Russian Culture Lexicon

Chekhov, Anton

▪ Russian author

Introduction

in full Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

born Jan. 29 [Jan. 17, Old Style], 1860, Taganrog, Russia

died July 14/15 [July 1/2], 1904, Badenweiler, Ger.

major Russian playwright and master of the modern short story. He was a literary artist of laconic precision who probed below the surface of life, laying bare the secret motives of his characters. Chekhov's best plays and short stories lack complex plots and neat solutions. Concentrating on apparent trivialities, they create a special kind of atmosphere, sometimes termed haunting or lyrical. Chekhov described the Russian life of his time using a deceptively simple technique devoid of obtrusive literary devices, and he is regarded as the outstanding representative of the late 19th-century Russian realist school.

Boyhood and youth

Chekhov's father was a struggling grocer and pious martinet who had been born a serf. He compelled his son to serve in his shop, also conscripting him into a church choir, which he himself conducted. Despite the kindness of his mother, childhood remained a painful memory to Chekhov, although it later proved to be a vivid and absorbing experience that he often invoked in his works.

After briefly attending a local school for Greek boys, Chekhov entered the town gimnaziya (high school), where he remained for 10 years. There he received the best standard education then available—thorough but unimaginative and based on the Greek and Latin classics. During his last three years at school Chekhov lived alone and supported himself by coaching younger boys; his father, having gone bankrupt, had moved with the rest of his family to Moscow to make a fresh start.

In the autumn of 1879 Chekhov joined his family in Moscow, which was to be his main base until 1892. He at once enrolled in the university's medical faculty, graduating in 1884 as a doctor. By this time he was already the economic mainstay of his family, for his father could obtain only poorly paid employment. As unofficial head of the family Anton showed great reserves of responsibility and energy, cheerfully supporting his mother and the younger children through his free-lance earnings as a journalist and writer of comic sketches—work that he combined with arduous medical studies and a busy social life.

Chekhov began his writing career as the author of anecdotes for humorous journals, signing his early work pseudonymously. By 1888 he had become widely popular with a “lowbrow” public and had already produced a body of work more voluminous than all his later writings put together. And he had, in the process, turned the short comic sketch of about 1,000 words into a minor art form. He had also experimented in serious writing, providing studies of human misery and despair strangely at variance with the frenzied facetiousness of his comic work. Gradually this serious vein absorbed him and soon predominated over the comic.

Literary maturity

Chekhov's literary progress during his early 20s may be charted by the first appearance of his work in a sequence of publications in the capital, St. Petersburg, each successive vehicle being more serious and respected than its predecessor. Finally, in 1888, Chekhov published his first work in a leading literary review, Severny vestnik (“Northern Herald”). With the work in question—a long story entitled “Steppe”—he at last turned his back on comic fiction. “Steppe,” an autobiographical work describing a journey in the Ukraine as seen through the eyes of a child, is the first among more than 50 stories published in a variety of journals and selections between 1888 and his death in 1904. It is on this corpus of later stories, but also on his mature dramas of the same period, that Chekhov's main reputation rests.

Although the year 1888 first saw Chekhov concentrating almost exclusively on short stories that were serious in conception, humour—now underlying—nearly always remained an important ingredient. There was also a concentration on quality at the expense of quantity, the number of publications dropping suddenly from over a hundred items a year in the peak years 1886 and 1887 to only 10 short stories in 1888. Besides “Steppe,” Chekhov also wrote several profoundly tragic studies at this time, the most notable of which was “A Dreary Story” (1889), a penetrating study into the mind of an elderly and dying professor of medicine. The ingenuity and insight displayed in this tour de force was especially remarkable, coming from an author so young. The play Ivanov (1887–89) culminates in the suicide of a young man nearer to the author's own age. Together with “A Dreary Story,” this belongs to a group among Chekhov's works that have been called clinical studies. They explore the experiences of the mentally or physically ill in a spirit that reminds one that the author was himself a qualified—and remained a sporadically practicing—doctor.

By the late 1880s many critics had begun to reprimand Chekhov, now that he was sufficiently well known to attract their attention, for holding no firm political and social views and for failing to endow his works with a sense of direction. Such expectations irked Chekhov, who was unpolitical and philosophically uncommitted. In early 1890 he suddenly sought relief from the irritations of urban intellectual life by undertaking a one-man sociological expedition to a remote island, Sakhalin (Sakhalin Island). This is situated nearly 6,000 miles (9,650 km) east of Moscow, on the other side of Siberia, and was notorious as an imperial Russian penal settlement. Chekhov's journey there was a long and hazardous ordeal by carriage and riverboat. After arriving unscathed, studying local conditions, and conducting a census of the islanders, he returned to publish his findings as a research thesis, which retains an honoured place in the annals of Russian penology: The Island of Sakhalin (1893–94).

Chekhov paid his first visit to western Europe in the company of A.S. Suvorin, a wealthy newspaper proprietor and the publisher of much of Chekhov's own work. Their long and close friendship caused Chekhov some unpopularity, owing to the politically reactionary character of Suvorin's newspaper, Novoye vremya (“New Time”). Eventually Chekhov broke with Suvorin over the attitude taken by the paper toward the notorious Alfred Dreyfus affair in France, with Chekhov championing Dreyfus.

During the years just before and after his Sakhalin expedition, Chekhov had continued his experiments as a dramatist. His Wood Demon (1888–89) is a long-winded and ineptly facetious four-act play, which somehow, by a miracle of art, became converted—largely by cutting—into Dyadya Vanya (Uncle Vanya), one of his greatest stage masterpieces. The conversion—to a superb study of aimlessness in a rural manor house—took place some time between 1890 and 1896; the play was published in 1897. Other dramatic efforts of the period include several of the uproarious one-act farces known as vaudevilles: Medved (The Bear), Predlozheniye (The Proposal), Svadba (The Wedding), Yubiley (The Anniversary), and others.

Melikhovo period: 1892–98

After helping, both as doctor and as medical administrator, to relieve the disastrous famine of 1891–92, Chekhov bought a country estate in the village of Melikhovo, about 50 miles (80 km) south of Moscow. This was his main residence for about six years, providing a home for his aging parents, as also for his sister Mariya, who acted as his housekeeper and remained unmarried in order to look after her brother. The Melikhovo period was the most creatively effective of Chekhov's life so far as short stories were concerned, for it was during these six years that he wrote “The Butterfly,” “Neighbours” (1892), “An Anonymous Story” (1893), “The Black Monk” (1894), “Murder,” and “Ariadne” (1895), among many other masterpieces. Village life now became a leading theme in his work, most notably in “Peasants” (1897). Undistinguished by plot, this short sequence of brilliant sketches created more stir in Russia than any other single work of Chekhov's, partly owing to his rejection of the convention whereby writers commonly presented the Russian peasantry in sentimentalized and debrutalized form.

Continuing to provide many portraits of the intelligentsia, Chekhov also described the commercial and factory-owning world in such stories as “A Woman's Kingdom,” (1894) and “Three Years” (1895). As has often been recognized, Chekhov's work provides a panoramic study of the Russia of his day, and one so accurate that it could even be used as a sociological source.

In some of his stories of the Melikhovo period, Chekhov attacked by implication the teachings of Leo Tolstoy, the well-known novelist and thinker, and Chekhov's revered elder contemporary. Himself once (in the late 1880s) a tentative disciple of the Tolstoyan simple life, and also of nonresistance to evil as advocated by Tolstoy, Chekhov had now rejected these doctrines. He illustrated his new view in one particularly outstanding story: “Ward Number Six” (1892). Here an elderly doctor shows himself nonresistant to evil by refraining from remedying the appalling conditions in the mental ward of which he has charge—only to be incarcerated as a patient himself through the intrigues of a subordinate. In “My Life” (1896) the young hero, son of a provincial architect, insists on defying middle-class convention by becoming a house painter, a cultivation of the Tolstoyan simple life that Chekhov portrays as misconceived. In a later trio of linked stories, ”The Man in a Case,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love” (1898), Chekhov further develops the same theme, showing various figures who similarly fail to realize their full potentialities. As these pleas in favour of personal freedom illustrate, Chekhov's stories frequently contain some kind of submerged moral, though he never worked out a comprehensive ethical or philosophical doctrine.

Chayka (The Seagull) is Chekhov's only dramatic work dating with certainty from the Melikhovo period. First performed in St. Petersburg on Oct. 17, 1896 (O.S.), this four-act drama, misnamed a comedy, was badly received; indeed, it was almost hissed off the stage. Chekhov was greatly distressed and left the auditorium during the second act, having suffered one of the most traumatic experiences of his life and vowing never to write for the stage again. Two years later, however, the play was revived by the newly created Moscow Art Theatre, enjoying considerable success and helping to reestablish Chekhov as a dramatist. The Seagull is a study of the clash between the older and younger generations as it affects two actresses and two writers, some of the details having been suggested by episodes in the lives of Chekhov's friends.

Yalta period: 1899–1904

In March 1897 Chekhov had suffered a lung hemorrhage caused by tuberculosis, symptoms of which had become apparent considerably earlier. Now forced to acknowledge himself a semi-invalid, Chekhov sold his Melikhovo estate and built a villa in Yalta, the Crimean coastal resort. From then on he spent most of his winters there or on the French Riviera, cut off from the intellectual life of Moscow and St. Petersburg. This was all the more galling since his plays were beginning to attract serious attention. Moreover, Chekhov had become attracted by a young actress, Olga Knipper, who was appearing in his plays, and whom he eventually married in 1901; the marriage probably marked the only profound love affair of his life. But since Knipper continued to pursue her acting career, husband and wife lived apart during most of the winter months, and there were no children of the marriage.

Never a successful financial manager, Chekhov attempted to regularize his literary affairs in 1899 by selling the copyright of all his existing works, excluding plays, to the publisher A.F. Marx for 75,000 rubles, an unduly low sum. In 1899–1901 Marx issued the first comprehensive edition of Chekhov's works, in 10 volumes, after the author had himself rejected many of his juvenilia. Even so, this publication, reprinted in 1903 with supplementary material, was unsatisfactory in many ways.

Chekhov's Yalta period saw a decline in the production of short stories and a greater emphasis on drama. His two last plays—Tri sestry (1901; Three Sisters) and Vishnyovy sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard)—were both written for the Moscow Art Theatre. But much as Chekhov owed to the theatre's two founders, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir Ivanovich) and Konstanin Stanislavsky (Stanislavsky, Konstantin Sergeyevich), he remained dissatisfied with such rehearsals and performances of his plays as he was able to witness. Repeatedly insisting that his mature drama was comedy rather than tragedy, Chekhov grew distressed when producers insisted on a heavy treatment, overemphasizing the—admittedly frequent—occasions on which the characters inveigh against the boredom and futility of their lives. Despite Stanislavsky's reputation as an innovator who had brought a natural, nondeclamatory style to the hitherto overhistrionic Russian stage, his productions were never natural and nondeclamatory enough for Chekhov, who wished his work to be acted with the lightest possible touch. And though Chekhov's mature plays have since become established in repertoires all over the world, it remains doubtful whether his craving for the light touch has been satisfied except on the rarest of occasions. Yet oversolemnity can be the ruin of Three Sisters, for example—the play in which Chekhov so sensitively portrays the longings of a trio of provincial young women. Insisting that his The Cherry Orchard was “a comedy, in places even a farce,” Chekhov offered in this last play a poignant picture of the Russian landowning class in decline, portraying characters who remain comic despite their very poignancy. This play was first performed in Moscow on Jan. 17, 1904 (O.S.), and less than six months later Chekhov died of tuberculosis.

Though already celebrated by the Russian literary public at the time of his death, Chekhov did not become internationally famous until the years after World War I, by which time the translations of Constance Garnett (into English) and of others had helped to publicize his work. Yet his elusive, superficially guileless style of writing—in which what is left unsaid often seems so much more important than what is said—has defied effective analysis by literary critics, as well as effective imitation by creative writers.

It was not until 40 years after his death, with the issue of the 20-volume Polnoye sobraniye sochineny i pisem A.P. Chekhova (“Complete Works and Letters of A.P. Chekhov”) of 1944–51, that Chekhov was at last presented in Russian on a level of scholarship worthy—though with certain reservations—of his achievement. Eight volumes of this edition contain his correspondence, amounting to several thousand letters. Outstandingly witty and lively, they belie the legend—commonly believed during the author's lifetime—that he was hopelessly pessimistic in outlook. As samples of the Russian epistolary art, Chekhov's letters have been rated second only to Aleksandr Pushkin's by the literary historian D.S. Mirsky. Although Chekhov is still chiefly known for his plays, critical opinion shows signs of establishing the stories—and particularly those that were written after 1888—as an even more significant and creative literary achievement.

Ronald Francis Hingley Ed.

Additional Reading

Biographies of the writer include Sophie Laffitte, Chekhov, 1860–1904 (1973); Ronald Hingley, A New Life of Anton Chekhov (1976, reprinted 1989); Henri Troyat, Chekhov (1986); and Carolina De Maegd-Soëp, Chekhov and Women: Women in the Life and Work of Chekhov (1987), analyzing the reflection of personal relationships in the writer's works. A combination of biography with critical analysis is provided in V.S. Pritchett, Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free (1988). Beverly Hahn, Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays (1977), introduces a wide range of writings, focusing on characters and recurrent themes. Development of Chekhov's narrative art, explored in the themes and concepts of the short stories, is the subject of Thomas Winner, Chekhov and His Prose (1966); A.P. Chudakov, Chekhov's Poetics (1983); and Valentine Tschebotarioff Bill, Chekhov, the Silent Voice of Freedom (1987). On the plays, see Maurice Valency, The Breaking String: The Plays of Anton Chekhov (1966, reissued 1983); David Magarshack, Chekhov the Dramatist (1952, reissued 1980), and The Real Chekhov: An Introduction to Chekhov's Last Plays (1972); and René Wellek and Nonna D. Wellek (eds.), Chekhov, New Perspectives (1984).

Lermontov, Mikhail

▪ Russian writer

Introduction

born Oct. 15 [Oct. 3, Old Style], 1814, Moscow, Russia

died July 27 [July 15], 1841, Pyatigorsk

the leading Russian Romantic poet and author of the novel Geroy nashego vremeni (1840; A Hero of Our Time), which was to have a profound influence on later Russian writers.

Life

Lermontov was the son of Yury Petrovich Lermontov, a retired army captain, and Mariya Mikhaylovna, née Arsenyeva. At the age of three he lost his mother and was brought up by his grandmother, Yelizaveta Alekseyevna Arsenyeva, on her estate in Penzenskaya province. Russia's abundant natural beauty, its folk songs and tales, its customs and ceremonies, the hard forced labour of the serfs, and stories and legends of peasant mutinies all had a great influence in developing the future poet's character. Because the child was often ill, he was taken to spas in the Caucasus on three occasions, where the exotic landscapes created lasting impressions on him.

In 1827 he moved with his grandmother to Moscow, and, while attending a boarding school for children of the nobility (at Moscow University), he began to write poetry and also studied painting. In 1828 he wrote the poems Cherkesy (“Circassians”) and Kavkazsky plennik (“Prisoner of the Caucasus”) in the vein of the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, whose influence then predominated over young Russian writers. Two years later his first verse, Vesna (“Spring”), was published. The same year he entered Moscow University, then one of the liveliest centres of culture and ideology, where such democratically minded representatives of nobility as Aleksandr Herzen, Nikolay Platonovich Ogaryov, and others studied. Students ardently discussed political and philosophical problems, the hard fate of serf peasantry, and the recent Decembrist uprising. In this atmosphere he wrote many lyrical verses, longer, narrative poems, and dramas. His drama Stranny chelovek (1831; “A Strange Man”) reflected the attitudes current among members of student societies: hatred of the despotic tsarist regime and of serfdom. In 1832, after clashing with a reactionary professor, Lermontov left the university and went to St. Petersburg, where he entered the cadet school. Upon his graduation in 1834 with the rank of subensign (or cornet), Lermontov was appointed to the Life-Guard Hussar Regiment stationed at Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin), close to St. Petersburg. As a young officer, he spent a considerable portion of his time in the capital, and his critical observations of aristocratic life there formed the basis of his play Maskarad (“Masquerade”). During this period his deep—but unreciprocated—attachment to Varvara Lopukhina, a sentiment that never left him, was reflected in Knyaginya Ligovskaya (“Duchess Ligovskaya”) and other works.

Lermontov was greatly shaken in January 1837 by the death of the great poet Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich) in a duel. He wrote an elegy that expressed the nation's love for the dead poet, denouncing not only his killer but also the court aristocracy, whom he saw as executioners of freedom and the true culprits of the tragedy. As soon as the verses became known to the court of Nicholas I, Lermontov was arrested and exiled to a regiment stationed in the Caucasus. Travel to new places, meetings with Decembrists (in exile in the Caucasus), and introduction to the Georgian intelligentsia—to the outstanding poet Ilia Chavchavadze, whose daughter had married a well-known Russian dramatist, poet, and diplomatist, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Griboyedov—as well as to other prominent Georgian poets in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) broadened his horizon. Attracted to the nature and poetry of the Caucasus and excited by its folklore, he studied the local languages and translated and polished the Azerbaijanian story “Ashik Kerib.” Caucasian themes and images occupy a strong place in his poetry and in the novel Geroy nashego vremeni, as well as in his sketches and paintings.

As a result of zealous intercession by his grandmother and by the influential poet V.A. Zhukovsky, Lermontov was allowed to return to the capital in 1838. His verses began to appear in the press: the romantic poem Pesnya pro tsarya Ivana Vasilyevicha, molodogo oprichnika i udalogo kuptsa Kalashnikova (1837; “A Song About Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, His Young Bodyguard, and the Valiant Merchant Kalashnikov”), the realistic satirical poems Tambovskaya kaznacheysha (1838; “The Tambov Paymaster's Wife”) and Sashka (written 1839, published 1862), and the romantic poem Demon. Soon Lermontov became popular; he was called Pushkin's successor and was lauded for having suffered and been exiled because of his libertarian verses. Writers and journalists took an interest in him, and fashionable ladies were attracted to him. He made friends among the editorial staff of Otechestvennye zapiski, the leading magazine of the Western-oriented intellectuals, and in 1840 he met the prominent progressive critic V.G. Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich), who envisioned him as the great hope of Russian literature. Lermontov had arrived among the circle of St. Petersburg writers.

At the end of the 1830s, the principal directions of his creative work had been established. His freedom-loving sentiments and his bitterly skeptical evaluation of the times in which he lived are embodied in his philosophical lyric poetry (“Duma” [“Thought”], “Ne ver sebye . . . ” [“Do Not Trust Yourself . . . ”]) and are interpreted in an original fashion in the romantic and fantastic images of his Caucasian poems, Mtsyri (1840) and Demon, on which the poet worked for the remainder of his life. Finally, Lermontov's mature prose showed a critical picture of contemporary life in his novel Geroy nashego vremeni, containing the sum total of his reflections on contemporary society and the fortunes of his generation. The hero, Pechorin, is a cynical person of superior accomplishments who, having experienced everything else, devotes himself to experimenting with human situations. This realistic novel, full of social and psychological content and written in prose of superb quality, played an important role in the development of Russian prose.

In February 1840 Lermontov was brought to trial before a military tribunal for his duel with the son of the French ambassador at St. Petersburg—a duel used as a pretext for punishing the recalcitrant poet. On the instructions of Nicholas I, Lermontov was sentenced to a new exile in the Caucasus, this time to an infantry regiment that was preparing for dangerous military operations. Soon compelled to take part in cavalry sorties and hand-to-hand battles, he distinguished himself in the heavy fighting at Valerik River, which he describes in “Valerik” and in the verse “Ya k vam pishu . . . ” (“I Am Writing to You . . . ”). The military command made due note of the great courage and presence of mind displayed by the officer-poet.

