Volume 50, Number 10 · June 12, 2003
The Tragedy of Prince Mirsky
By Joseph Frank
D.S. Mirsky:A Russian-English Life, 1890–1939
by G.S. Smith
Oxford University Press, 398 pp., $125.00
Few present-day readers will be familiar with the name of Prince Dimitri Svyatopolk-Mirsky; but anyone who took a course in Russian literature either in England or the United States between the mid-1920s and the present probably ran across its shortened, plebeian variant, D.S. Mirsky. Indeed, starting in 1920 and ending in 1932, this name would have been immediately recognized by all readers of serious literary journals in English, French, Italian, and German as well as readers of Russian journals published outside the USSR. Mirsky's native tongue was Russian but he had mastered the other languages as well; and during these years he became an internationally known literary critic and commentator on the rapidly changing cultural events taking place in the USSR. His major work, however, was his two-volume History of Russian Literature (1926), written directly in English and abridged to one volume by the American Slavist Francis J. Whitfield in 1949. This book, universally recognized as a classic, has never been out of print.[1]
Review, 4764 words
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