William Gerhardie

William Alexander Gerhardie OBE FRSL (21 November 1895 – 15 July 1977) was an Anglo-Russian novelist and playwright. His first novel, Futility, drew on his experiences of fighting the Bolsheviks in pre-revolutionary Russia.

William Gerhardie by Norman Ivor Lancashire (1927–2004). Photograph by Stella Harpley Life and career Gerhardie (or Gerhardi – he added the "e" in later years) was born at St Petersburg, Russia, the fifth of six children of Charles Alfred Gerhardi (1864–1925), a British expatriate industrialist, and his wife Clara Annie (1869–1948), daughter of John Wadsworth. He was educated at the Sankt Annenschule and Deutsche Reformierte Kirchenschule in St Petersburg, before completing his education in England at Worcester College, Oxford.

In 1915, during the First World War he enlisted in the Royal Scots Greys and trained in England while applying for a commission as an officer. After commissioning in 1916 he was posted to the staff of the British Military Attaché at Petrograd (as his birth city was then renamed) until 1918. During that period he witnessed the development of the 1917 Revolution which ruined his father who escaped Russia to exile in England having been allowed out through being identified with the (already dead) British socialist Keir Hardie. ) H. G. Wells also championed his work. His first novel, Futility, was written while he was at Oxford University and drew on his experiences in Russia fighting (or attempting to fight) the Bolsheviks, along with his childhood experiences visiting pre-revolutionary Russia. In his preface to reissues of Gerhardie’s works, Michael Holroyd said that Futility was the first work in English to explore fully the theme of "waiting", later made famous by Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot, but it is probably more apt to recognize a common comic nihilism between those two figures. His next novel, The Polyglots, is probably his masterpiece (although some argue for Doom). Again it deals with Russia (Gerhardie was strongly influenced by the tragi-comic style of Russian writers such as Anton Chekhov, about whom he wrote a study while in college).

He collaborated with Hugh Kingsmill on the biography The Casanova Fable. Their friendship with Kingsmill was both a source of conflict over women and a great intellectual stimulus, providing material for the novel Pending Heaven. After his death, an idiosyncratic study of world history between 1890 and 1940 was discovered among his papers, which was edited by Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky and published as God's Fifth Column. More recently, both Prion and New Directions Press have been reissuing his works.

Gerhardie never married. He lived the last 37 years of his life in the West End of London in increasing seclusion. He died at the Middlesex Hospital in June 1977 aged 81. After cremation his ashes were scattered in Regent's Park, at a gathering that included the writers Olivia Manning and J. G. Farrell.

The contemporary British novelist William Boyd has identified Gerhardie, along with Cyril Connolly, as key inspirations for the central character (the writer Logan Mountstuart) in his 2002 novel Any Human Heart. A television adaptation was released in the UK in 2010, and in the US in 2011.

Selected works Futility (1922), Cobden Sanderson 2012 The Polyglots (1925) Cobden Sanderson, 2013 Pretty Creatures (1927) Doom (1928) Duckworth. Also published as Jazz and Jasper, as Eva's Apples (in the United States), and in 1947 reissued as My Sinful Earth Pending Heaven (1930) Memoirs of a Polyglot: The Autobiography of William Gerhardie (1931) The Memoirs of Satan (1932) with Brian Lunn Resurrection (1934) Cassell Of Mortal Love (1936), Revised and Republished by Macdonald & Co. (1970), also Penguin 1983 My Wife's the Least of It (1938) Faber God's Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age 1890–1940 (1981) Simon and Schuster