As a result of persistent requests by his grandmother, Lermontov was given a short leave in February 1841. He spent several weeks in the capital, continuing work on compositions he had already begun and writing several poems noted for their maturity of thought and talent (“Rodina” [“Motherland”], “Lyubil i ya v bylye gody” [“And I Was in Love”]. Lermontov devised a plan for publishing his own magazine, planned new novels, and sought Belinsky's criticism. But he soon received an order to return to his regiment and left, full of gloomy forebodings. During this long journey he experienced a flood of creative energy: his last notebook contains such masterpieces of Russian lyric poetry as “Utes” (“The Cliff”), “Spor” (“Argument”), “Svidanye” (“Meeting”), “Listok” (“A Leaf”), “Net, ne tebya tak pylko ya lyublyu” (“No, It Was Not You I Loved So Fervently”), “Vykhozhu odin ya na dorogu . . . ” (“I go to the Road Alone . . . ”), and “Prorok” (“Prophet”), his last work.

On the way to his regiment, Lermontov lingered on in the health resort city of Pyatigorsk for treatment. There he met many fashionable young people from St. Petersburg, among whom were secret ill-wishers who knew his reputation in court circles. Some of the young people feared his tongue, while others envied his fame. An atmosphere of intrigue, scandal, and hatred grew up around him. Finally, a quarrel was provoked between Lermontov and another officer, N.S. Martynov; the two fought a duel that ended in the poet's death. He was buried two days later in the municipal cemetery, and the entire population of the city gathered at his funeral. Later, Lermontov's coffin was moved to the Tarkhana estate, and on April 23, 1842, he was buried in the Arsenyev family vault.

Assessment

Only 26 years old when he died, Lermontov had proved his worth as a brilliant and gifted poet-thinker, prose writer, and playwright, the successor of Pushkin, and an exponent of the best traditions of Russian literature. His youthful lyric poetry is filled with a passionate craving for freedom and contains calls to battle, agonizing reflections on how to apply his strengths to his life's work, and dreams of heroic deeds. He was deeply troubled by political events, and the peasant mutinies of 1830 had suggested to him a time “when the crown of the tsars will fall.” Revolutionary ferment in western Europe met with an enthusiastic response from him (verses on the July 1830 revolution in France, on the fall of Charles X), and the theme of the French Revolution is found in his later works (the poem Sashka).

Civic and philosophical themes as well as subjective, deeply personal motifs were closely interwoven in Lermontov's poetry. He introduced into Russian poetry the intonations of “iron verse,” noted for its heroic sound and its energy of intellectual expression. His enthusiasm for the future responded to the spiritual needs of Russian society. Lermontov's legacy has found varied interpretations in the works of Russian artists, composers, and theatrical and cinematic figures. His dramatic compositions have played a considerable role in the development of theatrical art, and his life has served as material for many novels, poems, plays, and films.

Vladimir Viktorovich Zhdanov

Additional Reading

Laurence Kelly, Lermontov: Tragedy in the Caucasus (1977, reissued 1983), is a detailed biography. Shorter biographical sketches are found in the works of literary criticism, such as John Mersereau, Mikhail Lermontov (1962); Janko Lavrin, Lermontov (1959); B.M. Eikhenbaum, Lermontov: A Study in Literary-Historical Evaluation (1981); and John Garrard, Mikhail Lermontov (1982), which discuss both the romantic poetry and prose of the writer. Lermontov's largest and most important prose work is analyzed in C.J.B. Turner, Pechorin: An Essay on Lermontov's “A Hero of Our Time” (1978); and William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (1986). Good translations of Lermontov into English are found in Charles Johnston (trans.), Narrative Poems by Alexander Pushkin and by Mikhail Lermontov (1983); and Guy Daniels (trans.), A Lermontov Reader (1965).

Goncharov, Ivan Aleksandrovich

▪ Russian writer

born June 18 [June 6, old style], 1812, Simbirsk [now Ulyanovsk], Russia

died Sept. 27 [Sept. 15, O.S.], 1891, St. Petersburg

Russian novelist and travel writer, whose highly esteemed novels dramatize social change in Russia and contain some of Russian literature's most vivid and memorable characters.

Goncharov was born into a wealthy merchant family and, after graduating from Moscow University in 1834, served for nearly 30 years as an official, first in the Ministry of Finance and afterward in the Ministry of Censorship. The only unusual event in his uneventful life was his voyage to Japan made in 1852–55 as secretary to a Russian admiral; this was described in Fregat Pallada (1858; “The Frigate Pallas”).

Goncharov's most notable achievement lies in his three novels, of which the first was Obyknovennaya istoriya (1847; A Common Story, 1917), a novel that immediately made his reputation when it was acclaimed by the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky. Oblomov (1859; Eng. trans., 1954), a more mature work, generally accepted as one of the most important Russian novels, draws a powerful contrast between the aristocratic and capitalistic classes in Russia and attacks the way of life based on serfdom. Its hero, Oblomov, a generous but indecisive young nobleman who loses the woman he loves to a vigorous, pragmatic friend, is a triumph of characterization. From this character derives the Russian term oblomovshchina, epitomizing the backwardness, inertia, and futility of 19th-century Russian society. Goncharov's third novel, Obryv (1869; The Precipice, 1915), though a remarkable book, is inferior to Oblomov.

In all three novels Goncharov contrasts an easygoing dreamer with an opposing character who typifies businesslike efficiency; the contrast illumines social conditions in Russia at a time when rising capitalism and industrialization uneasily coexisted with the aristocratic traditions of old Russia.

Of Goncharov's minor writings, the most influential was an essay on Aleksandr Griboyedov's play Gore ot uma (Wit Works Woe).

Fet, Afanasy Afanasyevich

▪ Russian author

Fet also spelled Foeth , legitimatized name Afanasy Afanasyevich Shenshin

born Dec. 5 [Nov. 23, Old Style], 1820, Novosyolki, near Mtsensk, Orlov district, Russia

died Dec. 3 [Nov. 21], 1892, Moscow

Russian poet and translator, whose sincere and passionate lyric poetry strongly influenced later Russian poets, particularly the Symbolist Aleksandr Blok.

The illegitimate son of a German woman named Fet (or Foeth) and of a Russian landowner named Shenshin, whose name he assumed by decree in 1876, Fet was still a student at the University of Moscow when, in 1842, he published several admirable lyrics in the literary magazine Moskvityanin. In 1850 a volume of his poems appeared, followed by another in 1856. He served several years in the army, retiring in 1856 with the grade of captain. In 1860 he settled on an estate at Stepanovka, in his home district, where he was often visited by his friends Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy.

His intense and brief lyrics, which aimed to convey vivid momentary sensations, were to have great influence on the later Symbolists, but during his lifetime he was decried because of his reactionary political views and somewhat unattractive personality. After 1863 he published very little, but he continued to write nature poetry and love lyrics (published posthumously in a four-volume collected edition, 1894). His works also include translations of Ovid, Virgil, J.W. von Goethe's Faust, and Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea.

Ostrovsky, Aleksandr Nikolayevich

▪ Russian dramatist

born March 31 [April 12, New Style], 1823, Moscow, Russia

died June 2 [June 14], 1886, Shchelykovo

Russian dramatist who is generally considered the greatest representative of the Russian realistic period.

The son of a government clerk, Ostrovsky attended the University of Moscow law school. From 1843 to 1848 he was employed as a clerk at the Moscow juvenile court. He wrote his first play, Kartiny semeynogo schastya (“Scenes of Family Happiness”), in 1847. His next play, Bankrot (“The Bankrupt”), later renamed Svoi lyudi sochtemsya (It's a Family Affair, We'll Settle It Among Ourselves), written in 1850, provoked an outcry because it exposed bogus bankruptcy cases among Moscow merchants and brought about Ostrovsky's dismissal from the civil service. The play was banned for 13 years.

Ostrovsky wrote several historical plays in the 1860s. His main dramatic work, however, was concerned with the Russian merchant class and included two tragedies and numerous comedies, including the masterpiece Bednost ne porok (1853; “Poverty Is No Disgrace”). His Snegurochka (1873; “The Snow Maiden”) was adapted as an opera by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov in 1880–81.

Ostrovsky was closely associated with the Maly (“Little”) Theatre, Moscow's only dramatic state theatre, where all his plays were first performed under his supervision. He served as the first president of the Society of Russia Playwrights, which was founded on his initiative in 1874, and in 1885 he became artistic director of the Moscow imperial theatres. The author of 47 original plays, Ostrovsky almost single-handedly created a Russian national repertoire. His dramas are among the most widely read and frequently performed stage pieces in Russia.

Gorky, Maksim

▪ Russian writer

Introduction

also spelled Maxim Gorki, pseudonym of Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov

born March 16 [March 28, New Style], 1868, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

died June 14, 1936

Russian short-story writer and novelist who first attracted attention with his naturalistic and sympathetic stories of tramps and social outcasts and later wrote other stories, novels, and plays, including his famous The Lower Depths.

Early life.

Gorky's earliest years were spent in Astrakhan, where his father, a former upholsterer, became a shipping agent. When the boy was five his father died; Gorky returned to Nizhny Novgorod to live with his maternal grandparents, who brought him up after his mother remarried. The grandfather was a dyer whose business deteriorated and who treated Gorky harshly. From his grandmother he received most of what little kindness he experienced as a child.

Gorky knew the Russian working-class background intimately, for his grandfather afforded him only a few months of formal schooling, sending him out into the world to earn his living at the age of eight. His jobs included, among many others, work as assistant in a shoemaker's shop, as errand boy for an icon painter, and as dishwasher on a Volga steamer, where the cook introduced him to reading—soon to become his main passion in life. Frequently beaten by his employers, nearly always hungry and ill clothed, he came to know the seamy side of Russian life as few other Russian authors before or since. The bitterness of these early experiences later led him to choose the word gorky (“bitter”) as his pseudonym.

His late adolescence and early manhood were spent in Kazan, where he worked as a baker, docker, and night watchman. There he first learned about Russian revolutionary ideas from representatives of the Populist movement, whose tendency to idealize the Russian peasant he later rejected. Oppressed by the misery of his surroundings, he attempted suicide by shooting himself. Leaving Kazan at the age of 21, he became a tramp, doing odd jobs of all kinds during extensive wanderings through southern Russia.

First stories.

In Tbilisi (Tiflis) Gorky began to publish stories in the provincial press, of which the first was “Makar Chudra” (1892), followed by a series of similar wild Romantic legends and allegories of only documentary interest. But with the publication of “Chelkash” (1895) in a leading St. Petersburg journal, he began a success story as spectacular as any in the history of Russian literature. “Chelkash,” one of his outstanding works, is the story of a colourful harbour thief in which elements of Romanticism and realism are mingled. It began Gorky's celebrated “tramp period,” during which he described the social dregs of Russia. He expressed sympathy and self-identification with the strength and determination of the individual hobo or criminal, characters previously described more objectively. “Dvadtsat shest i odna” (1899; “Twenty-Six Men and a Girl”), describing the sweated labour conditions in a bakery, is often regarded as his best short story. So great was the success of these works that Gorky's reputation quickly soared, and he began to be spoken of almost as an equal of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov.

Plays and novels.

Next Gorky wrote a series of plays and novels, all less excellent than his best earlier stories. The first novel, Foma Gordeyev (1899), illustrates his admiration for strength of body and will in the masterful barge owner and rising capitalist Ignat Gordeyev, who is contrasted with his relatively feeble and intellectual son Foma, a “seeker after the meaning of life,” as are many of Gorky's other characters. From this point, the rise of Russian capitalism became one of Gorky's main fictional interests. Other novels of the period are Troye (1900; Three of Them), Ispoved (1908; A Confession), Gorodok Okurov (1909; “Okurov City”), and Zhizn Matveya Kozhemyakina (1910; “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin”). These are all to some extent failures because of Gorky's inability to sustain a powerful narrative, and also because of a tendency to overload his work with irrelevant discussions about the meaning of life. Mat (1906; Mother) is probably the least successful of the novels, yet it has considerable interest as Gorky's only long work devoted to the Russian revolutionary movement. It was made into a notable silent film by Vsevolod Pudovkin (1926) and dramatized by Bertolt Brecht in Die Mutter (1930–31). Gorky also wrote a series of plays, the most famous of which is Na dne (1902; The Lower Depths). A dramatic rendering of the kind of flophouse character that Gorky had already used so extensively in his stories, it still enjoys great success abroad and in Russia. He also wrote Meshchane (1902; The Petty Bourgeois, or The Smug Citizen), a play that glorifies the hero-intellectual who has revolutionary tendencies but also that explores the disruptions revolutionaries can wreak on everyday life.

Marxist (Marxism) activity.

Between 1899 and 1906 Gorky lived mainly in St. Petersburg, where he became a Marxist, supporting the Social Democratic Party (Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party). After the split in that party in 1903, Gorky went with its Bolshevik wing. But he was often at odds with the Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin. Nor did Gorky ever, formally, become a member of Lenin's party, though his enormous earnings, which he largely gave to party funds, were one of that organization's main sources of income. In 1901 the Marxist review Zhizn (“Life”) was suppressed for publishing a short revolutionary poem by Gorky, “Pesnya o burevestnike” (“Song of the Stormy Petrel”). Gorky was arrested but released shortly afterward and went to the Crimea, having developed tuberculosis. In 1902 he was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but his election was soon withdrawn for political reasons, an event that led to the resignations of Chekhov and the writer V.G. Korolenko from the academy. Gorky took a prominent part in the Russian Revolution of 1905, was arrested in the following year, and was again quickly released, partly as the result of protests from abroad. He toured America in the company of his mistress, an event that led to his partial ostracism there and to a consequent reaction on his part against the United States as expressed in stories about New York City, Gorod zhyoltogo dyavola (1906; “The City of the Yellow Devil”).

Exile and revolution.

On leaving Russia in 1906, Gorky spent seven years as a political exile, living mainly in his villa on Capri in Italy. Politically, Gorky was a nuisance to his fellow Marxists because of his insistence on remaining independent, but his great influence was a powerful asset, which from their point of view outweighed such minor defects. He returned to Russia in 1913, and during World War I he agreed with the Bolsheviks in opposing Russia's participation in the war. He opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and went on to attack the victorious Lenin's dictatorial methods in his newspaper Novaya zhizn (“New Life”) until July 1918, when his protests were silenced by censorship on Lenin's orders. Living in Petrograd, Gorky tried to help those who were not outright enemies of the Soviet government. Gorky often assisted imprisoned scholars and writers, helping them survive hunger and cold. His efforts, however, were thwarted by figures such as Lenin and Grigory Zinovyev, a close ally of Lenin's who was the head of the Petrograd Bolsheviks. In 1921 Lenin sent Gorky into exile under the pretext of Gorky's needing specialized medical treatment abroad.

Last period.

In the decade ending in 1923 Gorky's greatest masterpiece appeared. This is the autobiographical trilogy Detstvo (1913–14; My Childhood), V lyudyakh (1915–16; In the World), and Moi universitety (1923; My Universities). The title of the last volume is sardonic because Gorky's only university had been that of life, and his wish to study at Kazan University had been frustrated. This trilogy is one of the finest autobiographies in Russian. It describes Gorky's childhood and early manhood and reveals him as an acute observer of detail, with a flair for describing his own family, his numerous employers, and a panorama of minor but memorable figures. The trilogy contains many messages, which Gorky now tended to imply rather than preach openly: protests against motiveless cruelty, continued emphasis on the importance of toughness and self-reliance, and musings on the value of hard work.

Gorky finished his trilogy abroad, where he also wrote the stories published in Rasskazy 1922–1924 (1925; “Stories 1922–24”), which are among his best work. From 1924 he lived at a villa in Sorrento, Italy, to which he invited many Russian artists and writers who stayed for lengthy periods. Gorky's health was poor, and he was disillusioned by postrevolutionary life in Russia, but in 1928 he yielded to pressures to return, and the lavish official celebration there of his 60th birthday was beyond anything he could have expected. In the following year he returned to the U.S.S.R. permanently and lived there until his death. His return coincided with the establishment of Stalin's ascendancy, and Gorky became a prop of Stalinist (Stalinism) political orthodoxy. Correspondence published in the 1990s between Gorky and Stalin and between Gorky and Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the Soviet secret police, shows that Gorky gradually lost all illusions that freedom would prevail in the U.S.S.R., and he consequently adjusted to the rules of the new way of life. He was now more than ever the undisputed leader of Soviet writers, and, when the Soviet Writers' Union was founded in 1934, he became its first president. At the same time, he helped to found the literary method of Socialist Realism, which was imposed on all Soviet writers and which obliged them—in effect—to become outright political propagandists.

Gorky remained active as a writer, but almost all his later fiction is concerned with the period before 1917. In Delo Artamonovykh (1925; The Artamonov Business), one of his best novels, he showed his continued interest in the rise and fall of prerevolutionary Russian capitalism. From 1925 until the end of his life, Gorky worked on the novel Zhizn Klima Samgina (“The Life of Klim Samgin”). Though he completed four volumes that appeared between 1927 and 1937 (translated into English as Bystander, The Magnet, Other Fires, and The Specter), the novel was to remain unfinished. It depicts in detail 40 years of Russian life as seen through the eyes of a man inwardly destroyed by the events of the decades preceding and following the turn of the 20th century. There were also more plays—Yegor Bulychov i drugiye (1932; “Yegor Bulychov and Others”) and Dostigayev i drugiye (1933; “Dostigayev and Others”)—but the most generally admired work is a set of reminiscences of Russian writers—Vospominaniya o Tolstom (1919; Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy) and O pisatelyakh (1928; “About Writers”). The memoir of Tolstoy is so lively and free from the hagiographic approach traditional in Russian studies of their leading authors that it has sometimes been acclaimed as Gorky's masterpiece. Almost equally impressive is Gorky's study of Chekhov. He also wrote pamphlets on topical events and problems in which he glorified some of the most brutal aspects of Stalinism.

Some mystery attaches to Gorky's death, which occurred suddenly in 1936 while he was under medical treatment. Whether his death was natural or not is unknown, but it came to figure in the trial of Nikolay I. Bukharin and others in 1938, at which it was claimed that Gorky had been the victim of an anti-Soviet plot by the “Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites.” The former police chief Genrikh Yagoda, who was among the defendants, confessed to having ordered his death. Some Western authorities have suggested that Gorky was done to death on Stalin's orders, having finally become sickened by the excesses of Stalinist Russia, but there is little evidence of this except that it was characteristic of Stalin to frame others on the charge of accomplishing his own misdeeds.

Assessment.

After his death Gorky was canonized as the patron saint of Soviet letters. His reputation abroad has also remained high, but it is doubtful whether posterity will deal with him so kindly. His success was partly due, both in the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent abroad, to political accident. Though technically of lower-middle-class origin, he lived in such poverty as a child and young man that he is often considered the greatest “proletarian” in Russian literature. This circumstance, coinciding with the rise of working-class movements all over the world, helped to give Gorky an immense literary reputation, which his works do not wholly merit.

Gorky's literary style, though gradually improving through the years, retained its original defects of excessive striving for effect, of working on the reader's nerves by the piling up of emotive adjectives, and of tending to overstate. Among Gorky's other defects, in addition to his weakness for philosophical digressions, is a certain coarseness of emotional grain. But his eye for physical detail, his talent for making his characters live, and his unrivaled knowledge of the Russian “lower depths” are weighty items on the credit side. Gorky was the only Soviet writer whose work embraced the prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary period so exhaustively, and, though he by no means stands with Chekhov, Tolstoy, and others in the front rank of Russian writers, he remains one of the more important literary figures of his age.

Ronald Francis Hingley Ed.

Additional Reading

Works of mainly biography are Dan Levin, Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky (1965, reissued 1986), a generally well-researched and sensitive account; Gerhard Habermann, Maksim Gorki (1971), a short popular work; and Henri Troyat, Gorky (1989). Critical studies are F.M. Borras, Maxim Gorky the Writer (1967), a generally sound critical interpretation, though the material is rather weakly organized; Nina Gourfinkel, Gorky (1960, reprinted 1975), a short, fragmentary work, though with some valuable insights; Richard Hare, Maxim Gorky, Romantic Realist and Conservative Revolutionary (1962, reprinted 1978), marred by some rather unbalanced critical attitudes and a general sense of authorial antipathy toward his subject; Alexander Kaun, Maxim Gorky and His Russia (1931, reprinted 1968), a fascinating and sensitive account of Gorky and his career by an American who knew him; Irwin Weil, Gorky (1966), a good account of Gorky's outstanding features as a writer and an extremely interesting, if somewhat speculative, attempt to trace his influence on the general development of Soviet literature as well as individual Soviet writers; Bertram D. Wolfe, The Bridge and the Abyss: The Troubled Friendship of Maxim Gorky and V.I. Lenin (1967, reprinted 1983), a fascinating account of a complex relationship that revealed vital aspects of personality in both men; and Barry P. Scherr, Maxim Gorky (1988), which includes a short biography. Bibliographies on Gorky's life and work and on Gorky criticism include Boriss A. Kaleps (comp.), Maxim Gorky (1868–1936): A Bibliography of Publications from and on Gorky in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latvian Languages (1963); and Edith W. Clowes, Maksim Gorky: A Reference Guide (1987).

