William Gerhardie
William Alexander Gerhardie was a British author born on November 21, 1895, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was the son of Charles Alfred Gerhardie, an industrialist, and received his early education in Russian secondary schools before moving to London to pursue a literary career. His plans were interrupted by World War I, where he served as a military attaché in Petrograd, gaining firsthand experience of the Russian Revolution. After the war, he studied at Worcester College, Oxford, and published his first novel, *Futility*, in 1922, which became a bestseller and impacted British literature.
Gerhardie's body of work includes literary criticism, such as his influential book on Anton Chekhov, and novels that explore themes like love, spirituality, and the aftermath of revolution. He was known for blending fiction with journalistic techniques, particularly after experiencing an out-of-body episode. His final years were marked by a retreat from public life in London as he worked on an ambitious tetralogy inspired by *War and Peace*, though this project remained incomplete at his death on July 15, 1977. Despite his literary contributions, many of Gerhardie's works fell into obscurity before his passing.
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William Gerhardie
- Born: November 21, 1895
- Birthplace: St. Petersburg, Russia
- Died: July 15, 1977
Biography
William Alexander Gerhardie was born November 21, 1895, in St. Petersburg, Russia, son of British industrialist Charles Alfred Gerhardie and his wife Clara. Educated in Russian secondary schools, Gerhardie matriculated at Kinsington College in London in 1913, hoping to begin a literary career. But World War I intervened, and his knowledge of Russian culture made him valuable to the British Army as military attaché in Petrograd, where he remained until 1918, watching the Russian Revolution unfold.
In 1920, he resumed his education, this time at Worcester College, Oxford, where he began writing a fictionalized account of his experience of the revolution. The novel appeared in 1922 as Futility, became a best seller, and influenced the rising generation of British novelists. His next book was a work of literary criticism, Anton Chekhov (1923), which was the first English work to argue for the Russian playwright’s universality. His second novel, The Polyglots (1925), looks at the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
Gerhardie’s third novel was his first attempt at science fiction, Jazz and Jasper (1928, published in America as Eva’s Apples, and reissued in 1947 as My Sinful Earth). He extended scientific speculation into the spiritual realm after having an out-of-body experience, and writing about it in a manner that would come to be called “new journalism” or “creative nonfiction.” Resurrection (1934) represented an argument for the immortality of the soul.
Two years later, he published a novel he had begun in his Oxford days, Of Mortal Love (1936), once again combining the techniques of reporting and fiction, telling a love story based on the experiences of a close friend of his. The book illustrated the Platonic “ladder of love” as the protagonist, Dinah, moves from erotic to “imaginative” stages of human love. The same year, Gerhardie produced a self-help book, Meet Yourself as You Really Are (1936). His last novel, My Wife’s the Least of It, appeared in 1938.
In 1939, his last book appeared, a historical biography of the last royal family of Russia, The Romanovs. Yet Gerhardie lived another thirty-eight years, a literary recluse in London, working through four decades on a massive tetralogy which he likened to War and Peace and discussed under the working title “This; Present Breath.” Although chapters of it were published in 1962 in an anthology called The Wind and the Rain, edited by Neville Braybrooke, the work has never appeared in whole, and some editors who have looked at it pronounced it unpublishable. When Gerhardie died on July 15, 1977, his works had been largely unread for nearly three decades.