers. The war was coming to an end, but despite this, three months after admission to the Institute, Vladimir joined the Officer preparatory body, and when it was announced a set of 18-year-old, served as a soldier. Was preparing for his assignment to the headquarters of General Pershing translator (Dixon by that time owned four languages), but after the war ended November 11, 1918, he was discharged and continued his studies at the Institute, from which he graduated in June 1921 with a bachelor’s degree. Two months later Vladimir became a graduate student at Harvard University and in July 1922 he received a master’s degree. In 1923, a young engineer through the recommendation of his father is a senior engineer in the branch of “Zinger” in Paris.
There Vladimir met with a wide range of writers and writers of “Russian Paris”, including Vladimir Nabokov, who highly valued the talent of Dixon as a writer, “took shape, clean language and poetic voice.”
In 1924 in Paris, was published collection of poems “Steps”, very well received by Russian emigrants, and in 1927 — a book of prose, “Leaves”. Many of his poems dedicated to Russia and abandoned faith in God, who from childhood had dwelt in the soul of the poet.
Christian poems Dixon, are permeated with faith in a merciful God Who wants to save people from sin and save His love.
Pray, be not dismayed, be not afraid,
Mists and storms do not fear;
From the thoughts now we take refuge,
Don’t be afraid to love and pray.
In sin, where so painfully and low
Stretches days of nothing,
You I forever close,
I’m closer than you think.
I see anguish and suffering
In your restless eyes
Your aspiration, the seeking,
Your terror, your shadow, your fear.
In the plain, in the boundless desert,
Where the fleeting light had gone out, —
I’m here as your Guardian, your Loyal,
Your Good, your Joyful Spirit.
March 1926
A poet “gifted with all that is God” (according to A. Remizova), died unexpectedly at the age of 29 years, while in France. He was buried in American city Plainfield where parents lived. In the coffin laid a handful of Russian land.
Like all earthly story,
Vulgarity in the world is all one,
Someone on the soul, on the conscience
There is not a single spot?
I’m not the last and not the first
Whose soul in sorrow shakes:
I don’t know how without faith
Even to day, even hour to live.
Since he knows your crippled heart,
Stumbling in the darkness:
There is a great and real
And on our poor earth.
There are unfailing and genuine —
The victim net, the heat of soul
Incorruptible, indivisible
In our clay, in our neck of the woods.
Let the hurts and betrayals
Our wicked and low-born —
The heart with the imperishable aspirations
Will to live and now lives.
And let the soul, the conscience
More black than bright places
There are in our durmannogo story
Redeeming the soul of the cross.