Multifariousness Under Duress: Gustav Špet's Scattered Lives

To a significant degree, this study is meant as a contribution to clearing the ground for a proper scholarly biography of Gustav Shpet (1879-1937) which someone might undertake to write in the future (for a first helpful attempt, see Ščedrina 2004). To that end, I draw on previously unheeded published and unpublished sources, bringing together strains of research that have so far remained unconnected. My prime concern will be to establish the most significant aspects of Shpet's involvement with Russian and Soviet culture (including literature, translation, and the theatre). The examination I undertake is intent on revealing his scattered talents and energy, and - in the years after 1927 - his tragically multifarious life under the political duress of Stalinism. I begin by analysing Shpet's intellectual and political predicament at GAKhN in the late 1920s, an episode of crucial significance for his marginalisation and brutal victimisation during the 1930s. As I will demonstrate, the roots of Shpet's instability lay back in the early 1920s, yet it was not until the Stalinisation of culture and scholarship gathered momentum in the second half of the 1920s that his position of leadership and public visibility grew untenable. After focusing on the propaganda campaign against GAKhN and the consequences it had for Shpet, I work back chronologically to review Shpet's immersion in Russian Symbolism and his contacts with the Imagists. In the final two sections I offer an analysis of Shpet's career as a translator and of his theatre affiliations, both falling largely in the 1930s and shaped in no small measure by the ideological constraints of Stalinism. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.