D. S. Mirsky is the English pen-name of Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky (), often known as Prince Mirsky ( – c. 7 June 1939), a Russian political and literary historian who promoted the knowledge and translations of

Russian literature Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia, its Russian diaspora, émigrés, and to Russian language, Russian-language literature. Major contributors to Russian literature, as well as English for instance, are authors of different e ...

in the United Kingdom and of

English literature English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world. The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian languages, Anglo-Frisian d ...

in the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

. He was born in

Kharkov Governorate Kharkov Governorate was an administrative-territorial unit (''guberniya'') of the Russian Empire founded in 1835. It embraced the historical region of Sloboda Ukraine. From 1765 to 1780 and from 1796 to 1835 the governorate was called Sloboda Uk ...

and died in a Soviet gulag near

Magadan Magadan ( rus, Магадан, p=məɡɐˈdan) is a Port of Magadan, port types of inhabited localities in Russia, town and the administrative centre of Magadan Oblast, Russia. The city is located on the isthmus of the Staritsky Peninsula by the ...

Early life

He was born Prince Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky, scion of the House of Svyatopolk-Mirsky, son of ''

knyaz A , also , ''knjaz'' or (), is a historical Slavs, Slavic title, used both as a royal and noble title in different times. It is usually translated into English language, English as 'prince', 'king' or 'duke', depending on specific historical c ...

'' Pyotr Dmitrievich Svyatopolk-Mirsky,

Imperial Russia Imperial is that which relates to an empire, emperor/empress, or imperialism. Imperial or The Imperial may also refer to: Places United States * Imperial, California * Imperial, Missouri * Imperial, Nebraska * Imperial, Pennsylvania * ...

n Minister of Interior, and his wife, Countess Ekaterina Bobrinskaya (1864-1926), descendant of

Catherine the Great Catherine II. (born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst; 2 May 172917 November 1796), most commonly known as Catherine the Great, was the reigning empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796. She came to power after overthrowing her husband, Peter I ...

. 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.

World War I and Civil War

Mirsky was mobilized in 1914 and saw service in the

Imperial Russian Army The Imperial Russian Army () was the army of the Russian Empire, active from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was organized into a standing army and a state militia. The standing army consisted of Regular army, regular troops and ...

during

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

. After the

October Revolution The October Revolution, also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution (in Historiography in the Soviet Union, Soviet historiography), October coup, Bolshevik coup, or Bolshevik revolution, was the second of Russian Revolution, two r ...

he joined the

White movement The White movement,. The old spelling was retained by the Whites to differentiate from the Reds. also known as the Whites, was one of the main factions of the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. It was led mainly by the Right-wing politics, right- ...

as a member of Denikin'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 north-west coast of continental Europe, consisting of the countries England, Scotland, and Wales. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the List of European ...

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-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...

, Mirsky published his landmark study ''A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1880''.

Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov ( ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian and American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Rus ...

has called it "the best history of Russian literature in any language including Russian". This work was followed with ''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 political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, ...

. He also is usually credited with coining the term

National Bolshevism National Bolshevism, whose supporters are known as National Bolsheviks and colloquially as Nazbols, is a syncretic political movement committed to combining ultranationalism and Bolshevik communism. History and origins In Germany Natio ...

. 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 CPGB ...

and asked

Maxim Gorky Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (; – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (; ), was a Russian and Soviet writer and proponent of socialism. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an aut ...

if he could procure his pardon by Soviet authorities. Permission to return to the

USSR The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

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 and one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. She helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device. Vir ...

wrote in her diary that "soon there'll be a bullet through your head".

Return to Russia

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, Mirsky was arrested by the

NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated as NKVD (; ), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) se ...

. Mirsky's arrest may have been caused by a chance meeting with his friend the British historian E. H. Carr 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'', 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'' as a "filthy Wrangelist and White Guard officer". He died in one of the

gulag The Gulag was a system of Labor camp, forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word ''Gulag'' originally referred only to the division of the Chronology of Soviet secret police agencies, Soviet secret police that was in charge of runnin ...

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 A masterpiece, , or ; ; ) is a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or a work of outstanding creativity, skill, profundity, or workmanship. Historically, ...

'' 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 Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge (24 March 1903 – 14 November 1990) was a conservative British journalist and satirist. His father, H. T. Muggeridge, was a socialist politician and one of the early Labour Party Members of Parliament (for Romford, i ...

, who met Mirsky after his return to the 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." On the other hand, Muggeridge himself said that he was "glad to be his protégé".

George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to a ...

called ''The Intelligentsia of Great Britain'' "a viciously malignant book", but

Tariq Ali Tariq Ali (;; born 21 October 1943) is a Pakistani-British political activist, writer, journalist, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual. He is a member of the editorial committee of the ''New Left Review'' and ''Sin Permiso'', and co ...

had a more favourable assessment of it.Ali, Tariq ''The Coming British Revolution''

Selected publications

* ''Anthology of Russian Poetry'' (1924) * ''Modern Russian Literature'' (1925) * ''Pushkin'' (1926) * (via

Google Books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...

. * Reprinted together with 1926 work a
''A History of Russian Literature''
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949;

Reprint A reprint is a re-publication of material that has already been previously published. The term ''reprint'' is used with slightly different meanings in several fields. Academic publishing In academic publishing, offprints, sometimes also known ...

Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1999. * ''A History of Russia'' (1928)

(London: Holme Press, 1931). * ''Russia: A Social History'' (1931) * ''The Intelligentsia of Great Britain'' (1935), originally in Russian, English translation by the author * ''Anthology of Modern English Poetry'' (1937) in Russian, published during Mirsky's arrest without acknowledgment of his authorship

References

External links

Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881-1925 - Full View , HathiTrust Digital Library

Red Prince, a Radio Liberty publication (in Russian)
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Mirsky, DS 1890 births 1939 deaths People from Liubotyn People from Valkovsky Uyezd Nobility from the Russian Empire National Bolsheviks Eurasianists Russian male poets 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 Russian philologists Russian Marxist writers Communist Party of Great Britain members Great Purge victims from Russia