Mikhail Gerasimov (poet)

Mikhail Prokofyevich Gerasimov (Russian: Михаи́л Проко́фьевич Гера́симов, IPA: [mʲɪxɐˈil prɐˈkofʲjɪvʲɪdʑ ɡʲɪˈrasʲɪməf] ⓘ; 12 October 1889 in Buguruslan – 26 June 1939 in Moscow) was one of the most widely read working-class poets in early-twentieth-century Russia.

Initially embracing the Bolshevik Revolution as a liberating event and participating in the effort to create a new proletarian culture, following the New Economic Policy he became disillusioned and was imprisoned during the Joseph Stalin era.

In these years in exile and labor, Gerasimov managed to explore much of Western Europe (especially France, Belgium, Italy and the Alps), often working in winter and wandering by foot in summer—for which he was several times arrested for vagrancy.

That was the year he joined Anatoly Lunacharsky's Circle of Proletarian Culture in Paris, where he met other Russian émigré worker writers including Fedor Kalinin, Alexei Gastev, and Pavel Bessalko.

In the fall of 1915, for participating in anti-war agitation and for insubordination (he joined an uprising of Russian soldiers against harsh treatment by French officers), Gerasimov was deported to Russia.

While continuing to write and publish a large number of poems (in a wide-variety of newspapers, magazines, and collections) during the years from 1918 to the mid-1930s, Gerasimov also became one of the leaders of the proletarian culture movement (Proletkult).

In February 1920, he formed a group of worker writers discontented with the Proletcult, feeling it inhibited their creative growth due to lack of attention to formal training and the special demands of the talented.

In 1937, he was arrested and according to some sources he was among Stalin's shooting lists and was executed by firing squad on 16 July 1937, however the official certificate of his death after his rehabilitation claims that Gerasimov passed in 1939 while being held in custody.