Kaganovich, B. (2018). Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Smirnov. 1883-1962. St. Petersburg: Evropeyskiy Dom

Abstract

With its in-depth knowledge and extensive use of archived and printed material, this book can offer a good learning experience for writers in the same genre: the biography of the Petersburgbased philologist, literary historian, translator, editor, and Professor A. Smirnov (1883–1962) is presented in the context of 20th-c. Russian cultural and literary life. The chapters follow a chronological order and are connected by permeating themes of human and academic relationships: with A. Veselovsky, V. Zhirmunsky, and others. The Shakespearean topic is particularly important in the book: Smirnov personally edited nearly all translations of the Bard’s works appearing in the 1930s–1950s. The biography paints a clear picture of the period and explains why Smirnov never got to write his magnum opus on Shakespeare, despite him having all it took to achieve this, being by nature and training, his philosophy and cultural mentality one of the more consummate ‘Europeans’ among Russian scholars.