Criticism
Malcolm Muggeridge, who met Mirsky after his return to USSR, apparently met one of the author's critics, a French correspondent to Russia named Luciani, who had this to say of Mirsky:
Mirsky had pulled off the unusual feat of managing to be a parasite under three regimes — as a prince under Czarism, as a professor under Capitalism, and as an homme-de-lettres under Communism.
Mirsky is familiar today partly because he is mentioned in George Orwell's work The Road to Wigan Pier, where Orwell is highly critical of The Intelligentsia of Great Britain. Thirty years later, however, Tariq Ali gave a more favourable assessment in his The Coming British Revolution.
Read more about this topic: D. S. Mirsky
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)