66 Facts About Mark Slonim

Mark Lvovich Slonim was a Russian politician, literary critic, scholar and translator.

Mark Slonim was a lifelong member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and, in 1917, served as its deputy for Bessarabia in the Russian Constituent Assembly.

Mark Slonim joined the Samara Government during the early phases of the Civil War, opposing both the Bolsheviks and the conservative elements of the White movement.

Mark Slonim, who was an Italian-trained literary scholar, became Volya Rossiis literary theorist and columnist.

Mark Slonim argued, against conservatives such as Zinaida Gippius, that the exiles needed to appreciate changes occurring in the Soviet Union and became one of the first popularizers of Soviet writers in the West.

Mark Slonim was one of the main backers of poet Marina Tsvetaeva.

In 1928, convinced that Russian literature in exile was in fact dead, Mark Slonim moved to Paris and, as an anti-fascist, opened up to Soviet patriotism.

Mark Slonim escaped World War II and arrived to the United States aboard the SS Navemar, spending the 1940s and '50s as a teacher at Sarah Lawrence College.

Mark Slonim continued to publish tracts and textbooks on Russian literary topics, familiarizing the American public with the major trends of Soviet poetry and fiction.

Mark Slonim spent his final years in Geneva, where he translated Andrei Bely's Silver Dove and worked sporadically on his memoirs.

Mark Slonim was born in the Russian Empire's port city of Odessa, although some sources mistakenly have Novgorod-Severskiy, Chernihiv Governorate.

Mark Slonim's elder brother Vladimir was born in Odessa in 1887.

Mark Slonim, who regarded himself as a libertarian socialist rather than a Marxist, worked on establishing "self-instruction circles", circulating banned literature among students, artisans and workers, and traveled to Europe to meet with Osip Minor.

Mark Slonim supported the Russian Provisional Government and its "defensist" policies against the Left Esers, with public disputations against Vladimir Karelin and Maria Spiridonova.

Mark Slonim took his seat in the Eser landslide win, and, aged 23, was the youngest parliamentarian.

Mark Slonim was present in the Assembly on the morning of January 19,1918, when the Bolsheviks dissolved it by force and opened fire on the supporting crowds.

Mark Slonim later fled to Samara, where the Constituent Assembly had formed its own "Committee of Members" government.

Mark Slonim joined the latter, then, upon its merger into the Provisional All-Russian Government, moved to Omsk.

Mark Slonim's party sent him abroad as a member of its Foreign Delegation, which originally existed to persuade the West not to recognize Alexander Kolchak as Russia's Supreme Ruler.

In November 1918, Mark Slonim had lost his Bessarabian constituency, as the region united with Romania.

Mark Slonim argued that Bessarabia had not been renounced by Russia, not truly annexed by the Romanian Kingdom.

Mark Slonim joined a self-appointed team of politicians and landowners who claimed to speak for Bessarabia, and attended the Paris Peace Conference to lobby for the Russian cause.

Mark Slonim, seconded by Tsyganko, circulated rumors of "unheard-of atrocities" committed by the Romanian Army, such as the massacre of 53 people in one village of after the Khotyn Uprising, and the torturing of many others.

Mark Slonim explained that he would never write for the right-wing press; in a later reply, Mussolini insisted that his budding fascist movement was not in fact reactionary.

Mark Slonim followed up with an essay on Bolshevik Proletkult and Futurism, taken up by Henri Gregoire's monthly, Le Flambeau.

At this early stage, Mark Slonim derided Soviet literary productions, and described the better poets as incompatible with communist dogmas.

Mark Slonim was co-opted to write for the Russian-language emigre magazine Volya Rossii.

Beyond them, Mark Slonim saw himself as a legatee of the Decembrists.

Mark Slonim himself was a noted adversary of Eurasianism and theories of Russian exceptionalism, which understood Bolshevism as compatible with nationalist ideas.

Mark Slonim interpreted Bolshevism as a "Jacobin" experiment in state control; he still believed in the regime's inevitable failure, and in the reemergence of democratic Russia.

Mark Slonim looked with political optimism to the unfolding of the New Economic Policy, which took Russia back to grassroots capitalism.

Mark Slonim searched for clues that communist writers were growing disenchanted with the Soviet state, and kept records about the "more tiresome and woeful" literature of agitprop.

However, Mark Slonim's encouragement had a perverse effect: in Russia, authors praised by Mark Slonim or sampled in Volya Rossii were singled out as potential enemies of the regime.

In order not to expose the author's direct contacts with the emigres, Mark Slonim claimed that these were back-translations from Czech and English reprints.

