Education
Moscow university boarding school.
Moscow university boarding school.
After returning to Russia four years later, Shevyrev published the first Russian study of Dante. Sergey Uvarov secured for him a professorship in Moscow. In the late 1830s Shevyrev joined Mikhail Pogodin, the editor of Moskvityanin, in opposing Belinsky and his pro-Western colleagues.
His later years were devoted to completing the bulky History of Russian Literature.
Many of the letters collected in Gogol"s Correspondence with Friends were addressed to Shevyrev. At the beginning of Alexander II"s liberal reign, Shevyrev was accused by Count Bobrinsky of being a pro-government (kvas) patriot.
The elderly scholar "lost his temper and hit Bobrinsky in the face. Bobrinsky flew off the handle: he dashed at his opponent, knocked him to the floor, and began to trample him underfoot".
Shevyrev (who had a rib broken in the scuffle) left Russia "in disgust", never to return again.
He died in Paris in 1864 and for half a century remained in oblivion. In 1930s the renewal interest in Shevyryov"s legacy led to several publications, including a 1939 compilation of his poetry in 2 volumes. In 1962 the collection of professor Shevyryov"s lectures was published in Moscow.
Modern critics are divided as to where Shevyryov’s poetic legacy belongs to
Some regard him as part of the Tyutchevian strand (alongside Fyodor Tyutchev, Fyodor Glinka and Aleksey Khomyakov among others), some see him and his "poetry of thought" invention as something that stands on its own and ahead of its time, akin more to formal experiments of the 20th-century Russian poetry.
Labeled a "Russian nationalist" (and, by default, "a reactionary") by influential radicals like Belinsky and Dobrolyubov, Stepan Shevyryov was forced to leave Russia in 1857.
Russian Academy of Sciences.