D. S. Mirsky is the English pen-name of Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky (russian: Дми́трий Петро́вич Святопо́лк-Ми́рский), often known as Prince Mirsky ( – c. 7 June 1939), a
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...
n political and literary historian who promoted the knowledge and translations of
Russian literature
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia and its émigrés and to Russian language, Russian-language literature. The roots of Russian literature can be traced to the Middle Ages, when epics and chronicles in Old East Slavic were c ...
in
Britain and of
English literature
English literature is literature written in the English language from United Kingdom, its crown dependencies, the Republic of Ireland, the United States, and the countries of the former British Empire. ''The Encyclopaedia Britannica'' defines E ...
in the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
. He was born in
Kharkov Governorate
The Kharkov Governorate ( pre-reform Russian: , tr. ''Khárkovskaya gubérniya'', IPA: xarʲkəfskəjə ɡʊˈbʲernʲɪjə ) was a governorate of the Russian Empire founded in 1835. It embraced the historical region of Sloboda Ukraine. From ...
and died in a Soviet gulag near
Magadan
Magadan ( rus, Магадан, p=məɡɐˈdan) is a port town and the administrative center of Magadan Oblast, Russia, located on the Sea of Okhotsk in Nagayev Bay (within Taui Bay) and serving as a gateway to the Kolyma region.
History
Maga ...
.
Early life
He was born Prince Dimitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky,
[The strange case of D.S. Mirsky.]
Hilton Kramer, '' The New Criterion'', January 2002. Retrieved 25 February 2016. scion of the
Svyatopolk-Mirsky family
The House of Sviatopolk-Mirsky ( be, Святаполк-Мірскі, Sviatapolk-Mirski, russian: Святополк-Мирский, pl, Światopełk-Mirski, also transliterated using ''Swiatopolk'' or ''Mirskii'') is a family of Russian and ...
, son of ''
knyaz
, or ( Old Church Slavonic: Кнѧзь) is a historical Slavic title, used both as a royal and noble title in different times of history and different ancient Slavic lands. It is usually translated into English as prince or duke, dependi ...
''
Pyotr Dmitrievich Svyatopolk-Mirsky
Prince Pyotr Dmitrievich Svyatopolk-Mirsky (russian: Пётр Дми́триевич Святопо́лк-Ми́рский, tr. ; , in Vladikavkaz – , in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire) was a Russian general, politician, and police official.
...
,
Imperial Russia
The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the List of Russian monarchs, Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended th ...
n Minister of Interior, and Countess Ekaterina
Bobrinskaya. He relinquished his princely title at an early age. During his school years, he became interested in the poetry of
Russian symbolism
Russian symbolism was an intellectual and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It arose separately from European symbolism, emphasizing mysticism and ostranenie.
Literature
Influences
Primary ...
and started writing poems himself.
World War I and Civil War
Mirsky was mobilized in 1914 and saw service in the
Imperial Russian Army
The Imperial Russian Army (russian: Ру́сская импера́торская а́рмия, tr. ) was the armed land force of the Russian Empire, active from around 1721 to the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the early 1850s, the Russian Ar ...
during
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
. After the
October Revolution
The October Revolution,. officially known as the Great October Socialist Revolution. in the Soviet Union, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key moment ...
he joined the
White movement as a member of
Denikin
Anton Ivanovich Denikin (russian: Анто́н Ива́нович Дени́кин, link= ; 16 December Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates">O.S._4_December.html" ;"title="Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates.html" ;"title="nowiki/>Old Style and New St ...
's staff. After the defeat of the White forces he fled to Poland in 1920.
London
Mirsky emigrated to
Great Britain
Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the largest European island and the ninth-largest island in the world. It is ...
in 1921. While teaching Russian literature at the
University of London
The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...
, Mirsky published his landmark study ''A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1880''.
Vladimir Nabokov has called it "the best history of Russian literature in any language including Russian". This work was followed with the ''Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881–1925,''.
