December 17 marks the 140th anniversary of the birth of Yevgeny Ivanovich Borichevsky (1883-1934), a philologist, translator, and one of the first bibliographers in Belarusian literary studies.
Evgeny Borichevsky was born in Minsk in the family of a notary and a collegiate assessor.
He received his secondary education at the Minsk Classical Gymnasium. In 1903-1904, he studied at the University of Berlin, where he took courses in philosophy and literary history, and attended seminars on aesthetics with Professor M. Dessoir. Then he entered the Historical and Philological Faculty of the Imperial Moscow University. At this time, he proved himself to be a talented translator of books: among the translations are the works of B. Christiansen and I. Schultz. E. Borichevsky's thesis "Hartmann's Realism" was awarded a gold medal. After graduation from 1910, he worked at the university. In addition to scientific, he was engaged in pedagogical and literary activities: he taught Russian literature in secondary educational institutions in Moscow and published articles and research results in newspapers and magazines.
From 1918 to 1922, he was the scientific secretary of the Main Museum of the RSFSR, lectured at Moscow and Petrograd Universities. He took part in the creation of the Central Museum of Oriental Art, was a member of its academic board.
In 1921, when recruitment for the Belarusian State University (BSU) was underway, Yevgeny Ivanovich sent an autobiography, an application asking to hire him and a letter of recommendation addressed to the rector of the institution, Vladimir Picheta. On February 21, 1922, Yevgeny Borichevsky was appointed a lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Department of Russian Literature (later he headed the departments of the History of Literary Theory and Western European Literature). At the same time, he was secretary of the presidium of the faculty, on March 15, 1922 he became an associate professor at BSU, and in 1928 he became a professor. Since 1924, he also taught at the Minsk Central Party School. Since 1927, Evgeny Ivanovich has been a researcher at the Institute of Belarusian Culture, then the Institute of Literature and Art of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR.
The period of the 1920s was very fruitful for E. Borichevsky in creative terms. In 1922, his pamphlet "The World of Art in the images of Poetry" and the article "The Philosophy of Expressionism" were published. In 1923 – the article "On the nature of aesthetic judgment", in 1925 - "Monument to Pushkin: the experience of interpretation". A number of publications were published in the magazines "Maladnyak", "Uzvyshsha", "Polymya" ("20 years to Belarusian printing", "Mother’s Gift" by A. Harun", etc.). He took part in the preparation of the Collection of works by M. Bahdanovich (vol. 1-2, 1927-1928).
In 1927, the books "The theory of sonets" and "Poetry of literary genres" were published, which explained the nature of art in its relationship with socio-historical and social phenomena. As examples, the author considered the works of Belarusian writers, including A. Rypinsky, F. Bagushevich, M. Bahdanovich, Ya. Kupala, Ya. Kolas, Z. Byadulya, M. Charot, V. Dubouka, etc. Based on these works, a training course "Poetics" was created and a textbook was written.
You can learn about the famous literary critic E.I. Borichevsky and his works from the electronic resources of the National Library of Belarus: the electronic catalog and the online encyclopedia "Belarus in persons and events".
The material was prepared by the Research Department of Bibliography.
