Bookcover of the biography of Dmitry Mirsky

D.S. Mirsky is the English pen-name of Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky () (–June 6, 1939), a Russian political and literary historian who promoted the knowledge and translations of Russian literature in Britain and of English literature in Soviet Russia.

Life

A scion of the Svyatopolk-Mirsky princely family, son of kniaz Pyotr Dmitrievich Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Imperial Russian Minister of Interior, he relinquished his princely title at an early age. During his school years, he became interested in the poetry of Russian Symbolism and started writing poems himself. He saw service in the Russian army during the World War I, joined the White movement as a member of Denikin's staff and eventually emigrated to Great Britain in 1921.

While teaching Russian literature in the University of London, Mirsky published his landmark study A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900, which still remains a standard English-language guide to classical Russian literature. Vladimir Nabokov recommended it to his students as "the best history of Russian literature in any language, including Russian". This work was followed with the Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881–1925, which was somewhat marred by Mirsky's prejudiced view of Chekhov and his inordinate liking for some of the Russian Formalists.

Mirsky was a founding member of the Eurasia Movement and the chief editor of the periodical Eurasia, his own views gradually evolving towards Marxism. He also is usually credited with coining the term National Bolshevism. In 1931, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and asked Maxim Gorky if he could procure his pardon by Soviet authorities. The permission to return to the USSR was granted him in 1932. On seeing him off to Russia, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that "soon they will put a bullet in his head". Five years later, during the Great Purge, Mirsky was arrested by the NKVD. He died in one of the gulag labor camps in 1939. Although his magnum opus was eventually published in Russia, Mirsky's reputation in his native country remains sparse.

Criticism

Malcolm Muggeridge, who met Mirsky after his return to USSR, apparently met one of the author's critics, a French correspondent to Russia named Luciani, who had this to say of Mirsky:

Mirsky had pulled off the unusual feat of managing to be a parasite under three regimes — as a prince under Czarism, as a professor under Capitalism, and as an homme-de-lettres under Communism.

Works

• Anthology of Russian poetry (1924)
• Modern Russian Literature (1925)
• Pushkin (1926)
• A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900 in two volumes (1926, 1927); repr. Knopf (1958), Northwestern University Press (1999)
• A History of Russia (1928)
• Lenin (1931)
• Russia: A Social History (1931)
• The Intelligentsia of Great Britain (1935), originally in Russian, translated by the author to English
• Anthology of Modern English Poetry (1937) in Russian, published during Mirsky's arrest without acknowledgment of his authorship

Further reading

• Gerald Stanton Smith. D. S. Mirsky : A Russian-English Life, 1890–1939. Oxford University Press: 2000 (ISBN 0-19-816006-2).
• Nina Lavroukine et Leonid Tchertkov, D. S. Mirsky : pro?l critique et bibliographique, Paris, Intitut d'Études Slaves, 1980, 110 pages, 6 planches hors-texte (ISBN 2-7204-0164-1).

External links

• Red Prince, a Radio Liberty publication (in Russian)
• The Strange Case of D. S. Mirsky by Hilton Kramer, in English

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