Bunin, Ivan Alekseyevich

▪ Russian author

born Oct. 10 [Oct. 22, New Style], 1870, Voronezh, Russia

died Nov. 8, 1953, Paris, France

poet and novelist, the first Russian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1933), and one of the finest of Russian stylists.

Bunin, the descendant of an old noble family, spent his childhood and youth in the Russian provinces. He attended secondary school in Yelets, in western Russia, but did not graduate; his older brother subsequently tutored him. Bunin began publishing poems and short stories in 1887, and in 1889–92 he worked for the newspaper Orlovsky Vestnik (“The Orlovsky Herald”). His first book, Stikhotvoreniya: 1887–1891 (“Poetry: 1887–1891”), appeared in 1891 as a supplement to that newspaper. In the mid-1890s he was strongly drawn to the ideas of the novelist Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy, Leo), whom he met in person. During this period Bunin gradually entered the Moscow and St. Petersburg literary scenes, including the growing Symbolist movement. Bunin's Listopad (1901; “Falling Leaves”), a book of poetry, testifies to his association with the Symbolists, primarily Valery Bryusov (Bryusov, Valery Yakovlevich). However, Bunin's work had more in common with the traditions of classical Russian literature of the 19th century, of which his older contemporaries Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, Anton) were models.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Bunin had become one of Russia's most popular writers. His sketches and stories "Antonovskiye yabloki" (1900; “Antonov Apples”), "Grammatika lyubvi" (1929; “Grammar of Love”), "Lyogkoye dykhaniye" (1922; “Light Breathing”), "Sny Changa" (1916; “The Dreams of Chang”), "Sukhodol" (1912; “Dry Valley”), "Derevnya" (1910; “The Village”), and "Gospodin iz San-Frantsisko" (1916; “The Gentleman from San Francisco”) show Bunin's penchant for extreme precision of language, delicate description of nature, detailed psychological analysis, and masterly control of plot. While his democratic views gave rise to criticism in Russia, they did not turn him into a politically engaged writer. Bunin also believed that change was inevitable in Russian life. His urge to keep his independence is evident in his break with the writer Maksim Gorky (Gorky, Maksim) and other old friends after the Russian Revolution of 1917, which he perceived as the triumph of the basest side of the Russian people.

Bunin's articles and diaries of 1917–20 are a record of Russian life during its years of terror. In May 1918 he left Moscow and settled in Odessa (now in Ukraine), and at the beginning of 1920 he emigrated first to Constantinople (now Istanbul) and then to France, where he lived for the rest of his life. There he became one of the most famous Russian émigré writers. His stories, the novella Mitina lyubov (1925; Mitya's Love), and the autobiographical novel Zhizn Arsenyeva (The Life of Arsenev)—which Bunin began writing during the 1920s and of which he published parts in the 1930s and 1950s—were recognized by critics and Russian readers abroad as testimony of the independence of Russian émigré culture.

Bunin lived in the south of France during World War II, refusing all contact with the Nazis and hiding Jews in his villa. Tyomnye allei (1943; Dark Avenues, and Other Stories), a book of short stories, was one of his last great works. After the end of the war, Bunin was invited to return to the Soviet Union, but he remained in France.Vospominaniya (Memories and Portraits), which appeared in 1950. An unfinished book, O Chekhove (1955; “On Chekhov”; Eng. trans. About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony), was published posthumously. Bunin was one of the first Russian émigré writers whose works were published in the Soviet Union after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

Additional Reading

Bunin's life and work are examined in Julian W. Connolly, Ivan Bunin (1982); Thomas Gaiton Marullo (ed.), Ivan Bunin: Russian Requiem, 1885–1920 (1993), and Ivan Bunin: From the Other Shore, 1920–1933 (1995), comprising Bunin's letters, diaries and fiction, as well as writings of his wife; and James B. Woodward, Ivan Bunin: A Study of His Fiction (1980).

Bryusov, Valery Yakovlevich

▪ Russian author

Bryusov also spelled Briusov and Brjusov

born Dec. 13 [Dec. 1, Old Style], 1873, Moscow, Russia

died Oct. 9, 1924, Moscow, Russian S.F.S.R., U.S.S.R.

poet, essayist, and editor, one of the founders and leading members of Russian Symbolism (Symbolist movement).

Bryusov's paternal grandfather was a serf who became a merchant, and his maternal grandfather was an amateur poet. Toward the end of 1892, he encountered the theories and poetry of the French Symbolists. He began his studies at Moscow University in 1893 and graduated six years later. In 1894–95 he published a translation of Romances sans paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”) by the French poet Paul Verlaine (Verlaine, Paul), three anthologies of Russian Symbolist poets, and a book of his own poetry bearing the French title Chefs d'oeuvre (“Leading Works”). In the introductions to these books he laid out his ideas on Symbolism. The books caused a literary scandal and brought Bryusov fame.

Though interested in the contemporary literature of Russia and Europe, Bryusov at the same time promoted Russian poets of the early 19th century, such as Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich), Fyodor Tyutchev (Tyutchev, Fyodor Ivanovich), and Yevgeny Baratynsky (Baratynsky, Yevgeny Abramovich). Bryusov's collections of poetry at the turn of the century, all bearing Latin titles—Me eum esse (1897; “This Is I”), Tertia vigilia (1900; “Third Vigil”), and Urbi et orbi (1903; “To the City and the World”)—testify to his increasing maturity as a poet. The high culture of this verse, combined with an opening up of the formerly obscure elements in his poetry and a synthesis of the eternal with the contemporary, made his poetry extremely popular.

From 1899 Bryusov oversaw the Skorpion publishing house, and in 1904 he was named editor of the literary magazine Vesy (“Libra,” or “Scales”). During this time he also contributed to the literary almanac Severnye tsvety (“Northern Flowers”). His regularly published articles on literature present a panorama of Russian poetry from a Symbolist point of view while also positioning Russian poetry within an international literary context. Bryusov also became known as a writer of fiction with his novel Ognenny angel (1908; The Fiery Angel) and as a translator from many languages.

Bryusov's resulting literary reputation allowed him to transcend the confines of the Symbolist movement. From 1909 on, he published a great deal in one of the most popular Russian magazines, Russkaya Mysl (“Russian Thought”). From 1910 to 1912 he was editor in chief of its literary section, and he subsequently became its war correspondent during World War I. His poetry during those years, however, is of less interest and importance.

Bryusov initially viewed the Russian Revolution of 1917 with some skepticism, but he soon joined the Bolsheviks, becoming a member of the Communist Party in 1920 and working in various Soviet institutions. During this period Bryusov wrote a great deal of experimental poetry, the style of which was not taken up by later generations of poets.

Additional Reading

Joan Delaney Grossman, Valery Bryusov and the Riddle of Russian Decadence (1985); Martin P. Rice, Valery Briusov and the Rise of Russian Symbolism (1975).

Tyutchev, Fyodor Ivanovich

▪ Russian writer

Tyutchev also spelled Tiutchev

born Dec. 5 [Nov. 23, Old Style], 1803, Ovstug, Russia

died July 27 [July 15], 1873, St. Petersburg

Russian writer who was remarkable both as a highly original philosophic poet and as a militant Slavophile, and whose whole literary output constitutes a struggle to fuse political passion with poetic imagination.

The son of a wealthy landowner, educated at home and at Moscow University, Tyutchev served his country as a diplomat in Munich and Turin. In Germany he developed a friendship with the poet Heinrich Heine and met frequently with the idealist philosopher Friedrich W.J. von Schelling. His protracted expatriate life, however, only made Tyutchev more Russian at heart. Though the bare and poverty-stricken Russian countryside depressed him, he voiced a proud, intimate, and tragic vision of the motherland in his poetry. He also wrote political articles and political verses, both of which reflect his reactionary nationalist and Pan-Slavist views, as well as his deep love of Russia. He once wrote, “I love poetry and my country above all else in the world.”

Tyutchev's love poems, most of them inspired by his liaison with his daughter's governess, are among the most passionate and poignant in the Russian language. He is regarded as one of the three greatest Russian poets of the 19th century, making a trinity with Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov.

Stanislavsky, Konstantin Sergeyevich

▪ Russian actor and director

Introduction

Stanislavsky also spelled Stanislavski , original name Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev

born January 5 [January 17, New Style], 1863, Moscow, Russia

died August 7, 1938, Moscow

Russian actor, director, and producer, founder of the Moscow Art Theatre (opened 1898). He is best known for developing the system or theory of acting called the Stanislavsky system, or Stanislavsky method.

Early influences

Stanislavsky's father was a manufacturer, and his mother was the daughter of a French actress. Stanislavsky first appeared on his parents' amateur stage at age 14 and subsequently joined the dramatic group that was organized by his family and called the Alekseyev Circle. Although initially an awkward performer, Stanislavsky obsessively worked on his shortcomings of voice, diction, and body movement. His thoroughness and his preoccupation with all aspects of a production came to distinguish him from other members of the Alekseyev Circle, and he gradually became its central figure. Stanislavsky also performed in other groups as theatre came to absorb his life. He adopted the pseudonym Stanislavsky in 1885, and in 1888 he married Maria Perevoshchikova, a schoolteacher, who became his devoted disciple and lifelong companion, as well as an outstanding actress under the name Lilina.

Stanislavsky regarded the theatre as an art of social significance. Theatre was a powerful influence on people, he believed, and the actor must serve as the people's educator. Stanislavsky concluded that only a permanent theatrical company could ensure a high level of acting skill. In 1888 he and others established the Society of Art and Literature with a permanent amateur company. Endowed with great talent, musicality, a striking appearance, a vivid imagination, and a subtle intuition, Stanislavsky began to develop the plasticity of his body and a greater range of voice. Praise came from famous foreign actors, and great Russian actresses invited him to perform with them. Thus encouraged, Stanislavsky staged his first independent production, Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy, Leo)'s The Fruits of Enlightenment, in 1891, a major Moscow theatrical event. Most significantly, it impressed a promising writer and director, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir Ivanovich) (1858–1943), whose later association with Stanislavsky was to have a paramount influence on the theatre.

Nemirovich-Danchenko followed Stanislavsky's activities until their historic meeting in 1897, when they outlined a plan for a people's theatre. It was to consist of the most talented amateurs of Stanislavsky's society and of the students of the Philharmonic Music and Drama School, which Nemirovich-Danchenko directed. As the Moscow Art Theatre, it became the arena for Stanislavsky's reforms. Nemirovich-Danchenko undertook responsibility for literary and administrative matters, while Stanislavsky was responsible for staging and production.

The Moscow Art Theatre opened on October 14 (October 26, New Style), 1898, with a performance of Aleksey K. Tolstoy's Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich. But Stanislavsky was disappointed in the acting that night. He found it to be merely imitative of the gestures, intonations, and conceptions of the director (directing). To project important thoughts and to affect the spectators, he reflected, there must be living characters on stage, and the mere external behaviour of the actors is insufficient to create a character's unique inner world. To seek knowledge about human behaviour, Stanislavsky turned to science. He began experimenting in developing the first elements of what became known as the Stanislavsky method. He turned sharply from the purely external approach to the purely psychological. A play was discussed around the table for months. He became strict and uncompromising in educating actors. He insisted on the integrity and authenticity of performance on stage, repeating for hours during rehearsal his dreaded criticism, “I do not believe you.”

Stanislavsky's successful experience with Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, Anton)'s The Seagull confirmed his developing convictions about the theatre. With difficulty Stanislavsky had obtained Chekhov's permission to restage The Seagull after its original production in St. Petersburg in 1896 had been a failure. Directed by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1898, The Seagull became a triumph, heralding the birth of the Moscow Art Theatre as a new force in world theatre. Chekhov, who had resolved never to write another play after his initial failure, was acclaimed a great playwright, and he later wrote The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1903) specially for the Moscow Art Theatre.

Staging Chekhov's play, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko discovered a new manner of performing: they emphasized the ensemble and the subordination of each individual actor to the whole, and they subordinated the director's and actors' interpretations to the dramatist's intent. Actors, Stanislavsky felt, had to have a common training and be capable of an intense inner identification with the characters that they played, while still remaining independent of the role in order to subordinate it to the needs of the play as a whole. Fighting against the artificial and highly stylized theatrical conventions of the late 19th century, Stanislavsky sought instead the reproduction of authentic emotions at every performance.

In 1902 Stanislavsky successfully staged both Maksim Gorky (Gorky, Maksim)'s The Petty Bourgeois and The Lower Depths, codirecting the latter with Nemirovich-Danchenko. Among the numerous powerful roles performed by Stanislavsky were Astrov in Uncle Vanya in 1899 and Gayev in The Cherry Orchard in 1904, by Chekhov; Doctor Stockman in Henrik Ibsen (Ibsen, Henrik)'s An Enemy of the People in 1900; and Satin in The Lower Depths. Both as an actor and as a director, Stanislavsky demonstrated a remarkable subtlety in rendering psychological patterns and an exceptional talent for satirical characterization. Commanding respect from followers and adversaries alike, he became a dominant influence on the Russian intellectuals of the time. He formed the First Studio in 1912, where his innovations were adopted by many young actors. In 1918 he undertook the guidance of the Bolshoi Opera Studio, which was later named for him. There he staged Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich)'s Eugene Onegin in 1922, which was acclaimed as a major reform in opera.

In 1922–24 the Moscow Art Theatre toured Europe and the United States with Stanislavsky as its administrator, director, and leading actor. A great interest was stirred in his system. During this period he wrote his autobiography, My Life in Art. Ever preoccupied in it with content and form, Stanislavsky acknowledged that the “theatre of representation,” which he had disparaged, nonetheless produced brilliant actors. Recognizing that theatre was at its best when deep content harmonized with vivid theatrical form, Stanislavsky supervised the First Studio's production of William Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William)'s Twelfth Night in 1917 and Nikolay Gogol (Gogol, Nikolay)'s The Government Inspector in 1921, encouraging the actor Michael Chekhov in a brilliantly grotesque characterization. His staging of Aleksandr Ostrovsky (Ostrovsky, Aleksandr Nikolayevich)'s An Ardent Heart (1926) and of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de)'s The Marriage of Figaro (1927) demonstrated increasingly bold attempts at theatricality. His monumental Armoured Train 14–69, V.V. Ivanov (Ivanov, Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich)'s play about the Russian Revolution, was a milestone in Soviet theatre in 1927, and his Dead Souls was a brilliant incarnation of Gogol's masterpiece.

While acting in The Three Sisters during the Moscow Art Theatre's 30th anniversary presentation on October 29, 1928, Stanislavsky suffered a heart attack. Abandoning acting, he concentrated for the rest of his life on directing and educating actors and directors.

The Stanislavsky method, or system, developed over 40 long years. He tried various experiments, focusing much of the time on what he considered the most important attribute of an actor's work—bringing an actor's own past emotions into play in a role. But he was frequently disappointed and dissatisfied with the results of his experiments. He continued nonetheless his search for “conscious means to the subconscious”—i.e., the search for the actor's emotions. In 1935 he was taken by the modern scientific conception of the interaction of brain and body and started developing a final technique that he called the “method of physical actions.” It taught emotional creativity; it encouraged actors to feel physically and psychologically the emotions of the characters that they portrayed at any given moment. The method also aimed at influencing the playwright's construction of plays.

Saburo Muroga Ed.

Additional Reading

David Magarshack, Stanislavsky (1950, reprinted 1986); and Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski, 2nd ed. (1990), are biographies. Discussions of the Stanislavsky method include Nikolai M. Gorchakov, Stanislavsky Directs (1954, reprinted 1985); Sonia Moore, The Stanislavski System, 2nd rev. ed. (1965); and Training an Actor: The Stanislavski System in Class, rev. ed. (1979), a work based on class tape recordings demonstrating the Stanislavsky technique in practice.

Stanislavsky method

▪ acting

also called The Method, or Stanislavsky System,

highly influential system of dramatic training developed over years of trial and error by the Russian actor, producer, and theoretician Konstantin Stanislavsky. He began with attempts to find a style of acting more appropriate to the greater realism of 20th-century drama than the histrionic acting styles of the 19th century. He never intended, however, to develop a new style of acting but rather to codify in teaching and performing regimens the ways in which great actors always have achieved success in their work, regardless of prevailing acting styles.

The method requires that an actor utilize, among other things, his emotional memory (i.e., his recall of past experiences and emotions). The actor's entrance onto the stage is not considered to be a beginning of the action or of his life as the character but a continuation of the set of preceding circumstances. The actor has trained his concentration and his senses so that he may respond freely to the total stage environment. Through empathic observation of people in many different situations, he attempts to develop a wide emotional range so that his onstage actions and reactions appear as if they were a part of the real world rather than a make-believe one.

A risk in the Stanislavsky method is that, when role interpretation is based on the inner impulses of the performer, a scene may unexpectedly take on new directions. (This temptation was opposed by Stanislavsky himself, who demanded that the actor subordinate himself to the play.) Some directors are disposed against the method, seeing in it a threat to their control of a production. Many, however, find it especially useful during rehearsals in uncovering unsuspected nuances of character or of dramatic action.

The method was widely practiced in the Soviet Union and in the United States, where experiments in its use began in the 1920s and continued in many schools and professional workshops, such as the prestigious Actors Studio in New York City.

Moscow Art Theatre

▪ theatre, Moscow, Russia

in full Moscow Art Academic Theatre , Russian Moscovsky Akademichesky Khudozhestvenny Teatr , or Moscovsky Khudozhestvenny Teatr

outstanding Russian theatre of theatrical naturalism founded in 1898 by two teachers of dramatic art, Konstantin Stanislavsky (Stanislavsky, Konstantin Sergeyevich) and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir Ivanovich). Its purpose was to establish a theatre of new art forms, with a fresh approach to its function. Sharing similar theatrical experience and interests, the cofounders met and it was agreed that Stanislavsky was to have absolute control over stage direction while Nemirovich-Danchenko was assigned the literary and administrative duties. The original ensemble was made up of amateur actors from the Society of Art and Literature and from the dramatic classes of the Moscow Philharmonic Society, where Stanislavsky (Stanislavsky method) and Nemirovich-Danchenko had taught. Influenced by the German Meiningen Company, Stanislavsky began to develop a system of training for actors that would enable them to perform realistically in any sort of role and situation.

After some 70 rehearsals, the Moscow Art Theatre opened with Aleksey Tolstoy's Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich in October 1898. For its fifth production it staged Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, Anton)'s The Seagull, a play that had failed in its first production. With its revival of The Seagull, the Art Theatre not only achieved its first major success but also began a long artistic association with one of Russia's most celebrated playwrights: in Chekhov's artistic realism, the Art Theatre discovered a writer suited to its aesthetic sensibilities. In The Seagull, as in all of Chekhov's plays, the Art Theatre emphasized the subtext, the underlying meaning of the playwright's thought. Artistically, the Art Theatre tried all that was new. Its repertoire included works of Maksim Gorky (Gorky, Maksim), L.N. Andreyev (Andreyev, Leonid Nikolayevich), Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy, Leo), Maurice Maeterlinck (Maeterlinck, Maurice), and Gerhart Hauptmann (Hauptmann, Gerhart), among others, and it staged works of political and social significance as well as satires, fantasies, and comedies.

After the Russian Revolution it received crucial support from V.I. Lenin (Lenin) and A.V. Lunacharsky, first commissar of education in the Soviet Union, and in 1922 the Art Theatre toured Europe and the United States, garnering critical acclaim wherever it performed. Returning to Moscow in 1924, the theatre continued to produce new Soviet plays and Russian classics. Two successful tours of London in the late 1950s and early '60s reestablished its preeminence in world theatre. The Art Theatre has exercised a tremendous influence on theatres all over the world: it fostered a number of experimental studios (e.g., Vakhtangov Theatre, Realistic Theatre, Habima Theatre, Musical Studio of Nemirovich-Danchenko), and, today, virtually all professional training in acting uses some aspects of Konstantin Stanislavsky's method.

