Svyatoslav Belza was born on 26 April 1942 in Chelyabinsk, to Igor Fyodorovich Belza, a Warsaw-born Soviet musician, composer, and art scholar, and Zoya Konstantinovna Belza-Doroshchuk. In 1965, after graduating the philological faculty at the Moscow University, Belza joined the Gorky Institute of the world literature at the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1979 he started regularly contributing to Literaturnaya Gazeta, initially as a foreign literature reviewer. Belza authored more than 300 essays, the majority of which focus on either the Western literature, or the Russian authors' links with European culture. Among his notable works are "Bryusov and Dante", "Bryusov and Poland", "Don Quixote in Russian Poetry", "The Polish Connections of P.A.Vyazemsky", "Graham Greene", "Pushkin and the Slavic Nations Cultural Unity", "Dante e la poesia russa nel primo quarto del XX secolo", "Rozanov and his Readership", and "The Slovak Literature". One of the foremost experts on Shakespeare in Russia, Belza compiled and edited the legacy of another important Russian Shakespearean scholar, Mikhail Morozov. He provided forewords and prefaces for more than 100 publications of works by William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, Jules Verne, Graham Greene, C. P. Snow, Edgar Allan Poe, Jan Parandowski, Stanisław Lem, Sławomir Mrożek, Teodor Parnicki, and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, among others. In 1990, he compiled The Reading Man. Homo Legens, lauded as an innovative study of the fundamental intellectual abilities of the modern man. In 1987, Belza debuted on the Soviet television as a reviewer; a year later he became the presenter of his own programme, Music on Air. In 1993-1995 he was an art director of the Ostankino musical and entertainment department. In 1997, Belza started working for Kultura TV. Among his best known programmes there were Masterpieces of the World Theatre and In Your House. He co-hosted the popular Romantika Romansa show and was a co-presenter of The Bolshoi Opera and The Bolshoi Ballet competition shows. Svyatoslav Belza died of pancreatic cancer on 3 June 2014 in Munich, Germany at the age of 72.
In 1969 Belza married Nina Kulagina, then a Kiev University student, later the teacher of English ; they had one son, Igor Belza, now a businessman, who is married to the artist Alexandra Otiyeva, based in Nice, France. After the divorce in 1981, Belza's partner was Olga Glebova, also teacher of English, and daughter of the actor Pyotr Glebov. They had one son, Fyodor Belza, whose son Sergey is Svyatoslav Belza's grandson.
