1869–1925
○ Tuberculosis
Russian cultural historian who launched the Vekhi collection and urged the intelligentsia toward spiritual self-awareness
In his introduction to Vekhi (1909), Gershenzon wrote: "We must bless this government which alone, with its bayonets and prisons, still protects us from the fury of the people."
A Russian cultural historian and essayist, Mikhail Gershenzon was the initiator and editor of the landmark 1909 collection Vekhi (Landmarks), which denounced the revolutionary radicalism of the Russian intelligentsia. He argued that the intelligentsia, fixated on reorganizing external social forms, had neglected the inner life of the spirit: a stance crystallized in his provocative line that "we must bless this government which alone, with its bayonets and prisons, still protects us from the fury of the people." After the revolution, he served as the first chair of the All-Russian Writers' Union and headed the literary section of Narkompros, while his scholarship on Pushkin (The Wisdom of Pushkin, 1919) and 19th-century Russian thought left a lasting intellectual legacy.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1894Graduated Moscow University, history and philology
- 1903–1905Literary reviewer, Nauchnoe Slovo
- 1907–1909Literary editor, Kriticheskoe Obozrenie
- 1909Initiated and edited Vekhi; wrote introduction and essay
- 1915–1919Edited Russkie Propilei (6 vols.)
- 1918First chair, Moscow Writers' Union
- 1920–1921Chair, All-Russian Writers' Union; member, Narkompros literary bureau
- 1922–1925Head, literary section, State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN)
Editing and Publishing Literary-Historical Sources
From the late 1890s, Gershenzon researched the archives of Moscow noble families, the Decembrist movement, the legacies of Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev, and the Westernizers and Slavophiles of the 1830s and 1840s. In the early 1910s he shifted much of his effort toward recovering and publishing literary and historical documents. In collaboration with the Moscow Religious and Philosophical Society, he issued two-volume collected works of Ivan Kireevsky (1911) and Pyotr Chaadaev (1913–1914), and from 1911 took part in developing the series Monuments of World Literature. His own documentary collection, Russian Propylaea, appeared in six volumes from 1915 to 1919; he published New Propylaea in 1923. Alongside this editorial work, he published studies of Pushkin and Turgenev in 1919.