D.S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life 1890-1939

Modern Language Review, The, Oct, 2001 by Robert Porter

D. S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life 1890-1939. By G. S. SMITH. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2000. xviii 398 pp. 8 plates. 65 [pounds sterling].

The dualism running through Mirsky's life is extraordinary: he was a serving officer in the Imperial Army during the First World War and in the White Army during the Civil War, seeing action regularly, yet he was also a man deeply wedded to literature and ideas; he was Russian through and through yet absorbed the cultures of Western Europe to a degree that many Europeans could never aspire to; he was an aristocrat and gourmand who agitated publicly for the Communist Party of Great Britain; and along with the shimmering intelligence there was a naivity bordering on plain stupidity. The Red Prince returned to Soviet Russia in 1932 to become one of its more prominent victims.

The present 'life and works' of D. S. Mirsky is likely to remain the fullest and most detailed we shall ever have. Gerald Smith has amassed information from published sources, private correspondence, eye-witness accounts, and the KGB archives to present us with a story that fascinates and puzzles. Some who came into contact with Mirsky felt that he was a little mad. Few deny the man's brilliance. It would be interesting to speculate as to what might have happened to Russian Studies in Britain had that brilliance not been directed in the ways that it was. A History of Russian Literature created the founding generation of Russianists. Written on his return to Russia, The Intelligentsia of Great Britain with its wholesale dismissals ('being theoreticians of the passive, dividend-drawing and consuming section of the bourgeoisie, they are extremely intrigued by their own minutest inner experiences, and count them an inexhaustible treasure store of further more minutious experiences', p. 238), may have cost Russian Studies another generation of students. Mirsky was not an easy man to deal with, as his relationship with Bernard Pares spells out. Mirsky's other intellectual forays, especially into Eurasianism, hardly add up to a coherent body of thought.

For those in Russian Studies in Britain, some of the most engrossing parts of this book concern the London School of Slavonic Studies and the early days of the discipline. At his interrogation Mirsky declared that the tasks of the School included strengthening 'the influence of British imperialism in the Slavonic countries' while Pares's role after the Revolution was to 'struggle against Soviet power' (p. 311).

For many years Mirsky's precise fate was unknown, though various reports indicated insanity and death through natural causes, brought on by harsh labour camp conditions. We now know that he died primarily of enterocolitis on 6 June 1939 in a camp hospital near Magadan. The outsider might wonder whether a mere literary critic who changed political allegiances so spectacularly and met an end no less wretched than many, many others in that time and place merits a fullscale biography. The answer is emphatically 'yes', for this book, like all the best biographies, speaks of an era as well an individual. The scholarship is scrupulous and the controlled zeal unfailing.

ROBERT PORTER UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW