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D.S. Mirsky is the English pen-name of Dmitry Petrovich Mirsky (1890–1939), a Russian political and literary historian who promoted the knowledge and translations of Russian literature in Britain and of the 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 WWI, 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". Her macabre prediction came true 5 years later, when Mirsky was arrested by the NKVD and died in one of the gulag labor camps. Although his magnum opus was eventually published in Russia, Mirsky's reputation in his native country remains sparse.

Trivia

There is an unfair aphorism about him: 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
• 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 under Mirsky's arrest without acknowledgement of his authorship

Further reading

• Gerald Stanton Smith. D. S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life, 1890–1939. Oxford University Press (August, 2000). ISBN 0198160062.

External links

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

• Russian poets
• Russian philologists
• Russian journalists
• Russian historians
• Victims of Soviet repressions
• Russian nobility
• 1890 births
• 1939 deaths