Philologist and writer Mikhail Bezrodny has died

A message came from Heidelberg about the death of one of the most famous philologists from Tartu, Mikhail Bezrodny. He was ill for a long time, said goodbye to his family and friends with words, and to his readers these days with a book of commentaries on “The Queen of Spades” that was being published, but this death at the age of 66 cut short his life at its very peak.

In the first responses to the death of Mikhail Bezrodny, the word “brilliant” most often varies: brilliant philologist, brilliant writer, lecturer, blogger, interlocutor. “The main myth (and pure truth) about Misha is that he was always incredibly brilliant,” “handsome, witty, so bright that sometimes I wanted to close my eyes,” “students idolized him.”

In the 1970s, he studied in Tartu (“And the most talented student goes his own way, like Misha Bezrodny,” Yuri Lotman later complained), and in the 1980s he worked in the St. Petersburg Publichka. Then he defended his dissertation on Blok, went to Germany, and taught in Heidelberg in 2003.

Outside the philological circle, his name became known in the mid-1990s, when Bezrodny’s book was published first in the magazine “New Literary Review” and then in the Ivan Limbach Publishing House “End Quote”.

This title itself immediately turned into a meme. In a story written at the same time by Natalya Tolstoy, there is even an episodic character – a fashionable playwright who writes an absurdist play, the hero of which “gets off the stove, begins to spin around the hut, then approaches the window, climbs onto the windowsill and, shouting “End quote,” jumps out of the window.” .

For the next generation of humanities scholars following Bezrodny’s generation, his book instantly became a password, a shibboleth by which they identified their own. She fell into a time rift – and became one of the symbols of this rift. Cultural historian Maria Mayofis, recalling the daily “collective reading aloud” of “The End of the Quote” in her student group in the summer of 1995, defines Bezrodny’s text as “the concentrated air of the era – the era of farewell to the Soviet and the non-Soviet that opposed it, to the prevailing in this non-Soviet Soviet Soviet environment in the 1970s with forms of lyrical and ironic expression and, of course, with intertext – as part of literary creativity and literary analysis.”

The reviewers immediately looked for noble ancestors in the “End Quote,” declaring the author the heir to the Rozanov tradition. Bezrodny himself did not seem to mind, calling one of his next exercises in the same edition of “philological prose” “The Third Box”: with an obvious reference to “Fallen Leaves” (and at the same time – ironically – to the expression “to talk to three boxes”) . In fact, Bezrodny doesn’t have too much in common with Rozanov, neither in themes nor in techniques.

Once upon a time, Boris Eikhenbaum introduced the concept of an appropriate form – a form that coincides with the demands of the era. Bezrodny’s book turned out to be just such a “proper form” for its time, a genre-forming work that set a new mode of speech existence for a philologist.

In it, everything coexisted with everything: literary observations, memoir sketches, puns, centons, poetic fragments and other, in the words of Mikhail Gasparov, “records and extracts.” In fact, it was a blog on paper – several years before the appearance of LiveJournal and the mass migration of Russian philologists there (including, of course, Bezrodny himself).

His actual literary works are much more traditional, their readership is narrower. But without Bezrodny’s articles about Blok, Remizov, Mandelstam, Khodasevich, without his pioneering works on the history of “silver-era” institutions – the philosophical magazine “Logos” or the symbolist publishing house “Musaget”, without the exemplary essay on anti-Jewish phobias and mythologies of the early 20th century “On Fear of Judaism” “Andrei Bely” will not be missed by any researcher of that period of Russian culture, which is commonly called the Silver Age.

Recently, the publishing houses Esterum and Clean Sheet are releasing a 400-page “Experience of a commentary on the Queen of Spades” – the opus magnum of his last years. Another commentary by Bezrodny, to Yuri Tynyanov’s story “Second Lieutenant Kizhe,” remained unfinished—and it is not yet clear whether it will see the light of day. Although you can expect anything from Bezrodny, which he himself warned about: “No, all of me will not die, they attacked the wrong one!”

Mikhail Edelshtein