Berkovskii, Naum

Born Apr. 14, 1901, in Vilna; died June 19, 1972. Soviet literary critic.

Beginning in 1930, Berkovskii was a professor at many higher educational institutions in Leningrad, Moscow, and elsewhere. The title of his doctoral dissertation is Problems of Literary Development in Recent Centuries (1964). Berkovskii studied problems of Soviet literature (in the book Current Literature, 1930) and dealt with problems of the development of romanticism and realism in the West in the articles in the collections Early Bourgeois Realism (1936) and Western Collection, I (1937) and in E. T.A. Hoffmann: Novellas and Stories (1936). He edited the collected works of H. Heine and published works on M. Cervantes, Leonardo da Vinci, F. Schiller, and H. Ibsen. He also wrote on problems of the theater. In his articles on Russian literature (on A. S. Pushkin, F. M. Dostoevsky, F. I. Tiutchev, and A. P. Chekhov), Berkovskii brought out the national originality of Russian classical realism. In his works on Shakespeare, H. Heine, Byron, and J. C. F. Hölderlin, Berkovskii focused his attention on the pivotal moments in the development of world history and on their poetic reflections.