have lunch with him. Since this was at the height of the Yezhovshchina, and any Soviet citizen who had any unauthorised contact with a foreigner was likely to be regarded as a spy, the NKVD arrested Mirsky as a British spy. In April 1937, he was denounced in the journal Literaturnaya Gazeta as a "filthy Wrangelist and White Guard officer". He died in one of the gulag labour camps near Magadan in June 1939 and was buried on the 7th of that month. He was rehabilitated in 1962. Although his magnum opus was eventually published in Russia, Mirsky's reputation in his native country remains sparse. Korney Chukovsky gives a lively portrait of Mirsky in his diary entry for 27 January 1935: I liked him enormously: the vast erudition, the sincerity, the literary talent, the ludicrous beard and ludicrous bald spot, the suit which, though made in England, hung loosely on him, shabby and threadbare, the way he had of coming out with a sympathetic ee-ee-ee (like a guttural piglet squeal) after each sentence you uttered—it was all so amusing and endearing. Though he had very little money—he's a staunch democrat—he did inherit his well-born ancestors' gourmandise. His stomach will be the ruin of him. Every day he leaves his wretched excuse for a cap and overcoat with the concierge and goes into the luxurious restaurant [of the Hotel National in Moscow], spending no less than forty rubles on a meal (since he drinks as well as eats) plus four to tip the waiter and one to tip the concierge. 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." George Orwell was highly critical of The Intelligentsia of Great Britain but Tariq Ali had a more favourable assessment of this book. Selected publications Anthology of Russian poetry (1924) Modern Russian Literature (1925) Pushkin (1926) A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900 in two volumes (1926, 1927); repr. Knopf (1958), Northwestern University Press (1999) Contemporary Russian Literature: From 1881 to 1925 (1926) A History of Russia (1928)' Lenin (London: Holme Press, 1931). Russia: