William gerhardie biography

William Alexander Gerhardie OBE FRSL (21 November 1895 – 15 July 1977) was an Anglo-Russian novelist and playwright.
William Alexander Gerhardie was born in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1895.
William Alexander Gerhardie (San Pietroburgo, 21 novembre 1895 – Londra, 15 luglio 1977) è stato uno scrittore e drammaturgo inglese.

•

William Gerhardie was born in St Petersburg in 1895, and largely grew up there. He served in the British missions to Petersburg and Vladivostok after the beginning of the Bolshevik rise to power, soon after which his first novel, Futility, was praised hysterically for its adherence to what the subtitle called ‘Russian Themes’. Gerhardie’s book on Anton Chekhov was the first study of the writer published outside Russia in any language. And yet he spent much of his life denying any suggestion that he was a Russian.

When Futility, a tragicomic novel of the Russian civil war, was published in 1922, it drove the literary world into a fervour. Happily sidestepping Gerhardie’s disclaimer that ‘The I in this book is not me’, critics of the calibre of Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, Arnold Bennett and others made Gerhardie – a callow man in his mid-20s just finishing an education at Oxford delayed by the war – an almost overnight sensation.

Critics identified Gerhardie’s experiences with those of Andrei Andreiech, the novel’s hero. They proclaimed that Gerhardie had in fact writt

•

Biography

Forget Waugh, Powell, Greene and Co. When it comes to the twentieth century English comic novel, William Gerhardie is the main man. The aforementioned Waugh said of him I have talent, but he has genius. Waugh’s talent is debatable. Gerhardie’s talent and genius are not. Yet, despite the fact that many critics have supported his claims, that his publishers have republished his works on several occasions and that many writers have recognised him as an influence, his works go in and out of print, the only biography of him sold badly and is also out of print and he is not generally recognised as one of the English lit greats. Standard literary histories give him short shrift. Malcolm Bradbury‘s The Modern British Novel mentions him only in passing, as does the Pelican Guide to English Literature, calling his novels exquisitely poised and amusing, if slightly inane (this is written by a man whose main writing is about Shakespeare, Blake and the Victorians and therefore would not know a comic novel if it hit him in the face).

So what is the problem

•

William Gerhardie

William Alexander Gerhardie (San Pietroburgo, 21 novembre1895 – Londra, 15 luglio1977) è stato uno scrittore e drammaturgoinglese.

Gerhardie (o Gerhardi: lo scrittore aggiunse la e da sé nel 1971) fu uno degli scrittori in lingua inglese più apprezzati negli anni '20. Le sue prime opere ricevettero il plauso di H. G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh e Graham Greene. Dal 1938 smise di pubblicare.

Biografia

[modifica | modifica wikitesto]

La famiglia, benestante, faceva parte della comunità inglese di San Pietroburgo. Il padre Charles era un ricco industriale d'origine belga: trasferì la famiglia a Londra nel 1913. William, che aveva cominciato gli studi in Russia, studiò al Kensington College di Londra (1913-1916) e, a 24 anni, al Worcester College di Oxford. Durante la prima guerra mondiale venne mandato in Russia, presso l'ambasciata inglese della sua città natale, poi nella missione militare in Siberia.

Dopo la guerra viaggiò molto. Il suo primo romanzo, Futility (1922) fu scritto a Cambridge. La storia, in cui il protagonista corteggia inutilmente la f