Mirsky was a founding member of the
Eurasianist movement and the chief editor of the periodical ''Eurasia'', his own views gradually evolving toward
Marxism
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
. He also is usually credited with coining the term
National Bolshevism. In 1931, he joined the
Communist Party of Great Britain
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPG ...
and asked
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (russian: link=no, Алексе́й Макси́мович Пешко́в; – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (russian: Макси́м Го́рький, link=no), was a Russian writer and social ...
if he could procure his pardon by Soviet authorities. The permission to return to the
USSR
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
was granted him in 1932. On seeing him off to Russia,
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
Woolf was born i ...
wrote in her diary that "soon there'll be a bullet through your head".
Return to Russia
![D](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/D._Svyatopolk-Mirsky.jpg)
Mirsky returned to Russia in September 1932.
[Roberts, I.W. (1991) ''History of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1915-1990''. London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies. p. 29. ] Five years later, during
the Great Purge
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secreta ...
, Mirsky was arrested by the
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
...
. Mirsky's arrest may have been caused by a chance meeting with his friend, the British historian
E. H. Carr
Edward Hallett Carr (28 June 1892 – 3 November 1982) was a British historian, diplomat, journalist and international relations theorist, and an opponent of empiricism within historiography. Carr was best known for '' A History of Soviet Rus ...
who was visiting the Soviet Union in 1937. Carr stumbled into Prince Mirsky on the streets of Leningrad (modern Saint Petersburg, Russia), and despite Prince Mirsky's best efforts to pretend not to know him, Carr persuaded his old friend to have lunch with him.
[Haslam, ''The Vices of Integrity'', p. 76.] Since this was at the height of the ''
Yezhovshchina
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secreta ...
'', and any Soviet citizen who had any unauthorised contact with a foreigner was likely to be regarded as a spy, the NKVD arrested Mirsky as a British spy.
In April 1937, he was denounced in the journal ''
Literaturnaya Gazeta
''Literaturnaya Gazeta'' (russian: «Литературная Газета», ''Literary Gazette'') is a weekly cultural and political newspaper published in Russia and the Soviet Union. It was published for two periods in the 19th century, and ...
'' as a "filthy
Wrangelist and
White Guard officer". He died in one of the
gulag
The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...
labour camps near Magadan in June 1939 and was buried on the 7th of that month.
He was
rehabilitated in 1962. Although his ''
magnum opus'' was eventually published in Russia, Mirsky's reputation in his native country remains sparse.
Korney Chukovsky gives a lively portrait of Mirsky in his diary entry for 27 January 1935:
I liked him enormously: the vast erudition, the sincerity, the literary talent, the ludicrous beard and ludicrous bald spot, the suit which, though made in England, hung loosely on him, shabby and threadbare, the way he had of coming out with a sympathetic ee-ee-ee (like a guttural piglet squeal) after each sentence you uttered—it was all so amusing and endearing. Though he had very little money—he's a staunch democrat—he did inherit his well-born ancestors' gourmandise. His stomach will be the ruin of him. Every day he leaves his wretched excuse for a cap and overcoat with the concierge and goes into the luxurious restaurant f the Hotel National in Moscow spending no less than forty rubles on a meal (since he drinks as well as eats) plus four to tip the waiter and one to tip the concierge.
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."
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitar ...
was highly critical of ''The Intelligentsia of Great Britain'' but
Tariq Ali had a more favourable assessment of this book.
[Ali, Tariq ''The Coming British Revolution'']
Selected publications
* ''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)
''Contemporary Russian Literature: From 1881 to 1925''(1926)
* ''A History of Russia'' (1928)'
(London: Holme Press, 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
References
Further reading
* Gerald Stanton Smith. ''D. S. Mirsky : A Russian-English Life, 1890–1939''. Oxford University Press: 2000 ().
* Nina Lavroukine et Leonid Tchertkov, ''D. S. Mirsky : profil critique et bibliographique'', Paris, Intitut d'Études Slaves, 1980, 110 pages, 6 planches hors-texte (). (French language)
External links
Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881-1925 - Full View , HathiTrust Digital LibraryRed Prince, a Radio Liberty publication (in Russian)*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mirsky, DS
1890 births
1939 deaths
People from Liubotyn
People from Kharkov Governorate
Russian nobility
National Bolsheviks
Eurasianism
Russian male poets
Russian philologists
Russian literary historians
Russian literary critics
20th-century Russian poets
Soviet literary historians
Soviet male writers
20th-century Russian male writers
Academics of the University of London
20th-century Russian journalists
20th-century philologists
Russian Marxist writers