Alexei Michailowitsch Gmyrjow

Alexei Michailowitsch Gmyrjow in a reproduction from 1986

Alexei Michailowitsch Gmyrjow ( Russian Алексей Михайлович Гмырёв ; born March 29, 1887 in Smolensk ; † September 24, 1911 in Kherson ) was a Russian poet and communist who died while imprisoned in Kherson prison.

Life

He was born in 1887 as the son of a railway conductor in Smolensk , Russia. He lost his mother at the age of nine and his father died six years later. In search of work, Alexei Gmyrew moved to Mykolaiv and worked in a shipyard . From 1903 he was involved in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and took an active part in the 1905 Russian Revolution in the Mykolaiv region. After the failure of the revolution, Gmyrew was repeatedly arrested and exiled to Arkhangelsk Province in May 1906 . After escaping from exile , Gymrev was arrested again in September 1906 and sentenced to six years and eight months of hard labor.

As early as 1905 he began to write poems , most of which were written in prison. During his detention, Gymrew suffered greatly from being isolated from the outside world. At the same time he expresses in his texts the belief that the strivings of the revolutionary working class cannot be stopped by imprisonment and repression . In his work, Gymrew called for the overthrow of the old system and consistent work on building socialism .

At the age of 24, he died in 1911 in Cherson prison of complications from consumption , after spending around a quarter of his life in prison. During his lifetime Gmyrew published only about ten poems, other works only appeared posthumously (including in Pravda ). After the October Revolution, Gmyrew's literary estate was recognized. Collections of his poems have been published by various publishers in the Soviet Union and have been praised by literary critics. In his theoretical work on proletarian poetry, the Russian philosopher and Marxist theorist Alexander Bogdanow described Gmyrew's poem “Das Rote Lied” as a prime example of proletarian poetry. It is the only known poem by Gmyrew that has been translated into German.

The composer Dmitri Shostakovich set some of his poems to music, and in 1968 a monument to Alexei Gmyrew was erected in Mykolaiv.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ANNO, Die Rote Fahne, 1920-10-17, page 4. Retrieved on May 12, 2020 . 
2. ↑ Daniel Jamritsch: Alexei Gmyrew - A revolutionary poets from Russia. In: Proletkult.at. Retrieved May 12, 2020 .