2001 Reports

D. S. Mirsky: The Death of a Modernist

Slobin N, Greta

Prince Dimitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky was an contradictions of his time. Bom in 1890, he was a contemporary of the great poets of the Russian renaissance, the so-called Silver Age: Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Tsvetaeva. A prince turned Communist, an emigre who despised his exiled compatriots, a cosmopolitan and a Eurasian nationalist, who was a failed poet (his book of verse published in 1911 was panned by Gumilev), but a brilliant literary critic, Mirsky brought Russian literature to the English public in a history text that remained definitive from the time it appeared to the end of the twentieth century.