In 1987 the theatre split into two companies—the Moscow Art Academic Theatre of Gorky and the Moscow Art Theatre of Chekhov—because of professional differences.

Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir Ivanovich

▪ Russian author and theatrical director

born Dec. 23 [Dec. 11, old style], 1858, Ozurgety, Russia

died April 25, 1943, Moscow

Russian playwright, novelist, producer, and cofounder of the famous Moscow Art Theatre.

At the age of 13, Nemirovich-Danchenko was directing plays and experimenting with different stage effects. He received his formal education at Moscow State University, where his talents as a writer and critic began to appear. As a young dramatist, his plays, which were presented at the Maly Theatre (Moscow), were highly praised and respected, and he received at least two awards for playwriting.

In 1891 he became an instructor of dramatic art at the Moscow Philharmonic Society. Olga Knipper, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Yevgeny Vakhtangov were only a few of the actors and directors who came under his influence and who eventually went on to win recognition on the Russian stage. As a teacher, Nemirovich-Danchenko expounded his ideas on theatrical art, the most important of which, such as the need for longer, organized rehearsals and a less rigid acting style, were subsequently incorporated by Konstantin Stanislavsky (Stanislavsky, Konstantin Sergeyevich) into his Method system of acting. In 1897, realizing that the Russian stage was in need of drastic reform, Nemirovich-Danchenko called a meeting with Stanislavsky to outline the aims and policies of a new theatre, an actor's theatre, first named the Moscow Art and Popular Theatre. Although Stanislavsky was given absolute authority over staging the productions, the contributions of Nemirovich-Danchenko were considerable. Both as producer and as literary adviser, he was chiefly responsible for the reading and selection of new plays, and he instructed Stanislavsky on matters of interpretation and staging as well.

Nemirovich-Danchenko encouraged both Anton Chekhov and Maksim Gorky to write for the theatre, and he is credited with the successful revival of Chekhov's Seagull after it had failed dismally at the Aleksandrinsky Theatre. Applying the dramatic reforms of the Moscow Art Theatre to light opera, Nemirovich-Danchenko founded the Moscow Art Musical Studio in the early 1920s and achieved outstanding success with his staging of La Périchole and Lysistrata in New York City (1925). His autobiography was translated as My Life in the Russian Theater (1936).

Andreyev, Leonid Nikolayevich

▪ Russian author

Andreyev also spelled Andreev

born Aug. 21 [Aug. 9, Old Style], 1871, Oryol, Russia

died Sept. 12, 1919, Kuokkala, Fin.

novelist whose best work has a place in Russian literature for its evocation of a mood of despair and absolute pessimism.

At the age of 20 Andreyev entered St. Petersburg University but lived restlessly for some time. In 1894, after several attempts at suicide, he transferred to the University of Moscow, where he studied law. He became a barrister and then a law and crime reporter, publishing his first stories in newspapers and periodicals. Encouraged by Maksim Gorky, who became a close friend, he was at first regarded as Gorky's successor as a Realist. His “Zhili-byli” (“Once There Lived . . .”) attracted attention and was included in his first collection of short stories (1901). Two stories of 1902, Bezdna (“The Abyss”) and V tumane (“In the Fog”), caused a storm by their candid and audacious treatment of sex. Andreyev's work became widely discussed, and he acquired fame and wealth with a series of novels and short stories that, at their best, resemble Tolstoy in their powerful themes and ironic sympathy for suffering humanity. Among his best tales are Gubernator (1905; His Excellency the Governor) and Rasskaz o semi poveshennykh (1908; The Seven That Were Hanged).

Andreyev's fame as a novelist declined rapidly as his works became increasingly sensational. He began a career as a dramatist in 1905. His most successful plays—Zhizn cheloveka (1907; The Life of Man) and Tot, kto poluchayet poshchyochiny (1916; He Who Gets Slapped)—were allegorical dramas, but he also attempted Realist comedy.

Andreyev saw World War I as a battle of democracy against Germany's despotism, which he strongly opposed. In 1916 he became the editor of the literary section of the newspaper Russkaya Volya (“Russian Will”), published with the support of the tsar's government. He enthusiastically welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 but saw the Bolsheviks' coming to power as a catastrophe for Russia. He moved to Finland in 1917, and Finland's declaration of independence that same year gave him the opportunity to write and print anti-Bolshevik articles, among them S.O.S. (1919), his famous appeal to the Allies. Andreyev's last novel, Dnevnik Satany (Satan's Diary), was unfinished at his death. Published in 1921, it paints a world in which boundless evil triumphs. In 1956 his remains were taken to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).

Additional Reading

James B. Woodward, Leonid Andreyev: A Study (1969); Josephine M. Newcombe, Leonid Andreyev (1972); Frederick H. White, Memoirs and Madness: Leonid Andreev Through the Prism of the Literary Portrait (2006).

Ivanov, Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich

▪ Soviet writer

born Feb. 24 [Feb. 12, old style], 1895, Lebyazhye, Russia

died Aug. 15, 1963, Moscow

Soviet prose writer noted for his vivid naturalistic realism, one of the most original writers of the 1920s.

Born into a poor family on the border of Siberia and Turkistan, Ivanov ran away from home to become a clown in a travelling circus. He later was a wanderer, labourer, and itinerant entertainer. He served in the Red Army during the civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution.

In 1920 Ivanov went to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), where he became associated with the Serapion Brothers, a literary group whose members admired and imitated the Romanticism of the early 19th-century German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann. He also came under the influence of Maksim Gorky. His graphic stories of the civil war—Partizany (1921; “Partisans”), Bronepoezd 14–69 (1922; Armoured Train 14–69), Tsvetnyye vetra (1922; “Coloured Winds”)—quickly established his reputation as a writer. Set in Asiatic Russia, the stories have a distinctive regional flavour.

A change in official literary policies in the late 1920s required Ivanov to revise his works to harmonize with the new principles. In 1927 he reworked Armoured Train 14–69— which had been severely criticized for neglecting the role of the Communist Party in the partisan movement—into a play, correcting this flaw. The drama enjoyed immediate success and has become one of the classics of the Soviet repertory. In his works composed at this time Ivanov had to temper much of the naturalism, which was considered a negative quality, that had produced such powerful effects in his earlier work. Moreover, his own attitude had changed; he turned from the affirmation of physical and instinctual life to psychological analysis. His major later works include a collection of tales, Taynoye taynykh (1927; “The Secret of Secrets”), and an autobiographical novel, Pokhozhdeniya fakira (1934–35; The Adventures of a Fakir).

During World War II Ivanov worked as a war correspondent for the newspaper Izvestiya. His wartime experiences provided material for a new collection of stories and a novel, neither favourably received by Soviet critics. His subsequent work is generally regarded as inferior to the early, unrevised stories.

Serapion Brothers

▪ Russian literary group

Russian Serapionovy Bratya,

group of young Russian writers formed in 1921 under the unsettled conditions of the early Soviet regime. Though they had no specific program, they were united in their belief that a work of art must stand on its own intrinsic merits, that all aspects of life or fantasy were suitable subjects, and that experiments in a variety of styles were desirable.

The writers were admirers of E.T.A. Hoffmann, the German Romantic storyteller who wrote a series of exotic tales supposedly exchanged by a group gathered around a hermit, Serapion. Consequently, the Brothers adopted this name as indicative of their interest in the art of storytelling. Though they could not entirely eliminate social themes from their work, the Serapion Brothers introduced to them a fresh use of intricate plots, surprise endings, and techniques of mystery and suspense. They regarded much of the escapist literature of the West, such as the romantic adventure stories of Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rider Haggard, as superior in technical artistry to traditional Russian realism.

The Serapion Brothers met in the House of Arts, a cultural institute established in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) by Maksim Gorky. They learned their craft in the literary workshop of the innovative elder writer Yevgeny Zamyatin (Zamyatin, Yevgeny Ivanovich). The members, most of whom were in their early 20s, included Mikhail Zoshchenko (Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhaylovich), Vsevolod Ivanov (Ivanov, Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich), Veniamin Kaverin, Konstantin Fedin (Fedin, Konstantin Aleksandrovich), Lev Lunts, Nikolay Nikitin, Nikolay Tikhonov (Tikhonov, Nikolay Semyonovich), Vladimir Pozner, Mikhail Slonimsky, and Viktor Shklovsky (Shklovsky, Viktor Borisovich). Their influence extended beyond their nuclear group and affected most of the other writers who remained aloof from political orthodoxy and dominated the literary scene in the early Soviet period.

Zamyatin, Yevgeny Ivanovich

▪ Russian author

Zamyatin also spelled Zamiatin

born February 1 [January 20, Old Style], 1884, Lebedyan, Tambov province, Russia

died March 10, 1937, Paris, France

Russian novelist, playwright, and satirist, one of the most brilliant and cultured minds of the postrevolutionary period and the creator of a uniquely modern genre—the anti-Utopian novel. His influence as an experimental stylist and as an exponent of the cosmopolitan-humanist traditions of the European intelligentsia was very great in the earliest and most creative period of Soviet literature.

Educated in St. Petersburg as a naval engineer (1908), Zamyatin combined his scientific career with writing. His early works were Uyezdnoye (1913; “A Provincial Tale”), a trenchant satire of provincial life, and Na kulichkakh (1914; “At the World's End”), an attack on military life that was condemned by tsarist censors. Zamyatin was brought to trial, and, although acquitted, he stopped writing for some time. During World War I he was in England supervising the building of Russian icebreakers. There he wrote Ostrovityane (1918; “The Islanders”), satirizing what he saw as the meanness and emotional repression of English life. He returned to Russia in 1917.

A chronic dissenter, Zamyatin was a Bolshevik before the Russian Revolution of 1917 but disassociated himself from the party afterward. His ironic criticism of literary politics kept him out of official favour, but he was influential as the mentor of the Serapion Brothers, a brilliant younger generation of writers whose artistic creed was to have no creeds. In such stories as "Mamay" (1921)—the name of the Mongol general who invaded Russia in the 14th century—and "Peshchera" (1922; “The Cave”), Zamyatin painted a picture of the increasing savagery of humankind in postrevolutionary Petrograd. "Tserkov Bozhiya" (1922; “The Church of God”) is an allegorical tale affirming that power based on bloodshed cannot lay claim to virtue. His essay "Ya boyus" (1921; “I Am Afraid”), a succinct survey of the state of postrevolutionary literature, closes with the prophetic judgment: “I am afraid that the only future possible to Russian literature is its past.” During this period Zamyatin wrote some of his best short stories.

His most ambitious work, the novel My (written 1920; We), circulated in manuscript but was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988 (an English translation appeared in the United States in 1924, and the original Russian text was published in New York in 1952). It portrays life in the “Single State,” where workers live in glass houses, have numbers rather than names, wear identical uniforms, eat chemical foods, and enjoy rationed sex. They are ruled by a “Benefactor” who is unanimously and perpetually reelected. Often classed as science fiction, We is the literary ancestor of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1949).

The publication abroad of We was one of the reasons for the repressive campaign launched against many writers in 1929. Zamyatin announced his withdrawal from the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers ( RAPP) and for all practical purposes ceased to be considered a Soviet author. He was no longer published, and his plays, which he had begun to write in 1923 and which had run successfully in theatres, were removed from the repertory. In 1931, after his appeal to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the intervention of writer Maksim Gorky on his behalf, Zamyatin was granted permission to leave the Soviet Union for an extended stay abroad. He lived in Paris for the rest of his life. His literary productivity during those years was scant.

Additional Reading

D.J. Richards, Zamyatin: A Soviet Heretic (1962); Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (1968); Brett Cooke, Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's We (2002)

Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhaylovich

▪ Soviet author

born Aug. 10 [July 29, Old Style], 1895, Poltava, Ukraine, Russian Empire

died July 22, 1958, Leningrad [now St. Petersburg], Russian S.F.S.R., U.S.S.R.

Soviet satirist whose short stories and sketches are among the best comic literature of the Soviet period.

Zoshchenko studied law and then in 1915 joined the army. He served as an officer during World War I, was wounded and gassed, and was awarded four medals for gallantry. Between 1917 and 1920 he lived in many different cities and worked at a variety of odd jobs and trades. In 1921 in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) he joined the Serapion Brothers literary group. His first works to become famous were the stories in Rasskazy Nazara Ilicha, gospodina Sinebryukhova (1922; “The Tales of Nazar Ilyich, Mr. Bluebelly”). Zoshchenko used skaz, a first-person narrative form, in these tales, which depict Russia during the Russian Civil War (1918–20) from the point of view and in the language of a semiliterate soldier and former peasant disoriented by the long years of war and revolution. Zoshchenko's later tales are primarily satires on everyday Soviet life. One of their main targets is bureaucratic red tape and corruption, which he attacked with a tongue-in-cheek wit filtered through the naive language of the semiliterate. The malapropisms present throughout these works make them difficult, though not impossible, to translate (notable among translations into English is Nervous People, and Other Satires [1963], trans. by Maria Gordon and Hugh McLean). Despite their extraordinary humour, Zoshchenko's stories paint a horrifying picture of life in Soviet Russia.

Beginning in the 1930s, Zoshchenko was subjected to increasingly severe criticism from Soviet officials. He tried to conform to the requirements of Socialist Realism—notably in Istoriya odnoy zhizhni (1935; “The Story of One Life”), dealing with the construction, by forced labour, of the White Sea–Baltic Waterway—but with little success. In 1943 the magazine Oktyabr began to serialize his psychological-introspective series of episodes, anecdotes, and reminiscences entitled Pered voskhodom solntsa (“Before Sunrise”) but suspended publication after the second installment. It was only in 1972 that the series was published in full, as Povest o razume (“A Tale About Reason”).

In 1946 Zoshchenko published in the literary magazine Zvezda a short story, “Priklyucheniya obezyany” (“The Adventures of a Monkey”), which was condemned by Communist critics as malicious and insulting to the Soviet people. He was expelled (with the poet Anna Akhmatova) from the Union of Soviet Writers, which meant the virtual end of his literary career. In 1954, meeting with English students in Russia, Zoshchenko stated that he did not consider himself guilty, after which he was subjected to further persecution. These pressures led to a psychological crisis; as a result, Zoshchenko spent his final years in ill health.

After his death, the Soviet press tended to ignore him, but some of his works were reissued, and their prompt sale indicated his continuing popularity.

Additional Reading

Linda Hart Scatton, Mikhail Zoshchenko: Evolution of a Writer (1993); Gregory Carleton, The Politics of Reception: Critical Constructions of Mikhail Zoshchenko (1998); Jeremy Hicks, Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz (2000).

skaz

▪ Russian literature

in Russian literature, a written narrative that imitates a spontaneous oral account in its use of dialect, slang, and the peculiar idiom of that persona. Among the well-known writers who have used this device are Nikolay Leskov (Leskov, Nikolay Semyonovich), Aleksey Remizov (Remizov, Aleksey Mikhaylovich), Mikhail Zoshchenko (Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhaylovich), and Yevgeny Zamyatin (Zamyatin, Yevgeny Ivanovich).

The word is of Russian origin and literally means “tale”; it is derived from skazat,

Leskov, Nikolay Semyonovich

▪ Russian writer

pseudonym Stebnitsky

born Feb. 16 [Feb. 4, Old Style], 1831, Gorokhovo, Russia

died March 5 [Feb. 21], 1895, St. Petersburg

novelist and short-story writer who has been described as the greatest of Russian storytellers.

As a child Leskov was taken to different monasteries by his grandmother, and he used those early memories of Russian monastic life with good effect in his most famous novel, Soboryane (1872; Cathedral Folk, 1924). A junior clerk of a criminal court in Orel and Kiev, he later joined an English firm and traveled all over Russia; it was during these travels that he obtained the material for most of his novels and short stories. Leskov began his writing career as a journalist. In 1865 he published his best known story, Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, 1961), the passionate heroine of which lives and dies by violence. His most popular tale, however, remains Skaz o Tulskom kosom Levshe i o stalnoy Blokhe (1881; “The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea”), a masterpiece of Gogolesque comedy in which an illiterate smith from Tula outwits the skill of the most advanced British craftsman. Another story, the picaresque Ocharovanny strannik (1873; Enchanted Wanderer, 1961), was written after a visit to the monastic islands on Lake Ladoga in 1872. His early novels Nekuda (1864; “Nowhere to Go”) and Na nozhakh (1870–71; “At Daggers Drawn”) were violently attacked by the Russian radicals as revealing an attitude of uncompromising hostility toward the Russian revolutionary movement, an attitude Leskov later modified. In 1969 W.B. Edgerton translated into English, for the first time, 13 of Leskov's stories, with a new translation of “The Steel Flea.”

Remizov, Aleksey Mikhaylovich

▪ Russian writer

born July 6 [June 24, Old Style], 1877, Moscow

died Nov. 26, 1957, Paris

Symbolist writer whose works had a strong influence on Russian writers before and after the 1917 Revolution.

Born into a poor family of merchant ancestry, Remizov gained his early experiences in the streets of Moscow. He attended the University of Moscow but was expelled in 1897 for participation in student riots, put in prison, and exiled to the provinces. In 1905 he settled in St. Petersburg, where he immediately began to frequent literary circles, particularly the Symbolist group. His works had begun to appear in various modernist periodicals, but his fame and popularity did not come until the publication in 1910 of Neuyomny buben (“The Indefatigable Tambourine”). This story of provincial life is among his best works, and it embodies many of the characteristics often found in his writing, including elements of the weird, the grotesque, and the whimsical. That same year Remizov published the short novel Krestovye syostry (“Sisters of the Cross”), one of his most popular works. Although close to the Symbolists, Remizov did not fully believe in the principles of this movement. A vital element in his prose was his exploitation of the full potential of the Russian language, from the contemporary popular idiom to the language of ancient Russian chronicles and folk tales.

Preferring to keep a distance from politics, he worked for magazines that had a patriotic stance during World War I. In 1917, before the Bolsheviks came to power, he published Slovo o pogibeli russkoy zemli (“Threnody on the Destruction of the Russian Land”). In 1921 he emigrated, settling first in Berlin and then, in 1923, in Paris. The large number of books that Remizov wrote during his émigré years were not commercially successful, and some were not published until after his death. Yet they had a vital effect on many writers because of his elaborate use of language and his constant interest in the hidden sides of a character's personality. Remizov's books were rarely published in Russia during the Soviet era but were widely republished beginning in the late 1980s.

Additional Reading

Greta N. Slobin (ed.), Aleksej Remizov: Approaches to a Protean Writer (1987); Greta N. Slobin, Remizov's Fiction, 1900–21 (1991).

Shklovsky, Viktor Borisovich

▪ Soviet author

born Jan. 24 [Jan. 12, Old Style], 1893, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Dec. 8, 1984, Moscow

Russian literary critic and novelist. He was a major voice of Formalism (q.v.), a critical school that had great influence in Russian literature in the 1920s.

Educated at the University of St. Petersburg, Shklovsky helped found OPOYAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, in 1914. He was also connected with the Serapion Brothers, a collection of writers that began meeting in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1921. Both groups felt that literature's importance lay primarily not in its social content but rather in its independent creation of language. In O teori prozy (1925; “On the Theory of Prose”) and Metod pisatelskogo masterstva (1928; “The Technique of the Writer's Craft”), Shklovsky argued that literature is a collection of stylistic and formal devices that force the reader to view the world afresh by presenting old ideas or mundane experiences in new, unusual ways. His concept of ostranenie, or “making it strange,” was his chief contribution to Russian Formalist theory.

