Mikhail Andreevich Ossorgin

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Mikhail Andreevich Ossorgin

Mikhail Andreyevich Ossorgin ( Russian Михаил Андреевич Осоргин , actually Mikhail Andreyevich Ilyin , Михаил Андреевич Ильин ) (born October 7, jul. / 19th October  1878 greg. In Perm , Russian Empire ; † 27. November 1942 in Chabris , France ) was a Russian writer and journalist. After his emigration to France in 1922, he was taboo in the Soviet Union .

Life

Michail Ossorgin comes from the Russian landed gentry . His father was a lawyer in the civil service. He studied law at the Moscow State University . Because he participated in student unrest, he was temporarily by the University relegated . In 1902 he passed the state examination and found his first job in a commercial court . He also worked as a legal advisor to the welfare service for orphans and the Society for the Guardianship of the Poor. He wrote a legal work entitled “The remuneration of workers in accidents” ( “Вознаграждение рабочих за несчастные случаи” ).

In 1904 he joined the Social Revolutionary Party . In his apartment illegal meetings were held, and it housed the secret police Okhrana looking for terrorists . He took an active part in the 1905 Russian Revolution , the uprisings against tsarist rule . He was arrested but shortly released on bail .

He fled to Italy via Scandinavia and Germany . In Genoa he was accepted into a villa owned by Russian emigrants . He became Italy correspondent for reform-oriented Russian newspapers. He also made contact with Italian futurists and published essays about them, which received a lot of attention in Russia. In 1911 Ossorgin declared his resignation from the Social Revolutionary Party, and three years later he joined a Masonic lodge in Genoa.

In 1913, now 35 years old, he married 17-year-old Rose Ginsberg, daughter of the Zionist activist Achad Ha'am , whom he had met in Italy, and converted to Judaism . The marriage lasted ten years.

In 1916 he returned to Moscow , where he continued to work as a journalist . After the February Revolution of 1917 , he was elected chairman of the Russian Union of Journalists. He also became a member of a commission that sifted through the archives of the dissolved Ochrana . He wrote mainly for socialist- oriented newspapers, his publications included the brochure The Ochrana and their secrets ("Охранное отделение и его секреты").

After the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks in 1917, he wrote comments against the new regime. In 1919 he was arrested by the Cheka Bolshevik secret police , but was soon released because fellow writers vouched for him.

In July 1921 he joined the All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Hungry (Pomgol); at the top were the two politburo members Lev Kamenew and Alexei Rykov , and the writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Korolenko were also members. But the committee bothered the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin because it gave the impression abroad that his policy had led to the famine in Soviet Russia. A month later, after signing an aid contract with the Herbert Hoover- led American Relief Administration , he ordered the arrest of committee leaders. Ossorgin was one of those arrested. Thanks to an intervention by the Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen , who also organized aid for the starving in Russia on behalf of the League of Nations , Ossorgin and other arrested people escaped the death sentences that had already been passed and were released.

For several months he went to Kazan , where he worked for the Literaturnaja Gazeta . On his return to Moscow he opened a bookstore together with the philosopher Nikolai Berdjajew , with whom he was friends. In the fall of 1922, both were forcibly evacuated on Lenin's orders, along with a large group of intellectuals, including numerous university professors . Since the deportation took place on the waterway, it got the name " Philosophenschiff " in the contemporary press .

After staying in Berlin for several months , Ossorgin settled in Paris in autumn 1923. He became an employee of the liberal Russian émigré newspaper Poslednije Novosti ("Latest News"). From 1925 to 1940 he was active in several Masonic lodges that belonged to the Grand Orient de France .

In the Soviet Union he was viewed as an opponent of the regime. In the secret proceedings against the writer Isaak Babel in the context of the Stalin Purges in May 1939, he was charged with several meetings with Ossorgin on a trip to Paris.

After the German invasion of France in 1940, Ossorgin and his second wife, whom he married while emigrating, left the French capital, where the Gestapo tried to control the Russian exile community. The couple settled in the village of Chabris. There he died at the age of 64. He was buried in Chabris.

Literary work

As a high school student he published his first texts in local newspapers, the pseudonym Ossorgin was his grandmother's maiden name.

