Serge Persky

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Serge Persky (originally: Сергей Маркович Перский / Sergej Markowitsch Perskij ; * 1870 in Chernigov , † 1938 in Nice ) was a Franco-Russian writer, translator, journalist and propagandist. Supposedly he also completed a medical degree and taught Russian literature at the Sorbonne .

Life

After studying in Western Europe, Persky did not return to Russia, but devoted himself to translation and journalism. He spent a long time in particular in Switzerland, where he lived in Chernex near Montreux.

He was one of the leading translators of Russian literature into French at the beginning of the 20th century, including the works of Maxim Gorky and Dmitri Mereschkowski . As a journalist he worked for several newspapers controlled by Georges Clemenceau . After the October Revolution , permeated with conspiracy theories, Persky tried, with more than 170 anti-Bolshevik articles that he published in several countries, to incite international public opinion against the young Soviet regime and to discredit it.

Before and after the Swiss national strike in November 1918, he published anti-Soviet articles in the Gazette de Lausanne - purely fictional - in which he wrote about planned anarchist-Bolshevik terrorist attacks around the world, including Switzerland, and allegedly leaked them to him Presented Lenin's instructions for a revolution in Switzerland and the establishment of a Bolshevik dictatorship. In 1919, Persky revealed to the French military attaché in Bern, for whom he worked as an informant, that he was waging a “relentless fight against Bolshevism”. He openly referred to his articles as "ordnance". These articles, described by Willi Gautschi as the “pseudo-Persky forgeries”, contributed significantly to the fear of revolution in the Swiss bourgeoisie and were used for decades in anti-socialist propaganda (including in the anti-Semitic film Die Rote Pest (1938) by Jean-Marie Musy and Franz Riedweg ).

Trivia

Persky was a great admirer of the Catalan-Russian opera singer Olga Codina, Sergei Prokofiev's mother-in-law . He organized a number of concerts for Codina in the 1910s and 1920s and was known to both her mother and daughter Lina, who later became Prokofiev's wife; Persky even wanted to marry Lina to one of his millionaire friends.

In an article in the La Gruyère newspaper in 2001, Persky was wrongly described as the “Russian Minister of Culture under the Tsars” for no reason at all.

Works

Works in French

  • Wania (1905)
  • L'Enfant (1909)
  • Le Pape noir (1909)
  • Tolstoï intimate: souvenirs, récits, propos familiers . Lausanne: Payot, 1909.
  • Les Maîtres du roman russe contemporain . Lausanne: Payot, 1912.
  • La Vie et l'œuvre de Dostoïevsky . Paris: Payot, 1918.
  • De Nicolas II à Lénine . Paris / Lausanne: Payot, 1917–1918.
  • Trois épouses: Nathalie Pouchkine , Anna Dostoïevsky , Sophie Tolstoï (1929)

Translations into French (selection)

  • Nicolas de Monkévitz: La décomposition de l'armée russe: Mémoires d'un général russe . Payot, Paris 1919.
  • Leonid Andrejew: Judas Iscariote; Lazare; Le cadeau . Payot, Paris 1914.
  • Maxim Gorki: Contes d'Italie . Payot, Lausanne 1914.
  • Maxim Gorki: Ma vie d'enfant: mémoires autobiographiques . Calmann-Lévy, Paris 1921.

literature

  • Daniel Artho: “Fake News” supports the revolutionary narrative: Serge Persky's controversial revelations , in: Roman Rossfeld et al. (Ed.): The national strike: Switzerland in November 1918 . Baden 2018. p. 423.
  • Daniel Artho: a diabolical plan to terrorize Switzerland? In: Die Wochenzeitung , November 22, 2018.
  • Daniel Artho: The machinations of the bustling Monsieur Persky. In: Die Wochenzeitung , November 22, 2018.
  • Daniel Artho: Revolution and Bolshevik Terror in Switzerland? The conspiracy propagandist Serge Persky and the interpretation of the Swiss national strike of 1918 , in: Swiss Journal for History 69/2 (2019). Pp. 283-301.
  • Daniel Artho: "A company for violent overthrow": How the conspiracy propagandist Serge Persky manipulated the interpretation of the Swiss national strike of 1918 . In: Johannes Kuber, Michael Butter, Ute Caumanns, Bernd-Stefan Grewe, Johannes Großmann (eds.): From back rooms and secret machinations. Conspiracy theories in the past and present (In dialogue. Contributions from the Academy of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart 3/2020). Pp. 107-120.
  • Michel Caillat, Jean-François Fayet: Le mythe de l'ingérence bolchevique dans la Grève générale de novembre 1918. Histoire d'une construction franco-suisse. In: Traverse . Vol. 25 (2018), H. 2, pp. 213-229.
  • Jean-François Fayet: Les Révolutionnaires Russes et Polonais installés en Suisse pendant la Première Guerre Mondiale. In: Christophe Vuilleumier (ed.): La Suisse et la Guerre de 1914–1918. Geneva 2015, pp. 387-403.
  • Jean-François Fayet, Michel Caillat: La cristallisation du mythe du complot communiste. In: Charles Heimberg et al. (Ed.): Mourir en manifestant: Répressions en démocratie le 9 novembre 1932 en perspective. Lausanne 2008, pp. 61–85.
  • Mort de l'écrivain Serge Persky. In: Gazette de Lausanne. No. 80 of March 21, 1938.
  • Adrian Zimmermann: Fake News: Bombs on the Federal Palace , in: VPOD Magazin , October 2018 . P. 16f.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.calames.abes.fr/pub/#details?id=FileId-1998 .
  2. ↑ http://www.calames.abes.fr/pub/#details?id=FileId-1998
  3. ↑ http://www.letempsarchives.ch/page/GDL_1919_04_23/1
  4. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from August 6, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ^ Willi Gautschi: Helvetische Streiflichter . Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1994, ISBN 978-3-858-23399-8 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  6. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z10BWRkRNnU
  7. ↑ Bruno Jaeggi et al .: Die Rote Pest: Antikommunismus in der Schweiz, in: Film - Kritisches Filmmagazin 1 (1975). Pp. 49-86.
  8. ↑ Daniel Artho: The Revolutionsnarrativ in the movies: The Red Plague of 1938 , in Roman Ross Field et al. (Ed.): The national strike: Switzerland in November 1918 . Baden 2018. p. 427.
  9. ↑ https://www.eda.admin.ch/dam/parl-vor/2nd-world-war/1970-1989/film-die-rote-pest.pdf
  10. ↑ https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/der-altbundesrat-und-sein-hetzfilm-ld.1418663
  11. ^ Simon Morrison: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev. Random House, 2013, ISBN 978-1-448-15626-9 , p. 14 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  12. ↑ http://loisirs.lagrue.ch/uploads/archives/2001/01.07.19/article3.htm
personal data
SURNAME Persky, Serge
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Perskij, Sergei Markowitsch
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-Russian writer and translator
DATE OF BIRTH 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Chernihiv
DATE OF DEATH 1938
Place of death Nice