Shklovsky also wrote autobiographical novels, chiefly Sentimentalnoye puteshestvie: vospominaniya (A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922), a widely acclaimed memoir of life during the early years of Bolshevik rule; and Zoo. Pisma ne o lyubvi, ili tryetya Eloiza (Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, or the Third Héloise). Both of these books were published in 1923, during a period (1922–23) when he lived in Berlin. He returned permanently to the Soviet Union in the latter year, at which time the Soviet authorities dissolved OPOYAZ, obliging Shklovsky to join other state-sanctioned literary organs. With his essay “Monument to a Scholarly Error” (1930), he finally bowed to the Stalinist authorities' displeasure with Formalism. Thereafter, he tried to adapt the theory of the accepted doctrine of Socialist Realism. He continued to write voluminously, publishing historical novels, film criticism, and highly praised studies of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Formalism

▪ literary criticism

also called Russian Formalism , Russian Russky Formalism

innovative 20th-century Russian school of literary criticism. It began in two groups: OPOYAZ, an acronym for Russian words meaning Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded in 1916 at St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) and led by Viktor Shklovsky (Shklovsky, Viktor Borisovich); and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915. Other members of the groups included Osip Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov, and Boris Tomashevsky.

Although the Formalists based their assumptions partly on the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure and partly on Symbolist (Symbolist movement) notions concerning the autonomy of the text and the discontinuity between literary and other uses of language, the Formalists sought to make their critical discourse more objective and scientific than that of Symbolist criticism. Allied at one point to the Russian Futurists and opposed to sociological criticism, the Formalists placed an “emphasis on the medium” by analyzing the way in which literature, especially poetry, was able to alter artistically or “make strange” common language so that the everyday world could be “defamliarized.” They stressed the importance of form and technique over content and looked for the specificity of literature as an autonomous verbal art. They studied the various functions of “literariness” as ways to separate poetry and fictional narrative from other forms of discourse. Although always anathema to the Marxist critics, Formalism was important in the Soviet Union until 1929, when it was condemned for its lack of political perspective. Later, largely through the work of the structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson (Jakobson, Roman), it became influential in the West, notably in Anglo-American New Criticism, which is sometimes called Formalism.

Victor Erlich's Russian Formalism (1955) is a history; Théorie de la littérature (1965) is a translation by Tzvetan Todorov of important Russian texts. Anthologies in English include L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism (1965), L. Matejka and K. Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics (1971), and Stephen Bann and John Bowlt, eds., Russian Formalism (1973).

formalism

▪ philosophy of mathematics

in mathematics, school of thought introduced by the 20th-century German mathematician David Hilbert, which holds that all mathematics can be reduced to rules for manipulating formulas without any reference to the meanings of the formulas. Formalists contend that it is the mathematical symbols themselves, and not any meaning that might be ascribed to them, that are the basic objects of mathematical thought. Compare intuitionism; logicism.

Gippius, Zinaida Nikolayevna

▪ Russian poet

Gippius also spelled Hippius

born Nov. 20 [Nov. 8, Old Style], 1869, Belyov, Russia

died Sept. 9, 1945, Paris, Fr.

Russian Symbolist poet who wrote in a metaphysical vein.

The wife of the poet and novelist Dmitry Merezhkovsky (Merezhkovsky, Dmitry Sergeyevich), who was a leader among the Symbolists of the early 1900s, Gippius made her own place in Russian literature. In addition to her poetry, she wrote plays, novels, short stories, and critical and political essays.

During the Revolution of 1905, Gippius and her husband became zealous revolutionaries, and she wrote much political verse. With the failure of the revolution, the couple emigrated to Paris; they returned to Russia before the outbreak of World War I but took a vehemently anti-Bolshevik attitude. In late 1919 they left the Soviet Union, traveling first to Poland and working for a while with counterrevolutionaries, then settling in Paris. Gippius continued to write and produced some very bitter, angry works against the Bolsheviks. She held that matter was more significant than manner, but her later works were so subjective and capricious that they were noted more for their form than for their content.

Merezhkovsky, Dmitry Sergeyevich

▪ Russian author

born Aug. 14 [Aug. 2, Old Style], 1865, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Dec. 9, 1941, Paris

Russian poet, novelist, critic, and thinker who played an important role in the revival of religious-philosophical interests among the Russian intelligentsia.

After graduation from the University of St. Petersburg in history and philology, Merezhkovsky published his first volume of poetry in 1888. His essay O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniyakh sovremennoy russkoy literatury (1893; “On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature”), sometimes erroneously described as the manifesto of Russian Symbolism, was nevertheless a significant landmark of Russian modernism. At the beginning of the 20th century he and his wife, Zinaida Gippius, organized religious-philosophical colloquia and edited the magazine Novy put (1903–04; “The New Path”).

With his trilogy Khristos i Antikhrist (1896–1905; “Christ and Antichrist”), Merezhkovsky revived the historical novel in Russia. Its three parts, set in widely separated epochs and geographical areas, reveal historical erudition and serve as vehicles for the author's historical and theological ideas. Another group of fictional works from Russian history—the play Pavel I (1908) and the novels Aleksandr I (1911–12) and 14 Dekabrya (1918; December the Fourteenth)—also form a trilogy. Merezhkovsky's favourite method is that of antithesis. He applied it not only in his novels but also in his critical study Tolstoy i Dostoyevsky (1901–02), a work of seminal importance and enduring value. His Gogol i chort (1906; “Gogol and the Devil”) is another noteworthy critical work.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 had a radicalizing effect on Merezhkovsky. Together with Gippius and Dmitry Filosofov he published the anthology Le Tsar et la révolution (1907; “The Tsar and the Revolution”) while living in France. After Merezhkovsky returned to Russia in 1908, he became one of the most popular Russian writers. He published extensively in newspapers and became known as the advocate of a “new religious consciousness.”

Merezhkovsky enthusiastically welcomed the first phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917 but saw the Bolsheviks' rise to power after its second phase as a catastrophe for Russia. He emigrated in 1920. After a short stay in Poland, he moved to Paris, where he lived until his death. His later works include the novels Rozhdenie bogov (1925; The Birth of the Gods) and Messiya (1928; “Messiah”) as well as biographical studies of Napoleon, Dante, Jesus Christ, and Roman Catholic saints. Merezhkovsky was of the opinion that Russia should be freed from Bolshevism at any cost, which is why he welcomed Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 during World War II. During his lifetime Merezhkovsky's authority among Russian émigrés was great. His works began to be published in Russia again only in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Soviet Union began to collapse.

Additional Reading

C. Harold Bedford, The Seeker: D.S. Merezhkovsky (1975); Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Dmitri Sergeevich Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age (1975); Temira Pachmuss, D.S. Merezhkovsky in Exile (1990).

Bely, Andrey

▪ Russian poet

pseudonym of Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev , Bugayev also spelled Bugaev

born Oct. 14 [Oct. 26, New Style], 1880, Moscow, Russia

died Jan. 7, 1934, Moscow, Russian S.F.S.R., U.S.S.R.

leading theorist and poet of Russian Symbolism, a literary school deriving from the Modernist movement in western European art and literature and an indigenous Eastern Orthodox spirituality, expressing mystical and abstract ideals through allegories from life and nature.

Reared in an academic environment as the son of a mathematics professor, Bely was closely associated with Moscow's literary elite, including the late 19th-century philosopher-mystic Vladimir Solovyov (Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich), whose eschatological thought (concerning the world's purpose and final resolution) he absorbed. Carried by his idealism from harsh reality to speculative thought, Bely completed in 1901 his first major work, Severnaya simfoniya (1902; “The Northern Symphony”), a prose poem that represented an attempt to combine prose, poetry, music, and even, in part, painting. Three more “symphonies” in this new literary form followed. In other poetry he continued his innovative style and, by repeatedly using irregular metre (the “lame foot”), introduced Russian poetry to the formalistic revolution that was brought to fruition by his aesthetic colleague Aleksandr Blok (Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich).

Bely's first three books of verse—Zoloto v lazuri (1904; “Gold in Azure”), Pepel (1909; “Ashes”), and Urna (1909; “Urn”)—are his most important contributions to poetry. Each of them stands out for an original view of the world: the first generates a new mythology; central to the second are images of the despair of Russian life; a somewhat ironic philosophical lyricism is used in the third. In 1909 Bely completed his first novel, Serebryany golub (1910; The Silver Dove). His most celebrated composition, Peterburg (published serially 1913–14; St. Petersburg), is regarded as a baroque extension of his earlier “symphonies.” In 1913 he became an adherent of the Austrian social philosopher Rudolf Steiner (Steiner, Rudolf) and joined his anthroposophical colony in Basel, Switz., a group advocating a system of mystical beliefs derived from Buddhist contemplative religious experience (see anthroposophy). While in Switzerland Bely began writing his Kotik Letayev (1922; Kotik Letaev), a short autobiographical novel suggestive of the style of James Joyce. Eventually, Bely left Steiner's group for personal reasons, but he remained attached to anthroposophical ideas to the end of his life.

In 1916 Bely returned to Russia, where he witnessed the entirety of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Initially, like Blok, he welcomed the Bolsheviks' ascent to power. His enthusiasm was reflected in Khristos voskrese (1918; “Christ Is Risen”), a novel in verse in which Bely renders contemporary life in mystical terms as a “revolution of the spirit.” Between 1918 and 1921 he worked in Soviet cultural organizations, and during that time he helped found the nonpartisan Free Philosophical Association (Volfila). The novel in verse Pervoye svidaniye (1921: The First Encounter) resurrects the events of his youth.

In 1921 Bely traveled to Berlin, where his already strained marriage collapsed and where he was subjected to Steiner's enmity. Bely also began writing his memoirs, which were published later in three volumes: Na rubezhe dvukh stolety (1930; “On the Boundary of Two Centuries”), Nachalo veka (1933; “The Beginning of the Century”), and Mezhdu dvukh revolyutsy (1934; “Between Two Revolutions”). In 1923 Bely returned to Moscow, where he wrote a trilogy of novels set in Moscow, ; he also wrote literary criticism and revised his early works. Bely's prose of the 1920s reflects his interest in form and in complex plot construction. In the early 1930s he tried to become a “true” Soviet author by writing a series of articles and making ideological revisions to his memoirs, and he also planned to begin a study of Socialist Realism. In 1932 he became a member of the Organizational Committee of the Writers' Union of the U.S.S.R. Yet in an idiosyncratic way he managed to combine these activities with his attachment to anthroposophy and Russian Symbolism.

Additional Reading

Studies of Bely include Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction (1985); Boris Christa, The Poetic World of Andrey Bely (1977); Samuel D. Cioran, The Apocalyptic Symbolism of Andrej Belyj (1973); and J.D. Elsworth, Andrey Bely (1972), and Andrey Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels (1983). Two studies of his novel St. Petersburg are Magnus Ljunggren, A Dream of Rebirth (1982); and Timothy Langen, The Stony Dance: Unity and Gesture in Andrey Bely's Petersburg (2005).

Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich

▪ Russian philosopher

Solovyov also spelled Soloviev

born Jan. 16 [Jan. 28, New Style], 1853, Moscow, Russia

died July 31 [Aug. 13], 1900, Uzkoye, near Moscow

Russian philosopher and mystic who, reacting to European rationalist thought, attempted a synthesis of religious philosophy, science, and ethics in the context of a universal Christianity uniting the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches under papal leadership.

He was the son of the historian Sergey M. Solovyov. After a basic education in languages, history, and philosophy at his Orthodox home, he took his doctorate at Moscow University in 1874 with the dissertation “The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists.” After travels in the West, he wrote a second thesis, a critique of abstract principles, and accepted a teaching post at the University of St. Petersburg, where he delivered his celebrated lectures on Godmanhood (1880). This appointment was later rescinded because of Solovyov's clemency appeal for the March 1881 assassins of Tsar Alexander II. He also encountered official opposition to his writings and to his activity in promoting the union of Eastern Orthodoxy with the Roman Catholic church.

Solovyov criticized Western empiricist and idealist philosophy for attributing absolute significance to partial insights and abstract principles. Drawing on the writings of Benedict de Spinoza and G.W.F. Hegel, he regarded life as a dialectical process, involving the interaction of knowledge and reality through conflicting tensions. Assuming the ultimate unity of Absolute Being, termed God in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Solovyov proposed that the world's multiplicity, which had originated in a single creative source, was undergoing a process of reintegration with that source. Solovyov asserted, by his concept of Godmanhood, that the unique intermediary between the world and God could only be man, who alone is the vital part of nature capable of knowing and expressing the divine idea of “absolute unitotality” in the chaotic multiplicity of real experience. Consequently, the perfect revelation of God is Christ's incarnation in human nature.

For Solovyov, ethics became a dialectical problem of basing the morality of human acts and decisions on the extent of their contribution to the world's integration with ultimate divine unity, a theory expressed in his The Meaning of Love (1894).

Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich

▪ Russian poet and dramatist

born Nov. 28 [Nov. 16, Old Style], 1880, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Aug. 7, 1921, Petrograd [now St. Petersburg]

poet and dramatist, the principal representative of Russian Symbolism, a modernist literary movement that was influenced by its European counterpart but was strongly imbued with indigenous Eastern Orthodox religious and mystical elements.

Blok was born into a sheltered, intellectual environment. After his father, a law professor, and his mother, the cultured daughter of the rector of St. Petersburg University, separated, Blok was reared from age three in an atmosphere of artistic refinement at the manor of his aristocratic maternal grandparents. In 1903 Blok married Lyubov Mendeleyeva, daughter of the famous chemist D.I. Mendeleyev (Mendeleyev, Dmitry Ivanovich). To Blok, who began to write at age five, poetic expression came naturally. In 1903 he published for the first time, and his early verse communicates the exaltation and spiritual fulfillment his marriage brought.

The early 19th-century Romantic poetry of Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich) and the apocalyptic philosophy of the poet and mystic Vladimir Solovyov (Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich) exerted a strong influence on Blok. Using innovative poetic rhythms, he drew on their concepts to develop an original style of expression. For Blok, sound was paramount, and musicality is the primary characteristic of his verse.

His first collection of poems, the cycle Stikhi o prekrasnoy dame (1904; “Verses About the Lady Beautiful”), focuses on personal, intimate themes that are presented on a mystical plane and lack any contemporaneity. The heroine of the poems is not only the beloved whom the poet treats with knightly chivalry but is also the epitome of eternal femininity. In a three-volume anthology of his poetry that he compiled shortly before his death, Blok placed Verses About the Lady Beautiful in the first volume, a decision that made clear his belief that it represented the first, mystical phase in his career.

Blok's next poetry collections differed significantly from his first. Nechayannaya radost (1907; “Inadvertent Joy”), Snezhnaya maska (1907; “Mask of Snow”), and Zemlya v snegu (1908; “Earth in Snow”) treated themes of contemporary city life, including revolutionary events, deeply felt love, and complex psychology. Many critics, among them Blok's close friend Andrey Bely (Bely, Andrey), saw these poems as a betrayal of the ideal expressed in his first collection, where reality was subjected to mystic transformation. Blok's thinking during these years was also reflected in plays—Neznakomka (written 1907; “The Stranger”) and Pesnya sudby (written 1909; “The Song of Fate”)—and a number of essays; in these he repeatedly returned to the ideals of the old Russian intelligentsia and the traditions of social radicalism.

Blok's standing as lyric poet culminates in the third volume of his anthology, traditionally seen as the pinnacle of his poetic work. This volume contains the poems previously collected in the books Nochnye chasy (1911; “Night Hours”) and Stikhi o Rossii (1915; “Poems About Russia”) as well as uncollected poems. Together they draw on a historical and mystical perspective to depict Russia as Blok saw it during the 1910s. World War I (during which Blok was drafted into the army and served in an engineering and construction detail but did not participate in combat) and the Russian Revolution of 1917 forged his view; Blok understood the events affecting not only Russia but the whole world as a critical, tragic, and threatening catastrophe. But underlying this view was faith in the future of humankind.

In 1917 Blok worked for the commission that investigated the crimes of the imperial government, and after the last phase of the revolution he began working for the Bolsheviks, whom he felt represented the will of the people. His state of mind in late 1917 and in 1918 is best expressed in a line of his poetry: “Terrible, sweet, inescapable, imperative.” He could see in Russia and elsewhere “the downfall of humanism”—a phrase he used in an article he wrote in 1918—but he felt that it was an inescapable stage in history. Blok expressed this outlook in the novel in verse Dvenadtsat (1918; The Twelve) and the poem "Skify" (1918; “The Scythians”). Many early readers of The Twelve regarded its depiction of Christ in revolutionary Petrograd as blasphemous, but through it Blok expressed vividly the mood of the time. He quickly became disillusioned with the Bolshevik government, however, and all but stopped writing poetry thereafter.

Additional Reading

Sergei Hackel, The Poet and the Revolution: Aleksandr Blok's The Twelve (1975); James Forsyth, Listening to the Wind: An Introduction to Alexander Blok (1977); Avril Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, 2 vol. (1979–80).

Akhmatova, Anna

▪ Russian poet

pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko

born June 11 [June 23, New Style], 1889, Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire

died March 5, 1966, Domodedovo, near Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Russian poet recognized at her death as the greatest woman poet in Russian literature.

Akhmatova began writing verse at age 11 and at 21 joined a group of St. Petersburg poets, the Acmeists (Acmeist), whose leader, Nikolay Gumilyov (Gumilyov, Nikolay Stepanovich), she married in 1910. They soon traveled to Paris, immersing themselves for months in its cultural life. Their son, Lev, was born in 1912, but their marriage did not last (they divorced in 1918). The Acmeists, who included notably Osip Mandelshtam (Mandelshtam, Osip Emilyevich), were associated with the new St. Petersburg journal Apollon (1909–17; “Apollo”) and such poets of the older generation as Innokenty Annensky and Mikhail Kuzmin, who stood apart from the dominant Symbolist poets of the day. Partly in response to the manifestos of the Russian Futurists (1912–13), the young poets founded Acmeism (Acmeist), a school that affirmed “beautiful clarity” (Kuzmin's term) in place of the vagueness and abstractness of Russian Symbolism. Codifying their own poetic practice, Acmeists demanded concrete representation and precise form and meaning—combined with a broad-ranging erudition (Classical antiquity, European history and culture, including art and religion). To these Akhmatova added her own stamp of elegant colloquialism and the psychological sophistication of a young cosmopolitan woman, fully in control of the subtle verbal and gestural vocabulary of modern intimacies and romance. A small detail could evoke a whole gamut of emotions (“You are drawing on my soul like a drink through a straw”). Her first collections, Vecher (1912; “Evening”) and Chyotki (1914; “Rosary”), especially the latter, brought her fame and made her poetic voice emblematic of the experience of her generation. Her appeal stemmed from the artistic and emotional integrity of her poetic voice as well as from her poetic persona, further amplified by her own striking appearance. Akhmatova's principal motif is frustrated and tragic love expressed with an intensely feminine accent and inflection entirely her own.

During World War I and following the Revolution of 1917, she added to her main theme some civic, patriotic, and religious motifs but did not sacrifice her personal intensity or artistic conscience. Her artistry and increasing control of her medium were particularly prominent in her next collections: Belaya staya (1917; “The White Flock”), Podorozhnik (1921; “Plantain”), and Anno Domini MCMXXI (1921). The broadening of her thematic range, however, did not prevent the communist cultural watchdogs from proclaiming her “bourgeois and aristocratic” and condemning her poetry for its narrow preoccupation with love and God, even as her standing as a premier poetic voice of the generation was being affirmed by major critical authorities of the 1920s (e.g., Korney Chukovsky and Boris Eikhenbaum, who in 1922 coined the definition of Akhmatova's poetic persona as a blend of “a harlot and a nun”). The execution in 1921 of her former husband, Gumilyov, on trumped-up charges of participation in an anti-Soviet conspiracy (the Tagantsev affair) further complicated her position. In 1923 she entered a period of almost complete poetic silence and literary ostracism, and no volume of her poetry appeared in the Soviet Union until 1940. Her public life was now limited to her studies of Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich).

The 1930s were especially hard for Akhmatova. Her son, Lev Gumilyov (1912–92), and her third husband (she was married from 1918 to 1928 to the Assyriologist Vladimir Shileiko), art historian and critic Nikolay Punin (1888–1953), were arrested for political deviance in 1935. Both were soon released, but her son was arrested again in 1938 and subsequently served a five-year sentence in the Gulag. Her friend Mandelshtam was arrested in her presence in 1934 and died in a concentration camp in 1938.

