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D. S. Mirsky is the English pen-name of Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky ((ロシア語:Дми́трий Петро́вич Святопо́лк-Ми́рский)), often known as Prince Mirsky ( – 6 June 1939), a Russian political and literary historian who promoted the knowledge and translations of Russian literature in Britain and of English literature in the Soviet Union. He was born in Kharkov Governorate and died near Magadan. ==Life== A scion of the Svyatopolk-Mirsky family, son of ''knyaz'' Pyotr Dmitrievich Svyatopolk-Mirsky, Imperial Russian Minister of Interior, he relinquished his princely title at an early age. During his school years, he became interested in the poetry of Russian Symbolism and started writing poems himself. He saw service in the Russian army during the World War I, joined the White movement as a member of Denikin's staff and eventually emigrated to Great Britain in 1921. While teaching Russian literature in the University of London, Mirsky published his landmark study ''A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900'', which still remains a standard English-language guide to classical Russian literature. Vladimir Nabokov recommended it to his students as "the best history of Russian literature in any language, including Russian". This work was followed with the ''Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881–1925,'' which was somewhat marred by Mirsky's prejudiced view of Anton Chekhov and his inordinate liking for some of the Russian Formalists. Mirsky was a founding member of the Eurasia Movement and the chief editor of the periodical ''Eurasia'', his own views gradually evolving toward Marxism. He also is usually credited with coining the term National Bolshevism. In 1931, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and asked Maxim Gorky if he could procure his pardon by Soviet authorities. The permission to return to the USSR was granted him in 1932. On seeing him off to Russia, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that "soon they will put a bullet in his head". Five years later, during the Great Purge, Mirsky was arrested by the NKVD. Mirsky’s arrest may have been caused by a chance meeting with his friend, the British historian E. H. Carr who visiting the Soviet Union in 1937.〔Jonathan Haslam, ''The Vices of Integrity, E.H. Carr, 1892–1982'' (London; New York: Verso, 1999), p. 76.〕 Carr stumbled into Prince Mirsky on the streets of Leningrad (modern Saint Petersburg, Russia), and despite Prince Mirsky's best efforts to pretend not to know him, Carr persuaded his old friend to have lunch with him.〔Haslam, ''The Vices of Integrity'', p. 76.〕 Since this was at the height of the ''Yezhovshchina'', and any Soviet citizen who had any unauthorized contact with a foreigner was likely to be regarded as a spy, the NKVD arrested Mirsky as a British spy.〔 He died in one of the gulag labor camps near Magadan in 1939. Although his ''magnum opus'' was eventually published in Russia, Mirsky's reputation in his native country remains sparse. Korney Chukovsky gives a lively portrait of Mirsky in his diary entry for 27 January 1935:
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