Michaił Heller – „polski Rosjanin” z Maisons-Laffitte
Mikhail Heller – The Polish Russian from Maisons-Laffitte

Summary/Abstract: This article is the first such an extensive attempt to describe and analyze the biography of Mikhail Heller – a historian, literary scientist, Sovietologist and emigrant from the Soviet Union, who settled in Paris in the second half of the twentieth century and co-operated with the Polish emigration journal – the Parisian “Kultura”. The text was developed on the basis of a bachelor’s thesis, defended in June 2017. The article presents the life of Heller from three perspectives related to the realities in which he must have lived. Heller was born, raised and educated in the USSR. In the fifties he was sentenced to a stay in a labor camp, a sentence which he did not have to serve in full. He left the “homeland of the proletariat”, thanks to the invaluable assistance of his wife, a Polish Jew, Eugenia Chigryn, and found himself in the Polish People’s Republic. He spent over a decade in Poland, where he worked and gained valuable acquaintances. In 1968 he decided to emigrate to West Europe – to France.

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