Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

Michael P. Alekseev

The bio below comes from a published article and may now be dated.

Mikhail Pavlovich Alekseev

Mikhail Pavlovich Alekseev (1896–1981) was, at the time of his passing, “generally recognized as the most eminent living Russian specialist on comparative literature” (Edgerton 1982, 200), working primarily in comparisons with English, French, and Spanish literature. “In Russian literature, Alekseev’s name is especially prominent in scholarship on Pushkin and Tur­genev” (ibid.). He was born and first educated in Kiev, then Odessa, “completing his thesis on Addison and Steele” (Boss 1984, 394), then taught at Irkutsk, and then Leningrad University, where he re­mained for the rest of his life. Major published coauthored works included History of English Literature (1945) and History of West-European Literatures (1947). “After the Twentieth Party Congress, thanks to Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign, … in 1956 Alekseev was allowed to set up a group under the auspices of the Institute of Russian Literature” of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Boss 1984, 395). William Edgerton (1982, 201) wrote: “Mikhail Pavlovich’s human warmth and generosity of spirit will long be remembered by grateful students now scattered all over the world and by literary scholars at home and abroad whose work he encouraged in innumerable ways.”