In 1940, however, several of her poems were published in the literary monthly Zvezda (“The Star”), and a volume of selections from her earlier work appeared under the title Iz shesti knig (“From Six Books”)—only to be abruptly withdrawn from sale and libraries. Nevertheless, in September 1941, following the German invasion, Akhmatova was permitted to deliver an inspiring radio address to the women of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Evacuated to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, soon thereafter, she read her poems to hospitalized soldiers and published a number of war-inspired poems; a small volume of selected poetry appeared in Tashkent in 1943. At the end of the war she returned to Leningrad, where her poems began to appear in local magazines and newspapers. She gave poetic readings, and plans were made for publication of a large edition of her works.

In August 1946, however, she was harshly denounced by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for her “eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference.” Her poetry was castigated as “alien to the Soviet people,” and she herself was publicly insulted as a “harlot-nun” by none other than Andrey Zhdanov (Zhdanov, Andrey Aleksandrovich), a Politburo member and the director of Stalin's program of cultural repression. She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers; an unreleased book of her poems, already in print, was destroyed; and none of her work appeared in print for three years.

Then, in 1950, a number of her poems eulogizing Stalin and Soviet communism were printed in several issues of the illustrated weekly magazine Ogonyok (“The Little Light”) under the title Iz tsikla “Slava miru” (“From the Cycle ‘Glory to Peace' ”). This uncharacteristic capitulation to the Soviet dictator—in one of the poems Akhmatova declares: “Where Stalin is, there is Freedom, Peace, and the grandeur of the earth”—was motivated by Akhmatova's desire to propitiate Stalin and win the freedom of her son, who again had been arrested in 1949 and exiled to Siberia. The tone of these poems (those glorifying Stalin were omitted from Soviet editions of Akhmatova's works published after his death) is far different from the moving and universalized lyrical cycle, Rekviem (“Requiem”), composed between 1935 and 1940 and occasioned by Akhmatova's grief over the earlier arrest and imprisonment of her son in 1938. This masterpiece—a poetic monument to the sufferings of the Soviet people during Stalin's terror—was published in Russia for the first time in 1989.

In the cultural thaw following Stalin's death, Akhmatova was slowly and ambivalently rehabilitated, and a slender volume of her poetry, including some of her translations, was published in 1958. After 1958 a number of editions of her works, including some of her brilliant essays on Pushkin, were published in the Soviet Union (1961, 1965, two in 1976, 1977); none of these, however, contains the complete corpus of her literary productivity. Akhmatova's longest work and perhaps her masterpiece, Poema bez geroya (“Poem Without a Hero”), on which she worked from 1940 to 1962, was not published in the Soviet Union until 1976. This difficult and complex work, in which the life of St. Petersburg bohemia in pre-World War I years is “double-exposed” onto the tragedies and suffering of the post-1917 decades, is a powerful lyric summation of Akhmatova's philosophy and her own definitive statement on the meaning of her life and poetic achievement.

Akhmatova executed a number of superb translations of the works of other poets, including Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo Leopardi, and various Armenian and Korean poets. She also wrote sensitive personal memoirs on Symbolist writer Aleksandr Blok (Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich), the artist Amedeo Modigliani (Modigliani, Amedeo), and fellow Acmeist Mandelshtam.

In 1964 she was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize, an international poetry prize awarded in Italy, and in 1965 she received an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Oxford. Her journeys to Sicily and England to receive these honours were her first travel outside her homeland since 1912. Akhmatova's works were widely translated, and her international stature continued to grow after her death. A two-volume edition of Akhmatova's collected works was published in Moscow in 1986, and The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, also in two volumes, appeared in 1990 and was updated and expanded in 1992.

Gregory Freidin

Additional Reading

Sam N. Driver, Anna Akhmatova (1972), combines a brief biography with a concise survey of the poetry. Amanda Haight, Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage (1976, reissued 1990), is a critical biography analyzing the relation of the poet's life to her poetry. Ronald Hingley, Nightingale Fever: Russian Poets in Revolution (1981), defines the historical and social background of the four poetical titans of 20th-century Russia. Anatoly Nayman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova (1991; originally published in Russian, 1989), is a work of the poet's literary secretary who witnessed her last years. Later biographies include Jessie Davies, Anna of All the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova (1988); Roberta Reeder, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet (1994); and Konstantin Polivanov, Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle (1994), trans. by Patricia Beriozkina. Among the memoirs of note are Lydia Chukovskaya, The Akhmatova Journals (1994, reissued 2002; originally published in Russian [Paris] in 1974), trans. by Milena Michalski, Sylva Rubashova, and Peter Norman; and Sophie Kazimirovna Ostrovskaya, Memoirs of Anna Akhmatova's Years, 1944–1950 (1988), with an appendix of memoirs by Margarita Aliger, trans. by Jessie Davies. Also of value are Emma Gerstein, Moscow Memoirs (2003; originally published in Russian, 1998), trans. and ed. by John Crowfoot; and the chapter “Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak” in Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture Under Communism (2004).Gregory Freidin

Acmeist

▪ Russian poets

Russian Akmeist, plural Akmeisty,

member of a small group of early-20th-century Russian poets reacting against the vagueness and affectations of Symbolism. It was formed by the poets Sergey Gorodetsky and Nikolay S. Gumilyov (Gumilyov, Nikolay Stepanovich). They reasserted the poet as craftsman and used language freshly and with intensity. Centred in St. Petersburg, the Acmeists were associated with the review Apollon (1909–17). In 1912 they founded the Guild of Poets, whose most outstanding members were Anna Akhmatova (Akhmatova, Anna) and Osip Mandelshtam (Mandelshtam, Osip Emilyevich). Because of their preoccupation with form and their ivory-tower aloofness, the Acmeists were regarded with suspicion by the Soviet regime. Gumilyov was executed in 1921 for his alleged activities in an anti-Soviet conspiracy. Akhmatova was silenced during the most productive years of her life, and Mandelshtam died either in or en route to a Siberian labour camp.

Gumilyov, Nikolay Stepanovich

▪ Russian poet

Gumilyov also spelled Gumilev

born April 15, 1886, Kronshtadt, Russia

died Aug. 24, 1921, Petrograd [St. Petersburg]

Russian poet and theorist who founded and led the Acmeist movement in Russian poetry in the years before and after World War I.

The son of a naval surgeon, Gumilyov was educated at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, where he was influenced by the poet and teacher Innokenty Annensky. Gumilyov's earliest published volumes of poetry, Put' konkvistadorov (1905; “The Path of the Conquistadors”), Romanticheskie tsvety (1908; “Romantic Flowers”), and Zemcuga (1910; “Pearls”), marked him as a talented young poet under the influence of the Symbolist movement then dominating Russian poetry. He spent the years 1906–08 in Paris and traveling in northern and eastern Africa, whose exotic locales were to figure prominently in his poetry for the next 10 years. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1908 and the following year became a founding member of Apollon, which became the leading poetry journal in Russia in the years before the war. In 1910 he married the poet Anna Akhmatova, but the couple separated less than a year later and were divorced in 1918.

Gumilyov was an indefatigable literary organizer, and in 1911 he and Sergey Gorodetsky assembled the group known as the Guild of Poets. Among the group's members were Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam, who together with Gumilyov soon formed the nucleus of the emerging Acmeist movement in Russian poetry. Gumilyov's poetry collection entitled Cuzoe nebo (1912; “Foreign Sky”) established his reputation as a leading Russian poet.

During World War I, Gumilyov fought at the front as a volunteer and in 1917 served as the Provisional Government's special commissar in Paris after the first Russian Revolution that year. He returned to Russia in 1918 and worked as a creative writing instructor in Petrograd, where he tried unsuccessfully to revive the Acmeist Guild of Poets as an association of writers unaffiliated with the Bolshevik Party. He attained his full artistic stature in the poems published in Kostyor (1918; “The Pyre”), Shatyor (1921; “The Tent”), and Ognennyi stolp (1921; “The Pillar of Fire”). He had never bothered to hide his antipathy toward the Bolshevik government, and in August 1921 he was arrested and shot for counter-revolutionary activities. He was posthumously rehabilitated in the Soviet Union in 1986.

Gumilyov's lyric poetry ranges over a wide variety of themes. Many of the poems of his middle period are set in Africa or other exotic places and glorify a life of romantic adventure, masculine heroism, and physical courage. The poetry in his last three volumes shows a shifting of concern toward spiritual problems and is characterized by greater stylistic complexity, enhanced philosophical depth, and a more intensely personal element. His poetic style is marked by the use of vivid imagery to convey sights, sounds, and colours to the reader with great clarity and directness. Gumilyov also wrote verse dramas and an important series of literary essays in which he developed the aesthetic canons of the Acmeist movement.

The Symbolist movement also spread to Russia, where Valery Bryusov (Bryusov, Valery Yakovlevich) published an anthology of Russian and French Symbolist poems in 1894–95. The revival of poetry in Russia stemming from this movement had as its leader Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich). His poetry expressed a belief that the world was a system of symbols expressing metaphysical realities. The greatest poet of the movement was Aleksandr Blok (Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich), who in Dvenadtsat (1918; The Twelve) united the Russian Revolution and God in an apocalyptic vision in which 12 Red Army men became apostles of the New World, headed by Christ. Other Russian Symbolist poets were Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (Ivanov, Vyacheslav Ivanovich), Fyodor Sologub, Andrey Bely (Bely, Andrey), and Nikolay Gumilyov (Gumilyov, Nikolay Stepanovich).

Mandelshtam, Osip Emilyevich

▪ Russian poet

Mandelshtam also spelled Mandelstam

born Jan. 3 [Jan. 15, New Style], 1891, Warsaw, Pol., Russian Empire [now in Poland]

died Dec. 27, 1938?, Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now in Russia]

major Russian poet and literary critic. Most of his works went unpublished in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era (1929–53) and were almost unknown outside that country until the mid-1960s.

Mandelshtam grew up in St. Petersburg in a cultured Jewish household. After graduating from the elite Tenishev School in 1907, he studied at the University of St. Petersburg as well as in France at the Sorbonne and in Germany at the University of Heidelberg.

His first poems appeared in the avant-garde journal Apollon (“Apollo”) in 1910. Together with Nikolay Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova, Mandelshtam founded the Acmeist school of poetry, which rejected the mysticism and abstraction of Russian Symbolism and demanded clarity and compactness of form. Mandelshtam summed up his poetic credo in his manifesto Utro Akmeizma (“The Morning of Acmeism”). In 1913 his first slim volume of verse, Kamen (“Stone”), was published. During the Russian Civil War (1918–20), Mandelshtam spent time in the Crimea and Georgia. In 1922 he moved to Moscow, where his second volume of poetry, Tristia, appeared. He married Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina in 1922.

Mandelshtam's poetry, which was apolitical and intellectually demanding, distanced him from the official Soviet literary establishment. His poetry having been withdrawn from publication, he wrote children's tales and a collection of autobiographical stories, Shum vremeni (1925; “The Noise of Time”). A second edition of this work, augmented by the tale “Yegipetskaya marka” (“The Egyptian Stamp”), was published in 1928. That year, a volume of his collected poetry, Stikhotvoreniya (“Poems”), and a collection of literary criticism, O poezii (“On Poetry”), appeared. These were his last books published in the Soviet Union during his lifetime.

In May 1934 he was arrested for an epigram on Joseph Stalin he had written and read to a small circle of friends. In addition to describing Stalin's fingers as “worms” and his moustache as that of a cockroach, the draft that fell into the hands of the police called Stalin “the murderer and peasant slayer.”

Shattered by a fierce interrogation, Mandelshtam was exiled with his wife to the provincial town of Cherdyn. After hospitalization and a suicide attempt, he won permission to move to Voronezh. Though suffering from periodic bouts of mental illness, he composed a long cycle of poems, the Voronezhskiye tetradi (“Voronezh Notebooks”), which contain some of his finest lyrics.

In May 1937, having served his sentence, Mandelshtam returned with his wife to Moscow. But the following year he was arrested during a stay at a rest home. In a letter to his wife that autumn, Mandelshtam reported that he was ill in a transit camp near Vladivostok. Nothing further was ever heard from him. Soviet authorities officially gave his death date as Dec. 27, 1938, although he was also reported by government sources to have died “at the beginning of 1939.” It was primarily through the efforts of his widow, who died in 1980, that little of the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam was lost; she kept his works alive during the repression by memorizing them and by collecting copies.

After Stalin's death the publication in Russian of Mandelshtam's works was resumed.

Additional Reading

Nadezhda Mandelstam (Nadezhda Mandelshtam), Hope Against Hope (1970, reissued 1989; originally published in Russian, 1970), and Hope Abandoned (1974, reissued 1989; originally published in Russian, 1972), memoirs by his wife, were published in the West in Russian and English. In Russia the Marinetti visit took root in a kind of Russian Futurism that went beyond its Italian model in a revolutionary social and political outlook. Marinetti influenced the two Russian writers considered the founders of Russian Futurism, Velimir Khlebnikov (Khlebnikov, Velimir Vladimirovich) (q.v.), who remained a poet and a mystic, and the younger Vladimir Mayakovsky (Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich) (q.v.), who became “the poet of the Revolution” and the popular spokesman of his generation. The Russians published their own manifesto in December 1912, entitled Poshchochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (“A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”), which echoed the Italian manifesto of the previous May. The Russian Futurists repudiated Aleksandr Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy and the then-current Russian symbolist verse and called for the creation of new techniques of writing poetry. Both the Russian and the Italian Futurist poets discarded logical sentence construction and traditional grammar and syntax; they frequently presented an incoherent string of words stripped of their meaning and used for their sound alone. As the first group of artists to identify wholeheartedly with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (Russian Revolution of 1917), the Russian Futurists sought to dominate post-Revolutionary culture and create a new art that would be integrated into all aspects of daily life of a revolutionary culture. They were favoured by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet commissar of education, and given important cultural posts. But the Russian Futurists' challenging literary techniques and their theoretical premises of revolt and innovation proved too unstable a foundation upon which to build a broader literary movement. The Futurists' influence was negligible by the time of Mayakovsky's death in 1930.

Khlebnikov, Velimir Vladimirovich

▪ Russian poet

original name Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov

born Oct. 28 [Nov. 9, New Style], 1885, Tundutov, Russia

died June 28, 1922, Santalovo, Novgorod province

poet who was the founder of Russian Futurism and whose esoteric verses exerted a significant influence on Soviet poetry.

Born into a scientific family, Khlebnikov studied both mathematics and linguistics during his university years. At that time he also began developing ideas for a renovation of poetic language. About 1912 he met the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the two became the centre of the Futurist literary movement, which was directed against the mysticism and narrowness of Symbolism and which regarded art as a social utility.

Khlebnikov, unlike other Futurists, retained a kind of mysticism—of things and words rather than of ideas and symbols. Through his verbal experimentation he devised a “translogical language,” creating a “new world of words” in his verse that makes it fresh and invigorating but difficult for the general reader. He was a poet's poet, influencing others who extended his experimentation into their more accessible verse.

Khlebnikov was a Slavophile who loved Russia and the Russian language; this led him to change his first name from Viktor (of Latin derivation) to Velimir. His popularity began to decline after the Revolution, although his influence persisted, as the works of Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, and others clearly show. He died in a remote village in the province of Novgorod. After World War II Khlebnikov was attacked by Soviet critics as a “formalist” and “decadent,” and his name fell into complete oblivion. Following the death of Joseph Stalin, however, he was rehabilitated. An English translation of his work is available in the Collected Works of Velimer Khlebnikov, 3 vol. (1987–97).

Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich

▪ Russian poet

born July 7 [July 19, New Style], 1893, Bagdadi, Georgia, Russian Empire

died April 14, 1930, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

the leading poet of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the early Soviet period.

Mayakovsky, whose father died while Mayakovsky was young, moved to Moscow with his mother and sisters in 1906. At age 15 he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party and was repeatedly jailed for subversive activity. He started to write poetry during solitary confinement in 1909. On his release he attended the Moscow Art School and joined, with David Burlyuk and a few others, the Russian Futurist (Futurism) group and soon became its leading spokesman. In 1912 the group published a manifesto, Poshchochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (“A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”), and Mayakovsky's poetry became conspicuously self-assertive and defiant in form and content. His poetic monodrama Vladimir Mayakovsky was performed in St. Petersburg in 1913.

Between 1914 and 1916 Mayakovsky completed two major poems, “Oblako v shtanakh” (1915; “A Cloud in Trousers”) and “Fleyta pozvonochnik” (written 1915, published 1916; “The Backbone Flute”). Both record a tragedy of unrequited love and express the author's discontent with the world in which he lived. Mayakovsky sought to “depoetize” poetry, adopting the language of the streets and using daring technical innovations. Above all, his poetry is declamatory, for mass audiences.

When the Russian Revolution of 1917 broke out, Mayakovsky was wholeheartedly for the Bolsheviks. Such poems as “Oda revolutsi” (1918; “Ode to Revolution”) and “Levy marsh” (1919; “Left March”) became very popular. So too did his Misteriya buff (first performed 1921; Mystery Bouffe), a drama representing a universal flood and the subsequent joyful triumph of the “Unclean” (the proletarians) over the “Clean” (the bourgeoisie).

As a vigorous spokesman for the Communist Party, Mayakovsky expressed himself in many ways. From 1919 to 1921 he worked in the Russian Telegraph Agency as a painter of posters and cartoons, which he provided with apt rhymes and slogans. He poured out topical poems of propaganda and wrote didactic booklets for children while lecturing and reciting all over Russia. In 1924 he composed a 3,000-line elegy on the death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin. After 1925 he traveled in Europe, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, recording his impressions in poems and in a booklet of caustic sketches, Moye otkrytiye Ameriki (1926; “My Discovery of America”). In the poem "Khorosho!" (1927; “Good!”) he sought to unite heroic pathos with lyricism and irony. But he also wrote sharply satirical verse.

Mayakovsky found time to write scripts for motion pictures, in some of which he acted. In his last three years he completed two satirical plays: Klop (performed 1929; The Bedbug), lampooning the type of philistine that emerged with the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union, and Banya (performed in Leningrad on Jan. 30, 1930; The Bathhouse), a satire of bureaucratic stupidity and opportunism under Joseph Stalin.

Mayakovsky's poetry was saturated with politics, but no amount of social propaganda could stifle his personal need for love, which burst out again and again because of repeated romantic frustrations. After his early lyrics this need came out particularly strongly in two poems, “Lyublyu” (1922; “I Love”) and “Pro eto” (1923; “About This”). Both of these poems were dedicated to Lilya Brik, the wife of the writer Osip Maksimovich Brik. Mayakovsky's love for her and his friendship with her husband had a strong influence on his poetry. Even after Mayakovsky's relationship with Lilya Brik ended, he considered her one of the people closest to him and a member of his family. During a stay in Paris in 1928, he fell in love with a refugee, Tatyana Yakovleva, whom he wanted to marry but who refused him. At the same time, he had misunderstandings with the dogmatic Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and with Soviet authorities. Nor was the production of his Banya a success. Disappointed in love, increasingly alienated from Soviet reality, and denied a visa to travel abroad, he committed suicide in Moscow.

Mayakovsky was, in his lifetime, the most dynamic figure of the Soviet literary scene. His predominantly lyrical poems and his technical innovations influenced a number of Soviet poets, and outside Russia his impress was strong, especially in the 1930s, after Stalin declared him the “best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.” In the 1960s, young poets, drawn to avant-garde art and activism that often clashed with communist dogma, organized poetry readings under Mayakovsky's statue in Moscow. In the Soviet Union's final years there was a strong tendency to view Mayakovsky's work as dated and insignificant, yet, on the basis of his best works, his reputation was later revived.

Additional Reading

Michael Almereyda (ed.), Night Wraps the Sky (2008), combines writings about Mayakovsky drawn from memoirs, critical essays, and other sources with translations into English of Mayakovsky's poetry. Edward J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (1973, reprinted 1988), is a critical biography. Studies of Mayakovsky's work include Bengt Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism 1917–1921 (1976); Vahan D. Barooshian, Brik and Mayakovsky (1978); Juliette R. Stapanian, Mayakovsky's Cubo-Futurist Vision (1986).

Tsvetayeva, Marina Ivanovna

▪ Russian poet

married name Marina Ivanovna Efron

born Sept. 26 [Oct. 8, New Style], 1892, Moscow, Russia

died Aug. 31, 1941, Yelabuga

Russian poet whose verse is distinctive for its staccato rhythms, originality, and directness and who, though little known outside Russia, is considered one of the finest 20th-century poets in the Russian language.

