Mikhail Gerasimov (poet)

Mikhail Prokofyevich Gerasimov (Russian: Михаи́л Проко́фьевич Гера́симов; IPA: [mʲɪxɐˈil prɐˈkofʲjɪvʲɪtɕ ɡʲɪˈrasʲɪməf]; 1889–1939) 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.

Mikhail Gerasimov was born on 30 September (12 October O.S.) 1889 in the village of Petrovka, near the town of Buguruslan, in Samara province in the Volga region of Russia. His father was a railway worker and crossing guard. His mother was a peasant of ethnic Mordvinian origin. Starting at the age of nine, Gerasimov began helping out around the railroad, pulling weeds near the tracks. In the winter months he attended a two-class school in the town of Kinel'. After finishing school (in four or five years) he attended, while working in a variety of railroad jobs, the Samara railway technical school, allowing him to become a railway technician after graduation.

During the 1905 revolution, when Gerasimov was sixteen and working on the railroad, he got involved in an armed revolutionary detachment (druzhina) of railway workers, and became increasingly involved with the socialist underground. In 1906, he was arrested and imprisoned, but after six months escaped through a tunnel leading to a secret Russian Social Democratic Labour Party apartment. From there he was smuggled out of the country in the fall of 1907 by way of Finland (where he briefly met Lenin and other leading Social Democratic émigrés). For the next eight years, he lived mainly in France and Belgium, where he worked variously as a loader for blast furnaces in an arms factory in Nancy, France, as a hauler and coal-hewer in mines in Belgium, as a metal fitter and electrical fitter in French locomotive and car factories (including Renault), as a stoker and coalman on ocean liners, and in a variety of jobs in a number of other factories. 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.

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