“The Thorny Eternity of Mine”: Additions to the Biography of Vladimir Schirovsky

Abstract

The article reconstructs details of the biography of the poet Vladimir Yevgenievich Schirovsky (1909‒1941) based on archival sources. Until today, only the memoirs of his sister-in-law, Aleksandra Dorrer, served as the source of his life’s details. The facts presented in her memoirs had undergone only partial documentary verification. The article establishes Vladimir Schirovsky’s exact date of birth, clarifies the dates and the crucial milestones in the lives of his father, Yevgeny Schirovsky (1850‒1918), and his maternal grandfather Erast Yezhov (1842 – after 1887) using historical records from the Moscow University archives and identifies Schirovsky’s family ties with the noble families of the Yezhovs, Savitskys, Vasilkovskys, and Akaro. Yevgeny Schirovsky, assigned to the lower class of the meschane (urban petit bourgeois) as an illegitimate child of a noble, built an exceptional career as a civil servant. At the peak of his career between 1897 and 1906, he successively held a provincial governorship of the Łomża Governorate, the Kielce Governorate, and the Radom Governorate of the Congress Poland, having risen to the rank of the Privy Councilor (but not to the rank of a senator, as incorrectly thought before based on Aleksandra Dorrer’s account). Yevgeny Schirovsky’s father, Aleksey Kozmich Schirovsky (1805 – after 1869), and grandfather Kozma Alekseyevich Schirovsky (1771‒1849), both physicians who worked at the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor in Moscow alongside Mikhail Andreyevich Dostoevsky, the father of Fyodor Dostoevsky, belonged to the closest circle of friends of the Dostoyevsky family.

Keywords

• russian literature of the 20th century
• writer’s biography
• moscow university
• genealogy
• publication of archival materials