Mikhail Alekseev as an Anglicist: Prehistory

The article deals with the early work of the outstanding Russian philologist academician M.P. Alekseev (1896–1981). A brilliant connoisseur of classical Russian literature, primarily the works of A.S. Pushkin and I.S. Turgenev, the author of numerous works on the history of foreign literature, mainly Western and Eastern European, he was the largest comparativist in our country, a historian of Russian-French, Russian-German, Russian-Spanish, Russian-Portuguese, Russian- Italian, Russian-Hungarian and Russian-Polish literary ties of various eras. However, he modestly considered only the literature of England and Russian-English literary and cultural relations as the main areas of his scientific interests. His studies of the history of English literature began with the translation from German of the pioneering article by the Austrian anglicist, Professor Karl Brunner of the University of Innsbruck, Wirtschaftslage und Literatur (1925). This translation was published in 1930 in Irkutsk in a separate brochure entitled Economic Situation and Literature. Alekseev provided the text of the article with an extensive preface and detailed notes, which contained abundant and diverse factual material. The scientific apparatus included in this relatively small translation testified to the phenomenal erudition, breadth of interests, and depth of thought for a young scientist. His subsequent works on English philology, as well as his scientific activity in general, fully confirmed this.