Irakly Luarsabovich Andronikov was a Russian literature historian, philologist, and media personality.
Background
Irakly Andronikov came from a Georgian noble family of Andronikashvili (Andronikov) and was born in Saint St. Petersburg. His father Luarsab Nikolaevich Andronikov was a lawyer whom the Russian Provisional Government appointed Senate Criminal Department Secretary in 1917. Irakly"s grandmother Lyubov Gurevich (née Ilyina) was a daughter of architect Ivan Ivanovich Ilyin (one of the builders of the Grand Kremlin Palace) and an aunt of philosopher Ivan Ilyin.
Education
Saint St. Petersburg State University.
Career
Irakly"s mother Yekaterina Gurevich came from an artistic Gurevich-Ilyin family. Irakly"s younger brother Elepter Andronikashvili was a notable physicist. In 1918 Luarsab was invited to teach philosophy at Tula State Pedagogical Institute in Tula, Russia.
In 1921 the family briefly moved to Moscow and then settled in Tbilisi.
In 1925 Irakly graduated from a secondary school in Tbilisi and entered the Faculty of History and Philology at Leningrad State University and the philological department of the Art History Institute. He studied history and philology under Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, Viktor Zhirmunsky, Lev Shcherba, Yevgeny Tarle.
In 1928 he became interested in music and worked as a lecturer for the Leningrad Philharmonic. In 1930 Andronikov graduated from Leningrad State University and started to work for children magazines Chizh and Yozh.
From 1934 he worked as a bibliographer for the Leningrad Public Library.
He started to study biography and the works of Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov at the university and continued his study while working in the library. He published his first article about Lermontov in 1936 and in 1939 he published his book Lermontov Life. The same year he was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers.
In 1942 Andronikov worked as a correspondent of an Army newspaper on Kalinin Front.
In 1946 he obtained his Kandidat Nauk degree for a dissertation about Lermontov. He continued to publish books about Lermontov «Рассказы литературоведа» (1949), «Лермонтов» (1951), «Лермонтов.
Исследования, статьи, рассказы» (1952), «Лермонтов в Грузии в 1837 году» (1955). The last book, Lermontov in Georgia in 1837, was considered sufficient to give him the Doktor Nauk degree of Moscow State University (1956).
Исследования и находки» (Lermontov Research and Findings) published in 1964.
Andronikov started to perform public lectures in a writers club in 1935 and soon became enormously popular. In 1954 he started to perform on television (show Andronikov Tells (Андроников Рассказывает). A number of documentaries there he tells his stories: «Загадка Н.
Ф.
И.», «Страницы большого искусства», «Портреты неизвестных», «Слово Андроникова» were published. In 1982 he was awarded People"s Artist of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics title. He died in Moscow in 1990.
Membership
Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics Union of Writers.