Mark Slonim became a backer of Tsvetaeva and her husband Sergei Efron, who had settled in Prague.

Mark Slonim became a friend, confidant, and dedicated promoter of Tsvetaeva, even though she declined interest in Eser ideology and political matters in general.

Mark Slonim was critical of her affair with K B Rodzevitch, whom he regarded as a "dull, mediocre" man.

Mark Slonim noted that, from 1926 on, the Foreign Delegation had only relied on Soviet publications for understanding the goings-on in Russia, and argued that Soviet literature could be followed for its documentary value.

Mark Slonim himself published an introduction to Russian literature in the 1927 edition of Slovansky Prehled.

Mark Slonim's skepticism was showing in his political essays, where he asserted that the Eser cause had been stifled by the 1922 Show Trials.

In 1927, Mark Slonim purchased a printing press in Paris, where he hoped to relaunch Volya Rossii.

Mark Slonim ultimately abandoned the plan and, in 1928, simply relocated to Paris, together with Stalinskii and Sukhomlin.

Mark Slonim remained skeptical of this "mysticism", while noting that the expanding Stalinist regime had emerged from industrialization as a "petty bourgeois" force, its appeal increased among emigre monarchists and Eurasianists.

Mark Slonim's articles were regularly featured in other emigre publications: Sotsialist-Revolyutsioner, Problemy and Novaya Gazeta in Paris; Russkiy Arkhiv of Belgrade; and the American Moskva.

Mark Slonim was focusing his attention on writing counter-propaganda descriptions of Socialist Realism, which was entering the official Soviet literary and political discourse under Joseph Stalin.

Mark Slonim looked for tensions between the official dogma and writers who still cultivated individualism in its various forms, citing works by Pasternak, Artyom Vesyoly, Yury Libedinsky, and Leonid Leonov.

Mark Slonim welcomed Stalin's decision to disband the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, seeing it as a "Charter of Liberation" for the nonconformist authors.

In Paris, Mark Slonim set up his own literary society, Kochev'ye, its name probably alluding to the primitivist aesthetics of the Left Esers.

Mark Slonim worked on translations and on editing books for print: in 1930, Cestmir Jerabek's Svet hori; and in 1934, Adele Hommaire de Hell's Memoires d'une aventuriere.

Mark Slonim was for years critical of emigres who asked to be resettled in the Soviet Union, denouncing Efron's work for the NKVD-sponsored Union for Repatriation.

In 1934, Mark Slonim had resumed his conferencing on Lenin, networking with Italian anti-fascists such as Oddino Morgari and Alberto Meschi, and being followed around by Mussolini's OVRA.

Mark Slonim came to agree with the basic tenets of Soviet thinking: he believed that democracy was doomed, and that the world was becoming split into two camps, of communism and fascism.

Mark Slonim put out in 1935 a sympathetic book on the ill-fated expedition of SS Chelyuskin, followed in 1937 by Les onzes republiques sovietiques, at Editions Payot.

In 1938, Mark Slonim translated Viktor Shklovsky's Voyage de Marco Polo.

That year, Mark Slonim completed a version of Bunin's Liberation of Tolstoy, published by Gallimard but disliked by the author.

When Lebedev abandoned the REOD and moved to America in 1936, Mark Slonim continued his work.

Mark Slonim completed the journey, despite the Navemars "criminally inadequate" facilities, alongside friends Zosa Szajkowski and Mark Zborowski.

Mark Slonim initially lectured on Russian topics at Yale, Chicago and Penn, before becoming, in 1943, a professor of Russian and comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence College, Yonkers.

In February 1945, Mark Slonim finally met Nabokov at a dinner party in New York.

Mark Slonim followed up in 1953 with a second volume, Modern Russian Literature, covering the period from Anton Chekhov to the 1950s, and a biographical study, Tri lyubi Dostoyevskogo.

Mark Slonim returned to Italy on a research trip, employed by La Sapienza University's Institute for Slavic Philology, and, in 1954, edited the collection Modern Italian Short Stories.

Additionally, Mark Slonim worked with Harvey Breit on a Signet anthology of love stories, which appeared in 1955 as This Thing Called Love.

Mark Slonim retired from Sarah Lawrence in 1962, and from teaching in 1965, living the rest of his life in Switzerland, where he was animator of a Russian literary club.

Mark Slonim contributed regularly to reviews and encyclopedias, answering queries posed by his younger colleagues, and supporting the Sarah Lawrence graduate program in Switzerland.

Mark Slonim arranged for print Sofiya Pregel's Last Poems.

Mark Slonim died in 1976 in the French resort of Beaulieu-sur-Mer.