Rosenheim, Mikhail Pavlovich

Born into a noble family. He studied at the First Cadet Corps (graduated in 1838). He served in equestrian artillery; in 1848 he moved to Petersburg, but until 1866 he continued to serve in artillery (out of order), while at the same time teaching. In 1866 he entered the military legal academy and at the end of the course in 1869, he was appointed lieutenant colonel as a military judge of the Kiev Military District Court, and in February 1870 he was transferred to the same position in the St. Petersburg Military District. In April 1872, Rosenheim was promoted to colonel.

In 1878 he published a historical monograph: "An Essay on the History of the Military Court Institutions in Russia until the Death of Peter the Great" ^[1] . On May 15, 1883, Rosenheim was promoted to major general. He was buried in St. Petersburg at the Nikolsky cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra ^{[2] [3]} .

He began to write in the cadet corps; already in 1837, several of his poems were published by N. A. Polev in “The Son of the Fatherland ”. Being a very modest man, Rosenheim did not attach importance to his writings and did not send them to the editors. Only in the second half of the 1850s did his poems begin to appear quite often in " Domestic Notes ", " Russian Herald " and other publications.

In 1858, the first collection of Rosenheim's poems was published, which brought him literary fame, although in this fame there were much more thorns than roses. Since the end of 1859, he wrote humorous feuilleton in “Domestic Notes” (“Notes of the Looming”) and in “St. Petersburg Gazette”. In 1860 he was editor of the Journal of Horse Breeding and Hunting, and took part in the Ladies' Gazette .

In 1863 - 1865 published a satirical weekly magazine " Zanoza ", which was a great success and up to 5 thousand subscribers, but fell in the fight against censorship obstacles.

In 1864 , Rosenheim's poems came out in a second edition, in 1883 in a third; the posthumous 4th edition was published in 1889 (with a biographical sketch). In the last 20 years of his life, Rosenheim only occasionally spoke with poems, but worked quite actively as a publicist in The Voice of the 1860s, in Russian Speech of the late 1870s. (led "internal review") and other publications. In 1878 he published a monograph based on archival data, "An Essay on the History of Military Courts in Russia until the Death of Peter the Great."

The author of the words of the popular song “Far, far, the steppe has gone beyond the Volga” ^[4] .

The literary memory of Rosenheim mainly rests on the review, which N. A. Dobrolyubov devoted to the first edition of his poems. For the critic of Sovremennik , Rosenheim was a vivid personification of the cheap “courage” and “progressiveness” that even people, who essentially had nothing in common with truly serious social aspirations, had worn in the era of reform and liberalization of the regime after the Crimean campaign . Dobrolyubov laughed at the “civic” pathos with which Rosenheim put forward “bold” theses like the following: do not take bribes , you must always tell the truth, serve “honestly,” etc. Indeed, when progressive fashion ended, Rosenheim completely switched over to the camp of banal patriotism. Just as disapproving, like Dobrolyubov, were Rosenheim and aesthetic critics, for example, Druzhinin . According to the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary , “the main drawback of Rosenheim is extreme roughness and incontinence, sometimes even sloppy texture, vagueness and the absence of any particular thought and mood; it is sometimes difficult to discern against whom and against what this unsuccessful representative of “revealing” and “civic” poetry is fighting. Rosenheim has no purely artistic merits - imagery, accuracy, racyness. ”

Dobrolyubov “fought” against Rosenheim not only with criticism, but also with parodies in the magazine “Whistle” , creating a mask of the “accusatory poet” Konrad Lilienshvager (tragedy of the name of Rosenheim: instead of Rosen 'roses' + Heim' house '[apparently understood by Dobrolyubov as Oheim' uncle '] Lilien' lilies' + Schwager 'father-in-law').

The lack of their own creative manner led to the fact that Rosenheim's poems were often attributed (including in authoritative publications) to Lermontov, Nekrasov and other larger authors.

• Brief Encyclopedia of Literature. T. 6: The saying is “Soviet Russia”. Moscow: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1971. Stlb. 334-335.