Nikolai Dejevsky was born in a United Nations administered refugee camp in Germany in 1945, and in ’49 arrived with his parents along the highway described in his novel Woodland of Weir, to be welcomed in central Maine in the town of Solon.
The family later joined the famous Russian émigré colony in Richmond, location of his novel A Myth of Messina: Echoes of Russian Richmond. Eventually they moving to Old Town, where the author graduated from high school to attend Cornell University.
After obtaining a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, Dejevsky went on to study medieval Russian history for his PhD at Oxford University. Dejevsky experienced life in the Soviet Union as the Moscow-based project manager for Reuters where he witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain.
For many years Dejevsky pursued a career in British publishing and journalism. He then moved to Paris in ’95, where his wife Mary was Paris Bureau Chief of The Independent of London, followed by four years in Washington, DC, where she was The Independent’s Washington correspondent.
Retired, Dejevsky remains active as a volunteer in various charities concerned with chronic illnesses. He is on the editorial board of The Parkinson, the quarterly magazine of the Parkinson’s Disease Society of the UK.
He and his wife divide their time between their home in London and their holiday home in the Languedoc region of France. Dejevsky’s poetry has received two Mervyn Peake Awards and has been read to television audiences in Maine.
“So, to sum it all up,” the author writes, “I feel Russian by roots, Londoner by accident, Francophile by inclination, and Mainer by divine intervention! As for America . . . well, the greater country would do well to follow the lead of Dirigo,” Maine’s motto.
PB Co. 