Alexander Shifman was born in 1907. His father, Yosif Shifman, was a garment worker. Alexander spent his childhood and youth in the town of Mozyr (Belarus). In 1924, at the age of seventeen, he left for Leningrad and became an apprentice at a spinning and weaving factory. At the same time, he began to attend evening literary courses, which were later renamed the State College of Publishing. His teachers there were some of the most prominent contemporary scholars and writers. While still a student, Shifman began to publish essays in newspapers.
In 1927, after graduating from the College of Publishing, he was sent to Sverdlovsk by his superiors in the Komsomol. There, he worked for two years as the executive secretary of the editorial office of the Komsomol newspaper Na Smenu (“The New Guard”).
In 1929-1930, Shifman served in the Red Army — first as a signalman (in Samara), and then as editor of a divisional newspaper (in Kazan). Afterward, he was recalled to Moscow and appointed deputy editor of the youth newspaper Pionerskaya Pravda (“The Pioneers' Pravda”). While working at the newspaper's editorial office, Shifman established a society of young poets, which was led by the celebrated Soviet poet Eduard Bagritsky. In 1932, combining study with work, he began to attend the evening literary department of the Institute of Red Professors. Shifman graduated from it in 1936, and devoted himself exclusively to literary work. From 1934 to 1938, he worked as an editor at the Molodaya Gvardiya (“The Young Guard”) publishing house, where, inter alia, he prepared for publication books by Alexei Tolstoy, Vasily Grossman, Nikolai Ostrovsky, and other writers. In 1938, Shifman became a researcher at the Institute of World Literature, and began to engage in more in-depth literary and critical work.
Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, he volunteered to enlist in the Red Army, and was soon assigned to the editorial office of Vo Slavu Rodiny (“For the Glory of the Motherland”), the official press organ of the Southern Front. Until the end of the war, he worked in the military newspapers of the Southern, Stalingrad, North Caucasus, Northwestern, and 1st Belorussian Fronts. During the Battles of Stalingrad and Berlin, he was a frontline correspondent of the youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. During the war, Shifman was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd class. He met V-E Day in Berlin, as deputy editor of Sovetskii Boyets (“Soviet Fighter”), the newspaper of the 5th Army. He remained in Germany for another two years, working in the Soviet military press.
In 1947, Shifman returned to the Institute of World Literature, and a year later he defended his PhD thesis, titled “Leo Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches.” In 1950, he moved to work at the State Museum of Leo Tolstoy. From this point on, his scholarship was focused almost exclusively on Tolstoy's literary and political legacy. Shifman published more than seventy books and articles, and took part in the editing of numerous publications by Tolstoy, including the great author's Collected Works.
Shifman took a particular interest in studying and publishing Tolstoy's archive, which included an enormous number of original manuscripts. As a scholar, Shifman paid special attention to Tolstoy's ties with India, and dedicated several articles and monographs to this topic. It was Shifman who first published Tolstoy's correspondence with Mahatma Gandhi and fifteen other Indian public figures, writers, and journalists. He also analyzed the references to India – its philosophy, history, culture, and literature – in Tolstoy's journalism, diaries, and letters. He wrote a number of articles on Tolstoy's little-known role as a popularizer of Indian culture in Russia.
Shifman also undertook in-depth studies of Tolstoy's relations with China, Japan, Iran, Turkey, and the countries of the Arab Middle East. A systematic presentation of this rich material was given in his lengthy monograph Leo Tolstoy and the Orient (1960). The book won the Jawaharlal Nehru International Prize in 1970. To receive the award, Shifman traveled to India and received it personally from the hands of Indira Gandhi.
In 1991, Alexander Shifman and his family moved to Israel. He died there in 1992.