In his student years he published other stories. He became known to a larger readership with his columnist volume of reports "Sketches of Modern Italy" (1913). He translated the drama Turandot by Carlo Gozzi and comedies by Carlo Goldoni from Italian .

In the years after the Russian Revolution he published other stories and children's fairy tales in Moscow and Kazan. His first international success was the novel Siwzew Wraschek (1928), which from 1914 to 1920 mainly takes place in the Sivzew-Wraschek-Alley of the same name in the center of Moscow. In it he portrayed the horrors in the trenches of the First World War , during the turmoil of revolution in 1917 and the Russian Civil War from a pacifist attitude . The novel has been translated into several languages, including German.

Among the subsequent book publications, the novels "Story of the Sister" (1931), "Witness of History" (1932) about terrorists in the Tsarist Empire and "The Freemason " (1937) received greater attention in literary criticism ; in the latter he portrayed the emergence of a totalitarian social order, but also self-ironically worked on his personal commitment . In 1940, under the influence of the German invasion of France , he wrote the autobiographical volume “In a quiet place in France”, which appeared posthumously .

In the Soviet Union , Ossorgin's work was taboo until perestroika . In 1990, "Siwzew Wraschek" was published in Moscow with an edition of 150,000 copies.

Works (selection)

  • Očerki sovremennoj Italii ( sketches from today's Italy ), St. Petersburg 1913
  • Sivcev Vražek, Paris 1928, 2nd edition 1929; Moskovskij Rabočij, Moscow 1990, OCLC 1070735094 .
    • The wolf circles. A novel from Moscow . Translated by Rebecca Candreia. Drei Masken-Verlag, Munich 1929.
    • A street in Moscow . Translated by Ursula Keller with the assistance of Natalja Sharandak. The Other Library (Volume 368), Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-8477-2012-6 .
  • Povest 'o sestre ( Tale from the sister ), Paris 1931
    • My sister's story . Translated by Waldemar Jollos. Artemis-Verlag, Zurich 1944.
  • Svidetel 'istorii . Paris 1932
    • Witnesses of time . Translation by Ursula Keller. Berlin: The Other Library, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-8477-0382-2 .
  • Vol'nyj Kamenščik ( The Freemason ), Paris 1937.
  • Proissestvie zelenogo mira ( An Incident in the Green World ), Sofia 1938.
  • V tichom mestečke v Francii ( In a quiet place in France ), Paris 1952.

literature

  • Donald M. Fiene: The Life and Works of MA Osorgin. Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1973.
  • Gleb Struve: Russkaja literatura v izgnanii. 3-e izd. Moscow / Paris 1996, pp. 184-186.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ biographical information, unless otherwise noted: A Russian Cultural Revival. Ed. Tamira Pachmuss. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville 1981, pp. 189-191.
  2. ↑ a b Vol'fgang Kazak : Leksikon russkoj literatury XX veka. Moscow 1996, p. 298.
  3. ↑ Literatura russkogo zarubež`ja. Red. AI Smirnovoj. Moscow 2006, pp. 246-247.
  4. ↑ a b c d Michail Andreevic Osorgin (Il'in) Enciklopedija "Krugosvet"
  5. ↑ Russkij dvorjanin i evrejskij vopros Lechaim , August 2005, Tamuz 5765-8 (160).
  6. ↑ Nicolas Werth : A state against its people , in: The Black Book of Communism , Munich / Zurich 1998, pp. 138-140.
  7. ^ Nicolas Werth: A state against its people , in: The Black Book of Communism , Munich / Zurich 1998, p. 147.
  8. ↑ a b A. I. Serkov, Commentary, in: Michail Osorgin: Vol'nyj kamščik. Moscow 1992.
  9. ↑ Vitaly Schentalinski : The resurrected word. Persecuted Russian writers in their final letters, poems, and records. Bergisch Gladbach 1996, p. 65.
  10. ↑ a b Russkoe zarubež`e. Zolotaja kniga emigracii. Pervaja step 'XX veka. Moscow 1997, p. 1097.
  11. ^ Gleb Struve: Russkaja literatura v izgnanii. 3-e izd. Moscow / Paris 1996, pp. 185–186.
personal data
SURNAME Ossorgin, Michail Andrejewitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Осоргин, Михаил Андреевич (Cyrillic)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian author
DATE OF BIRTH October 19, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Perm
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 1942
Place of death Chabris , France