Valery Isayants was born and died in Voronezh. He graduated from Suvorov Military School. Later he graduated from the Philological Faculty of Voronezh State University. His mother raised her son alone, working at a pasta factory to be promoted to a post of Director there. The Armenian ancestors of the Isayants emigrated to Russia from Western Armenia (now their homeland, Erzurum, is located in Turkey). Anastasia Tsvetaeva played a significant role in the literary fate of the gifted poet, he met Tsvetaeva in 1971.
In her memoirs, published much later, in 2004, Anastasia Ivanovna told about a trip to the Crimea, where Valery accompanied her. Thanks to her, he met Arseny Tarkovsky, who was the editor of his first poetry collection published in Yerevan in 1978.
The second collection of the poet was published only in 2013 in Voronezh through the efforts of Polina Sineva, a Voronezh poetess and journalist. Until that time, Isayants was supervised of the Voronezh poet club “Lik” headed by Mikhail Bolgov, a collector and local historian. The scattered texts of the poet written on numerous scraps of paper were collected and edited by joint efforts of the club members.
Since the early 1990s, Isayants, who was left without an apartment, wandered travelling from city to city in local trains. For some time, he even had to dwell in a forest near Voronezh.
On the eve of the new (2019) year, Isayants felt unwell. A disease attack caught him in the street. The ambulance took him to hospital, where he died a week later. The police could not identify the body for 10 days, since there were no documents with it. The poet was buried in the Berezovsky cemetery of Voronezh.