Tsvetayeva spent her youth predominantly in Moscow, where her father was a professor at the university and director of a museum and her mother was a talented pianist. The family traveled abroad extensively, and at the age of 16 she began studies at the Sorbonne. Her first collection of poetry, Vecherny albom (“Evening Album”), appeared in 1910. Many of her best and most typical poetical qualities are displayed in the long verse fairy tale Tsar-devitsa (1922; “Tsar-Maiden”).

Tsvetayeva met the Russian Revolution with hostility (her husband, Sergei Efron, was an officer in the White counterrevolutionary army), and many of her verses written at this time glorify the anti-Bolshevik resistance. Among these is the remarkable cycle Lebediny stan (“The Swans' Camp,” composed 1917–21, but not published until 1957 in Munich), a moving lyrical chronicle of the Civil War viewed through the eyes and emotions of the wife of a White officer.

Tsvetayeva left the Soviet Union in 1922, going to Berlin and Prague, and finally, in 1925, settling in Paris. There she published several volumes of poetry, including Stikhi k Bloku (1922; “Verses to Blok”) and Posle Rossii (1928; “After Russia”), the last book of her poetry to be published during her lifetime. She also composed two poetical tragedies on classical themes, Ariadne (1924) and Phaedra (1927), several essays on the creative process, and works of literary criticism, including the monograph Moy Pushkin (1937; “My Pushkin”). Her last cycle of poems, Stikhi k Chekhii (1938–39; “Verses to the Czech Land”), was an impassioned reaction to Nazi Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia.

In the 1930s Tsvetayeva's poetry increasingly reflected alienation from her émigré existence and a deepening nostalgia for Russia, as in the poems “Toska po rodine” (1935; “Homesick for the Motherland”) and “Rodina” (1936; “Motherland”). At the end of the '30s her husband—who had begun to cooperate with the communists—returned to the Soviet Union, taking their daughter with him (both of them were later to become victims of Joseph Stalin's terror). In 1939 Tsvetayeva followed them, settling in Moscow, where she worked on poetic translations. The evacuation of Moscow during World War II sent her to a remote town where she had no friends or support. She committed suicide in 1941.

Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich

▪ Russian author

born Feb. 10 [Jan. 29, Old Style], 1890, Moscow, Russia

died May 30, 1960, Peredelkino, near Moscow

Russian poet whose novel Doctor Zhivago helped win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 but aroused so much opposition in the Soviet Union that he declined the honour. An epic of wandering, spiritual isolation, and love amid the harshness of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the novel became an international best-seller but circulated only in secrecy and translation in his own land.

Pasternak grew up in a cultured Jewish household. His father, Leonid, was an art professor and a portraitist of novelist Leo Tolstoy, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and composer Sergey Rachmaninoff, all frequent guests at his home, and of Lenin. His mother was the pianist Rosa Kaufman.

Young Pasternak himself planned a musical career, though he was a precocious poet. He studied musical theory and composition for six years, then abruptly switched to philosophy courses at Moscow University and the University of Marburg (Germany). Physically disqualified for military service, he worked in a chemical factory in the Urals during World War I. After the Revolution he worked in the library of the Soviet commissariat of education.

His first volume of poetry was published in 1913. In 1917 he brought out a striking second volume, Poverkh baryerov (“Over the Barriers”), and with the publication of Sestra moya zhizn (1922; “My Sister Life”) he was recognized as a major new lyrical voice. His poems of that period reflected Symbolist influences. Though avant-garde and esoteric by Russian standards, they were successful. From 1933 to 1943, however, the gap between his work and the official modes (such as Socialist Realism) was too wide to permit him to publish, and he feared for his safety during the purges of the late 1930s. One theory is that Stalin spared him because Pasternak had translated poets of Stalin's native Georgia. His translations, which were his main livelihood, included renderings of William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, English Romantic poets, Paul Verlaine, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Although Pasternak hoped for the best when he submitted Doctor Zhivago to a leading Moscow monthly in 1956, it was rejected with the accusation that “it represented in a libelous manner the October Revolution, the people who made it, and social construction in the Soviet Union.” The book reached the West in 1957 through an Italian publishing house that had bought rights to it from Pasternak and refused to return it “for revisions.” By 1958, the year of its English edition, the book had been translated into 18 languages.

In the Soviet Union, the Nobel Prize brought a campaign of abuse. Pasternak was ejected from the Union of Soviet Writers (Writers' Union of the U.S.S.R.) and thus deprived of his livelihood. Public meetings called for his deportation; he wrote Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, “Leaving the motherland will equal death for me.” Suffering from cancer and heart trouble, he spent his last years in his home at Peredelkino.

Pasternak's works in English translation include short stories, the autobiographical Okhrannaya gramota (1931; Safe Conduct), and the full range of his poetic output, which ended on a note of gravity and quiet inwardness.

In 1987 the Union of Soviet Writers posthumously reinstated Pasternak, a move that gave his works a legitimacy they had lacked in the Soviet Union since his expulsion from the writers' union in 1958 and that finally made possible the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the Soviet Union. In addition to effecting Pasternak's rehabilitation, the review commission, headed by poet Andrey Voznesensky, recommended that Pasternak's home in Peredelkino be made a museum.

Additional Reading

Works of mainly biographical interest include Olga Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time (1978; originally published in Russian, 1978); Guy de Mallac, Boris Pasternak: His Life and Work (1981); Ronald Hingley, Pasternak (1983); Christopher Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography (1989– ); and Lazar Fleishman, Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics (1990). Criticism is represented by Olga R. Hughes, The Poetic World of Boris Pasternak (1974); Henry Gifford, Pasternak: A Critical Study (1977); and Victor Erlich (ed.), Pasternak: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978). Munir Sendich, Boris Pasternak: A Reference Guide (1994), an annotated bibliography of works by and about Pasternak, 1913–90, includes an essay on the critical reception Pasternak's writings received.

Babel, Isaak Emmanuilovich

▪ Russian author

born July 13 [July 1, Old Style], 1894, Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire

died Jan. 27, 1940, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Soviet short-story writer noted for his war stories and Odessa tales. He was considered an innovator in the early Soviet period and enjoyed a brilliant reputation in the early 1930s.

Born into a Jewish family, Babel grew up in an atmosphere of persecution that is reflected in the sensitivity, pessimism, and morbidity of his stories. His first works, later included in his Odesskiye rasskazy (“Odessa Tales”), were published in 1916 in St. Petersburg in a monthly edited by Maksim Gorky; but the tsarist censors considered them crude and obscene. Gorky praised the young author's terse, naturalistic style, at the same time advising him to “see the world.” Babel proceeded to do so, serving in the Cossack First Cavalry Army and in the political police (Babel's daughter denied this), working for newspapers, and holding a number of other jobs over the next seven years. Perhaps his most significant experience was as a soldier in the war with Poland. Out of that campaign came the group of stories known as Konarmiya (1926; Red Cavalry). These stories present different aspects of war through the eyes of an inexperienced, intellectual young Jew who reports everything graphically and with naive precision. Though senseless cruelty often pervades the stories, they are lightened by a belief that joy and happiness must exist somewhere, if only in the imagination.

The “Odessa Tales” were published in book form in 1931. This cycle of realistic and humorous sketches of the Moldavanka—the ghetto suburb of Odessa—vividly portrays the lifestyle and jargon of a group of Jewish bandits and gangsters, led by their “king,” the legendary Benya Krik.

Babel wrote other short stories, as well as two plays (Zakat, 1928; Mariya, 1935). In the early 1930s his literary reputation in the Soviet Union was high, but, in the atmosphere of increasing Stalinist cultural regimentation, Communist critics began to question whether his works were compatible with official literary doctrine. After the mid-1930s Babel lived in silence and obscurity. His last published work in the Soviet Union was a short tribute to Gorky in 1938. His powerful patron had died in 1936; in May 1939 Babel was arrested, and he was executed some eight months later. After Stalin's death in 1953, Babel was rehabilitated, and his stories were again published in the Soviet Union.

Olesha, Yury Karlovich

▪ Russian author

born March 3 [Feb. 19, Old Style], 1899, Elizavetgrad, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Kirovohrad, Ukr.])

died May 10, 1960, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Russian prose writer and playwright whose works address the conflict between old and new mentalities in the early years of the Soviet Union.

Olesha was born into the family of a minor official. He lived in Odessa from childhood, eventually studying for two years at Novorossyisk University there. In 1922 he moved to Moscow, worked for the railway workers' newspaper Gudok (“The Whistle”), and wrote poetry and satirical prose sketches.

Olesha gained renown first as a poet. His fame as a prose writer came after the publication of his novel Zavist (serialized 1927, published in book form 1928; Envy), the central theme of which is the fate of the intelligentsia in Russia's postrevolutionary society. Olesha's obvious enthusiasm for the new state of affairs did not hinder him from seeing and conveying to the reader the dramatic clash between the rational industrial state and the creative aspirations of Nikolay Kavalerov, one of the main characters in the novel. This clash is also echoed in Kavalerov himself: he has talent and creative potential, but he throws it away. Envy is one of a number of 20th-century Russian novels in which the protagonists clash with Soviet reality and as a result find themselves marginalized.

Olesha's second widely popular book, Tri tolstyaka (1928; The Three Fat Men), was written for both children and adults. It is a story set in an unknown land about an uprising led by the gunsmith Prospero. (The name is an allusion to the magician of William Shakespeare's The Tempest.) The novel has the didactic and schematic qualities of a fairy tale and is filled with unexpected metaphors and dexterously shifting points of view. In The Three Fat Men Olesha displays the same mastery of style present in Envy and his short stories.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Olesha had published a series of short stories and plays, among which the play Spisok blagodeyaniy (1931; “A List of Benefits”) was staged by the director Vsevolod Meyerhold (Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyevich). Olesha's openly lyrical speech in 1934 at the First All-Union Congress of the Writers' Union of the U.S.S.R. further bolstered his fame. After this, however, he published very little, although he often wrote for the cinema. For many years he worked on what was published posthumously as Ni dnya bez strochki (1965; No Day Without a Line); assembled from Olesha's notebooks after his death, it resembles a memoir, but its mix of sketches, essays, and other forms of writing defies categorization. It is often compared to Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor)'s equally complex The Diary of a Writer.

Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyevich

▪ Russian theatrical producer, director, and actor

born Feb. 9 [Jan. 28, old style], 1874, Penza, Russia

died Feb. 2, 1940, Moscow

Russian theatrical producer, director, and actor whose provocative experiments in nonrealistic theatre made him one of the seminal forces in modern theatre.

Meyerhold became a student in 1896 at the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School under the guidance of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, cofounder of the Moscow Art Theatre. Two years later, Meyerhold joined the Moscow Art Theatre and there began to formulate his avant-garde theories of symbolic, or “conditional,” theatre. In 1906 he became chief producer at the theatre of Vera Komissarzhevskaya, a distinguished actress of the time, and staged a number of Symbolist plays that employed his radical ideas of nonrepresentational theatre. For his presentation of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler in 1906, Meyerhold rebelled against the stylized naturalism popularized by Konstantin Stanislavsky's art theatre and instead directed his actors to behave in puppetlike, mechanistic ways. This production marked the beginning of an innovative theatre in Russia that became known as biomechanics (q.v.). Meyerhold's unorthodox approach to the theatre led him to break with Komissarzhevskaya in 1908. Thereafter, drawing upon the conventions of commedia dell'arte and Oriental theatre, he went on to stage productions in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). During 1920–35 Meyerhold achieved his greatest artistic success as a director, beginning with Fernand Crommelynck's Le Cocu magnifique (1920; The Magnificent Cuckold) and ending with his controversial production in 1935 of Aleksandr Pushkin's story “Pikovaya Dama” (“The Queen of Spades”).

Although he embraced the Russian Revolution of 1917, his fiercely individualistic temperament and artistic eccentricity brought reproach and condemnation from Soviet critics. He was accused of mysticism and neglect of Socialist Realism. Meyerhold refused to submit to the constraints of artistic uniformity and defended the artist's right to experiment. In 1939 he was arrested and imprisoned. Weeks later, his actress-wife, Zinaida Raikh, was found brutally murdered in their apartment. Nothing more was heard of him in the West until 1958, when his death in 1942 was announced in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia;

biomechanics

▪ theatre

antirealistic system of dramatic production developed in the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) in the early 1920s by the avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold (Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyevich) drew on the traditions of the commedia dell'arte and kabuki and on the writings of Edward Gordon Craig for his system, in which the actor's own personality was eliminated and he was entirely subordinated to the director's will. Coached as gymnasts and acrobats and emphasizing pantomime rather than words, the actors threw themselves about in puppetlike attitudes at the director's discretion. For these productions the stage was exposed to the back wall and was then furnished with harshly lit, bare sets consisting of scaffoldings, ladders, and ramps that the actors used. Biomechanics had lost its appeal by the late 1920s, though Meyerhold's emphasis on external action did become an element in Soviet actor-training techniques.

Ilf and Petrov

▪ Soviet humorists

Soviet humorists active at the end of the 1920s and in the '30s. The intimate literary collaboration of Ilya Ilf (pseudonym of Ilya Arnoldovich Faynzilberg; b. Oct. 3 [Oct. 15, New Style], 1897, Odessa, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]—d. April 13, 1937, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) and Yevgeny Petrov (pseudonym of Yevgeny Petrovich Katayev; b. Nov. 30 [Dec. 13, New Style], 1903, Odessa, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]—d. July 2, 1942, Crimea, U.S.S.R.) resulted in a number of immensely popular satirical works.

Born into a poor Jewish family, Ilf worked at various trades while a youth, becoming a journalist in Odessa at age 18. He went to Moscow in 1923 to begin a career as a professional writer. Petrov, the son of a teacher, began his career as a news-service correspondent, worked briefly as a criminal investigator, and went to Moscow in 1923, where he became a professional journalist. Initially, Ilf worked on the staff of Gudok (“The Whistle”), the central rail-workers' newspaper, while Petrov worked on the satirical journal, Krasny perets (“Red Pepper”). In 1926 Petrov moved to “The Whistle,” and he and Ilf formed their unique literary partnership.

In 1928 they published the first fruit of their collaboration, Dvenadtsat stulyev (The Twelve Chairs), a rollicking picaresque novel of farcical adventures within a framework of telling satire on Soviet life during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. The work was an instant success, and its rogue-hero—the irrepressible Ostap Bender—became overnight, and remained, one of the most popular personages in Russian fiction. Killed off at the end of The Twelve Chairs, Bender was resurrected in a sequel, Zolotoy telyonok (1931; The Little Golden Calf), an equally humorous but more serious and trenchant satire centring upon pretenders who claim to be the son of a dead Soviet hero.

In 1936, following a tour of the United States, Ilf and Petrov wrote Odnoyetazhnaya Amerika (“One-Storied America”), a witty account of their automobile trip across that country. In large part an exposé of the materialistic and uncultured character of American life, the work nevertheless indicates that many aspects of capitalist society appealed to the authors. A kind of sequel to this work was the long story Tonya (1937), which portrays with appropriate satirical touches the life of Soviet people compelled to live in a capitalist society. In addition to these major works, from 1932 Ilf and Petrov collaborated on a number of humorous and satiric sketches for the newspaper Pravda.

In 1937 Ilf died of tuberculosis. Petrov continued his literary work, writing for the newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta (“Literary Gazette”) and the magazine Ogonyok (“Little Light”). He died in 1942, when the airplane in which he was traveling from Sevastopol to Moscow crashed.

Bakhtin, Mikhail

▪ Russian philosopher and literary critic

in full Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin

born Nov. 17 [Nov. 5, Old Style], 1895, Orel, Russia

died March 7, 1975, Moscow, U.S.S.R.

Russian literary theorist and philosopher of language whose wide-ranging ideas significantly influenced Western thinking in cultural history, linguistics, literary theory, and aesthetics.

After graduating from the University of St. Petersburg (now St. Petersburg State University) in 1918, Bakhtin taught high school in western Russia before moving to Vitebsk (now Vitsyebsk, Belarus), a cultural centre of the region, where he and other intellectuals organized lectures, debates, and concerts. There Bakhtin began to write and develop his critical theories. Because of Stalinist censorship, he often published works under the names of friends, including P.N. Medvedev and V.N. Voloshinov. These early works include Freydizm (1927; Freudianism); Formalny metod v literaturovedeni (1928; The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship), an attack on the Formalist (Formalism)s' view of history; and Marksizm i filosofiya yazyka (1929; Marxism and the Philosophy of Language). Despite his precautions, Bakhtin was arrested in 1929 and exiled to the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. From 1945 to 1961 he taught at the Mordovian Teachers Training College.

Bakhtin is especially known for his work on the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor), Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo (1929; 2nd ed., 1963, retitled Problemy poetiki Dostoyevskogo; Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics), which he published under his own name just before he was arrested. It is considered one of the finest critical works on Dostoyevsky. In the book Bakhtin expressed his belief in a mutual relation between meaning and context involving the author, the work, and the reader, each constantly affecting and influencing the others, and the whole influenced by existing political and social forces. Bakhtin further developed this theory of polyphony, or “dialogics,” in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (1975; The Dialogic Imagination), in which he postulated that, rather than being static, language evolves dynamically and is affected by and affects the culture that produces and uses it. Bakhtin also wrote Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaya kultura srednevekovya i Renessansa (1965; Rabelais and His World).

Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasyevich

▪ Russian author

born May 15 [May 3, Old Style], 1891, Kiev, Ukraine, Russian Empire

died March 10, 1940, Moscow

Soviet playwright, novelist, and short-story writer best known for his humour and penetrating satire.

Beginning his adult life as a doctor, Bulgakov gave up medicine for writing. His first major work was the novel Belaya gvardiya (The White Guard), serialized in 1925 but never published in book form. A realistic and sympathetic portrayal of the motives and behaviour of a group of anti-Bolshevik White officers during the civil war, it was met by a storm of official criticism for its lack of a communist hero. Bulgakov reworked it into a play, Dni Turbinykh (“The Days of the Turbins”), which was staged with great success in 1926 but was subsequently banned. In 1925 he published a book of satirical fantasies, Dyavoliada (“Deviltries”; Diaboliad), implicitly critical of Soviet communist society. This work, too, was officially denounced. In the same year he wrote Sobachye serdtse (Heart of a Dog), a scathing comic satire on pseudoscience.

Because of their realism and humour, Bulgakov's works enjoyed great popularity, but their trenchant criticism of Soviet mores was increasingly unacceptable to the authorities. By 1930 he was, in effect, prohibited from publishing. His plea for permission to emigrate was rejected by Joseph Stalin. During the subsequent period of literary ostracism, which continued until his death, Bulgakov created his masterpieces. In 1932, as literary consultant to the Moscow Art Theatre staff, he wrote a tragedy on the death of Molière, Molière. A revised version was finally staged in 1936 and had a run of seven nights before it was banned because of its thinly disguised attack on Stalin and the Communist Party.

Bulgakov produced two more masterpieces during the 1930s. The first was his unfinished Teatralny roman (Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel, originally titled Zapiski pokoynika [“Notes of a Dead Man”]), an autobiographical novel, which includes a merciless satire on Konstantin Stanislavsky and the backstage life of the Moscow Art Theatre. The second was his dazzling Gogolesque fantasy, Master i Margarita (The Master and Margarita). Witty and ribald, and at the same time a penetrating philosophical novel wrestling with profound and eternal problems of good and evil, it juxtaposes two planes of action—one set in contemporary Moscow and the other in Pontius Pilate's Judea. The central character is the Devil—disguised as Professor Woland—who descends upon Moscow with his purgative pranks that expose the corruption and hypocrisy of the Soviet cultural elite. His counterpart is the “Master,” a repressed novelist who goes into a psychiatric ward for seeking to present the story of Jesus. The work oscillates between grotesque and often ribald scenes of trenchant satiric humour and powerful and moving moments of pathos and tragedy. It was published in the Soviet Union only in 1966–67, and then in an egregiously censored form.

