Arkady Gornfeld
Arkady Gornfeld | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Occupation | translator, literary critic, essayist |
| Literary movement | “Reasonable Maverick" |
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. After his childhood in Ukraine, 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]
Wrath of Lenin
In 1922, Lenin personally listed Gornfeld among a list of thinkers harmful to the Revolution, writing to his successor:[3]
Comrade Stalin!
On the matter of deporting the Mensheviks, Popular Socialists, Kadets and the like from Russia, I would like to ask several questions in view of the fact that this operation, initiated before my leave, has not been completed to this day.
[...] Peshekhonov, Miakotin, Gorenfeld? [...] I think all of them should be deported. They are more harmful than any SR [moderate socialist], because more cunning. [...]
But unlike others on Lenin’s list, Gornfeld remained in the Soviet Union.
Osip Mandelstam Feud
In 1928, a printer’s error led Gornfeld to believe that the dissident poet Osip Mandelstam had plagiarized his translation of the German Till Eulenspiegel fables, claiming them as his own. In fact, Gornfeld’s name had gone missing from Mandelstam’s work only in an oversight. Nevertheless, Gornfeld attacked Mandelstam in a letter to the Red Evening Gazette, likening the alleged plagiarism to a theft of a fur coat.[4]
The furor inspired Mandelstam’s book The Fourth Prose, in which he flung anti-Semitic remarks at 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.”[5]
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
- ^ Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin, p. 169
- ^ 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