Guillaume du Vintrais
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Guillaume du Vintrais (c.1553-c.1602) is a fictional 16th-century French poet created by Soviet writers Yuri Veinert and Yakov Kharon while they were imprisoned in a Gulag labor camp in the 1940s. Du Vintrais was described as "a sixteenth-century Gascon poet who was born in the twentieth-century Soviet Far East".[1]
Du Vintrais was born around 1553 in Gascony, France. He was a contemporary of poets such as Agrippa d'Aubigne and Michel de Montaigne.[2] As a young man, du Vintrais moved to Paris and became a court poet known for his satirical and politically provocative verses. In 1572, du Vintrais was imprisoned in the Bastille for his Huguenot beliefs during the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, was sentenced to death, but then sent into an exile to England.[2] He returned to France and joined the Henry IV's court. He died in 1602.[3]
Du Vintrais' sonnets' themes express the poet's passions for freedom, justice, and romantic love. Nadezda Vashkevich noted the parallels between du Vintrais and the French humanist poet Clement Marot, who was imprisoned as a follower of Reformation.[2]