Bulgakov's works were slow to benefit from the limited “thaw” that characterized the Soviet literary milieu following the death of Stalin. His posthumous rehabilitation began slowly in the late 1950s, and starting in 1962 several volumes of his works, including plays, novels, short stories, and his biography of Molière, were published. The three culminating masterpieces of this artist, however, were not published in the Soviet Union during his lifetime.

Nabokov, Vladimir

▪ American author

in full Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

born April 22, 1899, St. Petersburg, Russia

died July 2, 1977, Montreux, Switz.

Russian-born American novelist and critic, the foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian and English, and his best works, including Lolita (1955), feature stylish, intricate literary effects.

Nabokov was born into an old aristocratic family. His father, V.D. Nabokov, was a leader of the pre-Revolutionary liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) in Russia and was the author of numerous books and articles on criminal law and politics, among them The Provisional Government (1922), which was one of the primary sources on the downfall of the Kerensky regime. In 1922, after the family had settled in Berlin, the elder Nabokov was assassinated by a reactionary rightist while shielding another man at a public meeting; and although his novelist son disclaimed any influence of this event upon his art, the theme of assassination by mistake has figured prominently in Nabokov's novels. Nabokov's enormous affection for his father and for the milieu in which he was raised is evident in his autobiography Speak, Memory (revised version, 1967).

Nabokov published two collections of verse, Poems (1916) and Two Paths (1918), before leaving Russia in 1919. He and his family made their way to England, and he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, on a scholarship provided for the sons of prominent Russians in exile. While at Cambridge he first studied zoology but soon switched to French and Russian literature; he graduated with first-class honours in 1922 and subsequently wrote that his almost effortless attainment of this degree was “one of the very few ‘utilitarian' sins on my conscience.” While still in England he continued to write poetry, mainly in Russian but also in English, and two collections of his Russian poetry, The Cluster and The Empyrean Path, appeared in 1923. In Nabokov's mature opinion, these poems were “polished and sterile.”

Between 1922 and 1940 Nabokov lived in Germany and France, and, while continuing to write poetry, he experimented with drama and even collaborated on several unproduced motion-picture scenarios. By 1925 he settled upon prose as his main genre. His first short story had already been published in Berlin in 1924. His first novel, Mashenka (Mary), appeared in 1926; it was avowedly autobiographical and contains descriptions of the young Nabokov's first serious romance as well as of the Nabokov family estate, both of which are also described in Speak, Memory. Nabokov did not again draw so heavily upon his personal experience as he had in Mashenka until his episodic novel about an émigré professor of entomology in the United States, Pnin (1957), which is to some extent based on his experiences while teaching (1948–58) Russian and European literature at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

His second novel, King, Queen, Knave, which appeared in 1928, marked his turn to a highly stylized form that characterized his art thereafter. His chess novel, The Defense, followed two years later and won him recognition as the best of the younger Russian émigré writers. In the next five years he produced four novels and a novella. Of these, Despair and Invitation to a Beheading were his first works of importance and foreshadowed his later fame.

During his years of European emigration, Nabokov lived in a state of happy and continual semipenury. All of his Russian novels were published in very small editions in Berlin and Paris. His first two novels had German translations, and the money he obtained for them he used for butterfly-hunting expeditions (he eventually published 18 scientific papers on entomology). But until his best-seller Lolita, no book he wrote in Russian or English produced more than a few hundred dollars. During the period in which he wrote his first eight novels, he made his living in Berlin and later in Paris by giving lessons in tennis, Russian, and English and from occasional walk-on parts in films (now forgotten). His wife, the former Véra Evseyevna Slonim, whom he married in 1925, worked as a translator. From the time of the loss of his home in Russia, Nabokov's only attachment was to what he termed the “unreal estate” of memory and art. He never purchased a house, preferring instead to live in houses rented from other professors on sabbatical leave. Even after great wealth came to him with the success of Lolita and the subsequent interest in his previous work, Nabokov and his family (he and his wife had one son, Dmitri) chose to live (from 1959) in genteelly shabby quarters in a Swiss hotel.

The subject matter of Nabokov's novels is principally the problem of art itself presented in various figurative disguises. Thus, The Defense seemingly is about chess, Despair about murder, and Invitation to a Beheading a political story, but all three works make statements about art that are central to understanding the book as a whole. The same may be said of his plays, Sobytiye (“The Event”), published in 1938, and The Waltz Invention. The problem of art again appears in Nabokov's best novel in Russian, The Gift, the story of a young artist's development in the spectral world of post-World War I Berlin. This novel, with its reliance on literary parody, was a turning point: serious use of parody thereafter became a key device in Nabokov's art. His first novels in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947), do not rank with his best Russian work. Pale Fire (1962), however, a novel consisting of a long poem and a commentary on it by a mad literary pedant, extends and completes Nabokov's mastery of unorthodox structure, first shown in The Gift and present also in Solus Rex, a Russian novel that began to appear serially in 1940 but was never completed. Lolita (1955), with its antihero, Humbert Humbert, who is possessed by an overpowering desire for very young girls, is yet another of Nabokov's subtle allegories: love examined in the light of its seeming opposite, lechery. Ada (1969), Nabokov's 17th and longest novel, is a parody of the family chronicle form. All of his earlier themes come into play in the novel, and, because the work is a medley of Russian, French, and English, it is his most difficult work. (He also wrote a number of short stories and novellas, mostly written in Russian and translated into English.)

Nabokov's major critical works are an irreverent book about Nikolay Gogol (1944) and a monumental four-volume translation of, and commentary on, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964). What he called the “present, final version” of the autobiographical Speak, Memory, concerning his European years, was published in 1967, after which he began work on a sequel, Speak On, Memory, concerning the American years.

As Nabokov's reputation grew in the 1930s so did the ferocity of the attacks made upon him. His idiosyncratic, somewhat aloof style and unusual novelistic concerns were interpreted as snobbery by his detractors—although his best Russian critic, Vladislav Khodasevich, insisted that Nabokov's aristocratic view was appropriate to his subject matters: problems of art masked by allegory.

Nabokov's reputation varies greatly from country to country. Until 1986 he was not published in the Soviet Union, not only because he was a “White Russian émigré” (he became a U.S. citizen in 1945) but also because he practiced “literary snobbism.” Critics of strong social convictions in the West also generally hold him in low esteem. But within the intellectual émigré community in Paris and Berlin between 1919 and 1939, V. Sirin (the literary pseudonym used by Nabokov in those years) was credited with being “on a level with the most significant artists in contemporary European literature and occupying a place held by no one else in Russian literature.” His reputation after 1940, when he changed from Russian to English after emigrating to the United States, mounted steadily until the 1970s, when he was acclaimed by a leading literary critic as “king over that battered mass society called contemporary fiction.”

Andrew Field

Additional Reading

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1967), the author's autobiography up to 1940; three books by Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Art (1967), Nabokov: A Bibliography (1972), and Nabokov: His Life in Part (1977); C. Newman and Alfred Appel, Jr. (eds.), For Vladimir Nabokov on His Seventieth Birthday (1971), a Festschrift of reminiscences of Nabokov and critical articles and tributes; Alfred Appel Jr., Nabokov's Dark Cinema (1974), on Nabokov's work in film; Peter Quennell (ed.), Vladimir Nabokov, His Life, His Work, His World: A Tribute (1980).

Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich

▪ Russian writer

Introduction

Herzen also spelled Hertzen, or Gertsen

born April 6 [March 25, Old Style], 1812, Moscow, Russia

died Jan. 21 [Jan. 9], 1870, Paris, France

political thinker, activist, and writer who originated the theory of a unique Russian path to socialism known as peasant populism. Herzen chronicled his career in My Past and Thoughts (1861–67), which is considered to be one of the greatest works of Russian prose.

Early life.

Herzen was the illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, Ivan Alekseyevich Yakovlev, and a German woman of humble origins. Reared in his father's house, he received an elite and far-ranging education from French, German, and Russian tutors. Still, the “taint” of his birth, as he regarded it, made him resentful of authority and, ultimately, of the autocratic, serf-based Russian social order. This resentment also bred in him an ardent commitment to the cause of the Decembrists (Decembrist), a revolutionary group that staged an unsuccessful uprising against the emperor Nicholas I in 1825. Herzen and his friend Nikolay Ogaryov, who, like Herzen, was influenced by the heroic libertarianism of the German playwright Friedrich Schiller, took a solemn oath to devote their lives to continuing the Decembrists' struggle for freedom in Russia.

Attending the University of Moscow between 1829 and 1833, Herzen evolved from “romanticism for the heart to idealism for the head” and became an adept of the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling's Naturphilosophie.

Eventually Herzen and Ogaryov and their circle fused the pantheistic idealism of Schelling with the utopian socialism of the French social philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon (Saint-Simon, Henri de) to produce a philosophy of history in which the “World Spirit” evolved ineluctably toward the realization of freedom and justice.

This metaphysical politics was sufficient, however, to lead to the arrest of the entire circle in 1834. Herzen was sent into exile for six years to work in the provincial bureaucracy in Vyatka (now Kirov) and Vladimir; then, for an indiscreet remark about the police, he spent two more years in Novgorod. The misery of this period was relieved by an extravagantly romantic courtship and an initially happy marriage with his cousin, Natalya Zakharina, in 1838.

Herzen's eight-year experience with injustice and the acquaintance it afforded with the workings of Russian government gave firmer contours to his radicalism. He abandoned the nebulous idealism of Schelling for the thought of two other contemporary German philosophers—first the “realistic logic” of G.W.F. Hegel and then the materialism of L.A. Feuerbach (Feuerbach, Ludwig). Herzen thus became a “Left-Hegelian,” holding that the dialectic (development through the reconciliation of conflicting ideas) was the “algebra of revolution” and that the disembodied truths of “science” (i.e., German idealism) must culminate in the “philosophy of the deed,” or the struggle for justice as proclaimed by French socialism. In later life Herzen explained that this metaphysical approach to politics was inevitable for his generation, since the despotism of Nicholas I made action impossible and thus left pure thought as the only free realm of expression.

Armed with these philosophical weapons, Herzen returned to Moscow in 1842 and immediately joined the camp of the Westernizers (Westernizer), who held that Russia must progress by assimilating European rationalism and civic freedom, in their dispute with the Slavophiles (Slavophile), who argued that Russian development must be founded on the Orthodox religion and a fraternal peasant commune. Herzen contributed to this polemic two able and successful popularizations of Left-Hegelianism, Diletantizm v nauke (“Dilettantism in Science”) and Pisma ob izuchenii prirody (“Letters on the Study of Nature”), and a novel of social criticism, Kto vinovat? (“Who Is to Blame?”), in the new “naturalistic” manner of Russian fiction.

Soon, however, Herzen fell out with the other Westernizers because the majority of the group were reformist liberals, whereas Herzen had by now embraced the anarchist socialism of the French social theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. At this point, in 1846, Herzen's father died, leaving him a considerable fortune; and the following year Herzen left Russia for western Europe—as it turned out, for good.

Life in exile.

Herzen went immediately to the capital of European radicalism, Paris, hoping for the imminent triumph of social revolution. The revolutionary upheavals of 1848 that he witnessed in Paris and Italy soon disabused him: he became convinced that the Western “matadors of rhetoric” were too imbued with the values of the past to level the existing social order, that Europe's role as a progressive historical force was finished, and that Western institutions were in fact “dead.” He concluded further that, contrary to the teachings of the Hegelians, there was no “rational” inevitability in history and that society's fate was decided instead by chance and human will. He developed these themes in two brilliant but rather confused works, Pisma iz Frantsii i Italii (“Letters from France and Italy”) and S togo berega (From the Other Shore). His disillusionment was vastly increased by his wife's infidelity with the radical German poet Georg Herwegh and by her death in 1852.

Loss of faith in the West, however, provoked a spiritual return to Russia: though “old” Europe, “fettered by the richness of her past,” had proved incapable of realizing the ideal of socialism, “young” Russia, precisely because its past offered nothing worth conserving, now seemed to Herzen to possess the resources for a radical new departure. And Herzen (borrowing an idea from his old foes, the Slavophiles) found these resources above all in a collectivist peasant commune, which he viewed as the basis for a future socialist order. This new faith in Russia's revolutionary potential was expressed in Letters to the French historian Jules Michelet and the Italian revolutionist Giuseppe Mazzini in 1850 and 1851.

In 1852 Herzen moved to London, and the following year, with the aid of Polish exiles, he founded the “Free Russian Press in London,” the first uncensored printing enterprise in Russian history. In 1855 Nicholas I died, and soon thereafter Alexander II proclaimed his intention of emancipating the serfs. Responding to this unprecedented “thaw,” Herzen rapidly launched a series of periodicals that were designed to be smuggled back to Russia: “The Polar Star” in 1855, “Voices from Russia” in 1856, and a newspaper, Kolokol (The Bell), created in 1857 with the aid of his old friend Ogaryov, now also an émigré. Herzen's aim was to influence both the government and the public toward emancipation of the peasants, with generous allotments of land and the liberalization of Russian society. To this end, he moderated his political pronouncements, speaking less of socialist revolution and more of the concrete issues involved in Alexander's reforms. For a time he even believed in enlightened autocracy, hailing Alexander II in 1856 (in words that echoed the famous dying tribute of Julian the Apostate to Christ) with: “you have conquered, oh Galilean!” Kolokol soon became a major force in public life, read by the tsar's ministers and the radical opposition.

Soon, however, the ambiguity of Herzen's position between reform and revolution began to cost him support. After 1858 moderate liberals, such as the writer Ivan Turgenev, attacked Herzen for his utopian recklessness; and after 1859 he quarreled with the political writer N.G. Chernyshevsky (Chernyshevsky, N.G.) and the younger generation of radicals, whose intransigent manner appeared to him as “very dangerous” to reform. He also lost faith in the government; when the Emancipation Act (Emancipation Manifesto) was finally enacted in 1861, he denounced it as a betrayal of the peasants.

He therefore veered again to the left and called on the student youth to “go to the people” directly with the message of Russian socialism. Furthermore, on the urging of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich), he threw the support of Kolokol behind the unsuccessful Polish revolt of 1863. He immediately regretted this rashness, for it cost him the support of all moderate elements in Russia without restoring his credit among the revolutionaries. Kolokol's influence declined sharply. In 1865 Herzen moved his headquarters to Geneva to be near the young generation of Russian exiles, but in 1867 public indifference forced Kolokol to cease publication.

Amidst these political reverses, Herzen turned his energies increasingly to his memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, which were designed to enshrine both his own legend and that of Russian radicalism. A loosely constructed personal narrative, interspersed with sharp vignettes of both Russian and Western political figures and with philosophical and historical digressions, it provides a masterful fresco of contemporary European radicalism. At times witty, irreverent, and playful in style, and at other times lyrical, passionate, and rhapsodical, it is one of the most original and powerful examples of Russian prose. My Past and Thoughts was published principally between 1861 and 1867, and its scope and quality have placed it alongside the great Russian novels of the 19th century in artistic stature.

In 1869 Herzen wrote letters K staromu tovarishchy (“To an Old Comrade”; Bakunin), in which he expressed new reservations about the cost of revolution. Still, he was unable to accept liberal reformism completely, and he expressed interest in the new force of the First International, Karl Marx's federation of working-class organizations. This wavering position between socialism and liberalism, which characterized so much of his career, proved to be his political testament. The ambiguities of his position have made it possible ever since for both Russian liberals and socialists to claim his legacy with equal plausibility.

Martin E. Malia

Additional Reading

Works on Herzen include Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855 (1961), exploring his ideology and politics; Edward Hallett Carr, The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery (1933, reissued 1981), treating his personal life; Edward Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary (1979); and N.M. Pirumova, Aleksandr Gertsen: Revoliutsioner, Myslitel', Chelovek (1988). Collected editions of his works are Polnoe sobranie sochineniĭ i pisem, ed. by M.K. Lemke, 21 vol. in 22 (1919–23); and Sobranie sochineniĭ,

Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhaylovich

▪ Russian writer

born February 2 [February 14, New Style], 1855, Bakhmutsky district, Russian Empire

died March 24 [April 5], 1888, St. Petersburg

Russian short-story writer whose works helped to foster the vogue enjoyed by that genre in Russia in the late 19th century.

Garshin was the son of an army officer whose family was wealthy and landed. The major Russo-Turkish war of the 19th century broke out when Garshin was in his early twenties, and, perhaps feeling obligated by his father's profession, he renounced his youthful pacifism to serve.

He wrote of the plight of injured soldiers in his first story, “Chetyre dnya” (1877; “Four Days”), the title of which refers to the length of time the wounded main character remains unattended on the battlefield. The theme of wartime casualty is continued in his “A Very Short Novel,” the story of a soldier whose injury precipitates an emotional crisis when he returns home. In perhaps his most famous story, “Krasny tsvetok” (1883; “The Red Flower”), a madman dies after destroying a flower he believes to contain all of the world's evil. Haunted by similar delusions in his own life, Garshin committed suicide by throwing himself down a stairwell.

Tolstoy, Aleksey Nikolayevich, Graf

▪ Soviet writer

(Count)

born Jan. 10, [Dec. 29, 1882, old style], 1883, Nikolayevsk, Russia

died Feb. 23, 1945, Moscow

novelist and short-story writer, a former nobleman and “White” Russian émigré who became a supporter of the Soviet regime and an honoured artist of the Soviet Union.

The son of a count distantly related to the great 19th-century novelist Leo Tolstoy, he studied engineering at St. Petersburg. His early novels Chudaki (1910; “The Eccentrics”) and Khromoy barin (1912; “The Lame Squire”) deal with gentry families in a spirit of comic realism reminiscent of Gogol. After the Bolshevik Revolution he supported the Whites in the Russian Civil War and emigrated to western Europe, where he lived from 1919 to 1923. During this time he wrote one of his finest works, Detstvo Nikity (1921; Nikita's Childhood, 1945), a nostalgic, partly autobiographical study of a small boy's life.

In 1923, prompted by homesickness, Tolstoy asked to return to Russia, where he enjoyed a productive and prosperous career for the rest of his life. He was a natural storyteller and many of his works are purely entertaining. He wrote science fiction (Aelita, 1922), children's stories, thrillers, stories of international intrigue, and more than 20 plays. His most extensive serious work is his trilogy of novels Khozhdeniye po mukam. Consisting of Sestry (1920–21; “Sisters”), Vosemnadtsaty god (1927–28; “The Year 1918”), and Khmuroe utro (1940–41; “A Gloomy Morning”), it is a study of Russian intellectuals converted to the Bolshevik cause during the Civil War. An English translation of the trilogy appeared in 1946 under the title The Road to Calvary (1946). For the trilogy and for his long unfinished historical novel Pyotr I (1929–45; Peter the First, 1956), he received Stalin prizes. During World War II he was a prolific author of patriotic articles and also composed his two-part play Ivan the Terrible (1943), a dramatic apologia for the pathologically cruel tsar. The play earned Tolstoy his third Stalin Prize.

samizdat

▪ Soviet literature

(from Russian (Russian literature) sam, “self,” and izdatelstvo, “publishing”), literature secretly written, copied, and circulated in the former Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and usually critical of practices of the Soviet government.

Samizdat began appearing following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, largely as a revolt against official restrictions on the freedom of expression of major dissident Soviet authors. After the ouster of Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1964, samizdat publications expanded their focus beyond freedom of expression to a critique of many aspects of official Soviet policies and activities, including ideologies, culture, law, economic policy, historiography, and treatment of religions and ethnic minorities. Because of the government's strict monopoly on presses, photocopiers, and other such devices, samizdat publications typically took the form of carbon copies of typewritten sheets and were passed by hand from reader to reader.

The major genres of samizdat included reports of dissident activities and other news suppressed by official media, protests addressed to the regime, transcripts of political trials, analysis of socioeconomic and cultural themes, and even pornography.

In its earliest days, samizdat was largely a product of the intelligentsia of Moscow and Leningrad. But it soon fomented analogous underground literatures throughout the constituent republics of the Soviet Union and among its many ethnic minorities.

From its inception, the samizdat movement and its contributors were subjected to surveillance and harassment by the KGB, the secret police. The suppression worsened in the early 1970s, at the height of samizdat activity. Culminating in a show trial of Pyotr Yakir and Victor Krasin in August 1973, the government's assault wounded the movement. But it survived, though reduced in numbers and deprived of many of its leaders.