Knut was born into a merchant family and made his literary debut in the Chisināu press: in 1918 he edited the Journal Young Thought". In 1920 he emigrated to Paris wherehe participated in circles of Russian-language poets, and organized the group of poets "Palace of Poets". He published in emigre journals and edited Noviy dom (1925-1927), the Russian-language Jewish newspaper Razsvet, and other publications. In 1925 he pub- lished 'My Millennia" which included many poems infused with biblical motifs and allusions, and with consideration of the historical fate of the Jewish people. In subse- quent collections, "Second Book of Verses", 1928; "Parisian Nights", 1932; "True Love", 1938 the predominant themes are love, loneliness, death, rejection of the city, the op- pression of life, and unrealizability of hopes. Knut dedicated a cycle of poems to his visit to Palestine in the mid-1930s; this was called "Original Homeland", published in periodicals from 1938 to 1948 and partially included in "Selected Poetry", 1949. Ini- tially Knut's poetry was close to that of the Acmeists. In August 1940 Knut joined the Jewish resistance movement (L'Armée juive) in France whose activity he described in "Contribution to the History of the Jewish Resistance in France, 1940-1944". In 1949 he moved to Israel and settled in Tel Aviv, where he continued his literary activity and began to write poems in Hebrew.