Arkady Gornfeld
Arkady Gornfeld | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Occupation | translator, literary critic, essayist |
| Literary movement | Menshevik |
Arkady Georgievich Gornfeld (1867 - 1941) was a prominent[1] Russian essayist, literary critic and translator, best known for a feud with dissident poet Osip Mandelstam.
Life and Work
Arkady G. Gornfeld was born in 1941 in Sevastopol, the son of a notary. He went on to study philology, literature and psychology at Kharkov University and Berlin University. He then embarked on a career writing for various publications, including Russian Wealth. In his assessment of Jewish-Russian literature, he argued that the shtetl writings so far had failed to reach the greatness of Tolstoy.[2]
Mandelstam Incident of 1928
The poet Osip Mandelstam lashed out in 1928 after a misleading printer’s error led Gornfeld to claim that Mandelstam had plagiarized his translation of the German Till Eulenspiegel fables. Gornfeld made the allegation in a letter to the Red Evening Gazette, likening the use of his words to the theft of a fur coat.[3]
The furor inspired Mandelstam’s book The Fourth Prose, in which he said of Gornfeld: "This paralytic d'Anthés, this uncle Monia from the Basseinaia Street . . . Uncle Gornfel'd, why did you decide to complain in the Birzhevka, that is, The Red Evening Gazette, in the Soviet year of 1929? You would have done better to weep in the clean Jewish literary waistcoat of Mr. Propper. You would have done better to relate your misfortune to the banker with sciatic nerve, kugel, and the tallith.”[4]
Bibliography
«Forgotten writer "(Kushchevskaya, 1895);
"Criticism and lyricism" (1897);
"I. I. Dityatin "(1896, 2);
"Paul-Louis Courier (1895);
"The torments of the Word" ( "Collection of Russian Wealth", 1899);
"Memory of Herzen" (1900);
"Theory and practice of the study of literature" (1901);
"Russian women Nekrasov in a new light" (1904);
"Experimental Art" (1904);
"The Future of Art" (1908);
"S. Aksakov “
"Literature and heroism, etc.
"Books and People" (1908),
"In the West" (1910),
"On the interpretation of artistic works" (1912),
"On the Russian writers, v. 1 (1912)
References
- ^ Zsuzsa Hetényi, In a maelstrom: the history of Russian-Jewish prose (1860-1940), 149
- ^ Zsuzsa Hetényi, In a maelstrom: the history of Russian-Jewish prose (1860-1940), p. 149
- ^ Donald Leowen, The Most Dangerous Art, p. 95
- ^ Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation, p. 275