Samarin, Roman Mikhailovich

Born in the family of a literary critic, professor of Kharkov University Mikhail Pavlovich Samarin. In the 1920s, parents divorced, and Roman was raised by his mother, Julia Ivanovna Samarina. Mikhail Pavlovich Samarin maintained friendly relations with his son. A strong influence on Roman Samarin had a literary critic A.I. Beletsky , with whom they were close friends of families. In his youth, he entered the literary association "Rush" together with Lev Kopelev . Published since 1928.

In 1933 he graduated from the Kharkov Pedagogical Institute of Professional Education . Candidate of Philological Sciences (1938, dissertation on the work of A. d'Aubigne ).

During the Great Patriotic War he was evacuated in Tomsk ; was expelled from the party "for non-payment of membership fees" ^[2] . He worked at Moscow State University since 1944.

Since 1947, he was the head of the Department of the History of Foreign Literatures of the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University , defended his doctoral dissertation “The Creative Way of J. Milton ” (1948), and since 1953, he headed the department of the history of foreign literature of the Institute of World Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences . Dean of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University in 1956-1961. (Samarin held all these posts, remaining non-partisan). Corresponding Member of the Academy of Arts of the GDR (since 1965).

In the summer of 1973, he left IMLI as a result of a conflict with director B. L. Suchkov ^[2] .

In his own way he “served the Soviet power” faithfully. He was non-partisan, out of caution, he did not join either the party or even the Writers' Union , but was listed in non-partisan Bolsheviks. The main formula that determined his behavior was “what are you willing to do?”, But not in a straightforward and vulgar, but in a rather subtle and veiled form. ^[3]

According to the memoirs of Liliana Lungina , who studied with Samarin, telling, in particular, about the role of Samarin in the campaign to “ fight against cosmopolitanism ” at Moscow State University,

a man like Samarin, who in a normal society would not have done harm to anyone, in the atmosphere of the early fifties became a real bastard ^[4] .

Samarin was a wonderful rhetorician . But no Soviet school, with its boring literature lessons, could do more harm to fragile minds than Roman Mikhailovich’s lectures. The literature in his presentation was a reflection of the ruthless class struggle, and only these positions of this or that author needed to be learned, only from this point of view to evaluate styles, trends, aesthetics. But Roman Mikhailovich himself was an esthete, a connoisseur of “ damned poets ”. Truly scary and, alas, a figure characteristic of that era ^[5]

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Here is how Samarin describes the famous linguist Alexander Zholkovsky , who entered Moscow State University in 1954:

The dean was R. M. Samarin, who sought to cover up his sad anti-Semitic fame of the 1949 sample deliberately with his own manners, as if from Boccaccio (he read to us the literature of the Renaissance ). Walking along the corridor of the third floor, thick, bald, with a pipe in his mouth, he could scatter first-year students fighting with his own hands to throw over the shoulder paternalistic: “Schoolchildren!” ^[6]

• Poems about the "spent" Cossacks and the recognition of all rights in liberated Russia by the Third Reich A. Hitler in 1943
• Nikolyukin A. N. Samarin, Roman Mikhailovich // Brief Literary Encyclopedia / Ch. ed. A.A. Surkov . - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia , 1962-1978.
• Biography on the site "Annals of Moscow University"