Aizenstadt Mikhail Konstantinovich (1900-1970)

Aizenstadt (Eisenstadt) (Argus) Mikhail Konstantinovich (born 1900, location unknown – died 1970, location unknown) – Journalist, satirical writer, and poet.

Mikhail Aizenstadt grew up in Novgorod, where he completed a Realschule (a type of secondary school). He enrolled in the Faculty of Philology at St Petersburg University, but his studies were interrupted by the circumstances of the post-revolutionary period.

Mikhail Aizenshtadt began publishing in 1917, contributing revolutionary-themed poetry to the Bulletin of the All-Russian Congress of Cadet Youth (he was a delegate at this congress).

In 1919, Mikhail Aizenstadt moved to Riga, where he collaborated with the local press, most actively with the newspaper Segodnya, which published more than 100 of his pieces. He also wrote for Rizhsky Ogonyok and Theatre and Life, continuing to compose poetry. He served in the Latvian Army.

In 1924, Mikhail Aizenstadt emigrated to the United States, where he spent over nine years travelling from city to city and taking on various jobs to familiarise himself with the country. He worked as a furniture shop porter, a factory worker at a confectionery plant, a painter, a farmhand, and an orderly in a tuberculosis hospital.

From 1933 until the end of his life, Mikhail Aizenstadt worked for the newspaper Novoe Russkoe Slovo, becoming one of its most esteemed contributors. He published under the pseudonyms Zheleznov and, more frequently, Argus, and wrote the women’s section of Novoe Russkoe Slovo under the pseudonym Knyaginya Ligovskaya.

According to contemporaries, Mikhail Aizenstadt’s literary talent was evident in every genre he pursued. In the 1950s, he was regarded as the only émigré successor to the great Russian humourists and satirists such as Nadezhda Teffi, Arkady Averchenko, Sasha Chorny, and Don-Aminado.

He published two books in English – Moscow on the Hudson (1951) and A Rogue with Ease (1953) – and several in Russian. His collection Half-Joking, Half-Serious (1959) was published with a foreword by Ivan Bunin, who wrote in a letter to Aizenstadt: “I greatly appreciate your relentless and unforgiving satire on… (life in the USSR).”

The foreword to another of his books, Another Life and the Distant Shore (1969), was written by the Paris-based writer Georgy Adamovich, who observed: “A careful reader will notice… a tendency towards lyricism, countered by an ingrained, irresistible urge to be ironic.”

During the Second World War, Mikhail Aizenshtadt was a member of the Society for European Arrivals committee.