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.