Aleksey Pisemsky

Aleksey Pisemsky

Portrait of Pisemsky by Ilya Repin.
Born March 23, 1821
Kostroma, Russian Empire
Died February 2, 1881 (aged 59)
Moscow, Russian Empire
Occupation Novelist • Playwright
Nationality Russian
Literary movement Realism
Notable works One Thousand Souls (1858)
A Bitter Fate (1859)
An Old Man's Sin (1862)
Troubled Seas (1863)
Notable awards Uvarov Prize of the Russian Academy
Spouse Yekaterina Pavlovna Svinyina
Children Nikolay Pisemsky • Pavel Pisemsky

Signature

Aleksey Feofilaktovich Pisemsky (Russian: Алексе́й Феофила́ктович Пи́семский) (March 23 [O.S. March 11] 1821February 2 [O.S. January 21] 1881) was a Russian novelist and dramatist who was regarded as an equal of Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the late 1850s, but whose reputation suffered a spectacular decline after his fall-out with Sovremennik magazine in the early 1860s. A realistic playwright, along with Aleksandr Ostrovsky he was responsible for the first dramatization of ordinary people in the history of Russian theatre.[1] D.S. Mirsky said: "Pisemsky's great narrative gift and exceptionally strong grip on reality make him one of the best Russian novelists."[2]

His first novel Boyarschina (1847, published 1858) was originally forbidden for its unflattering description of the Russian nobility. His principal novels are The Simpleton (1850), One Thousand Souls (1858), which is considered his best work of the kind, and Troubled Seas, which gives a picture of the excited state of Russian society around the year 1862. He also wrote plays, including A Bitter Fate (also translated as "A Hard Lot"), which depicts the dark side of the Russian peasantry. The play has been called the first Russian realistic tragedy; it won the Uvarov Prize of the Russian Academy.[1]

Biography

Early life

Aleksey Pisemsky was born at his father's Ramenye estate in the Chukhloma province of Kostroma. His parents were retired colonel Feofilakt Gavrilovich Pisemsky and his wife Yevdokiya Shipova.[3] In his autobiography, he described his family as belonging to the ancient Russian nobility, although his more immediate progenitors were all very poor and unable to read or write. Pisemsky wrote:

I come from an ancient noble family. One of my ancestors, a diak named Pisemsky, had been sent by Tsar Ivan the Terrible to London with a view of coming to an understanding with Princess Elisabeth whose niece the Tsar was planning to marry. Another predecessor of mine, Makary Pisemsky, became a monk and has been canonized as a saint, his remains still lying at rest in the Makarievsky monastery on the Unzha River. That's about all there is to my family's historical glory... the Pisemskys, from what I've heard of them, were rich, but the particular branch that I belong to has become desolate. My grandfather was illiterate, walked in lapti, and ploughed the land himself. One of his affluent relatives, a landowner from Malorossia, took it upon himself to "arrange the future" of Feofilakt Gavrilovich Pisemsky, my father, then 14. This "arranging" process was reduced to the following: my father was washed up, given some clothes, taught to read, and then sent as a soldier to conquer Crimea. After having spent 30 years in the regular army there, he, now an army Major, took an opportunity to re-visit Kostroma Province... and there married my mother, who came from the wealthy Shipov family. My father was 45 at the time, my mother 37.[4]

Aleksey remained the only child in the family, 4 infants dying before his birth and 5 after. Years later he described himself (to which other people attested) as a weak, capricious and whimsical boy who for some reason loved to mock clergymen and suffered from sleepwalking at one time. He remembered his father as a military service man in every sense of the word, strict and duty-bound, almost a purist in his habits, a man of the utmost honesty in terms of money, yet severe and strict. "Some of our serfs were horrified by him, not all of them, though, only those who were foolish and lazy; those who were smart and industrious were favoured by him," he remarked. Pisemsky saw his mother as an altogether different person: nervous, dreamy, astute, eloquent (even though she was not well-educated) and rather sociable. He went further, noting: "Except for those clever eyes of hers, she wasn't good-looking, and my father had a conversation with me regarding this when I was a student: 'Tell me Aleksey, why do you think your mother becomes more attractive with age?' – 'Because she has a lot of inner beauty which, as years go by, becomes more and more evident', I answered, and he had to agree with me," Pisemsky wrote.[4] His mother's cousins were Yury Bartenev, one of the most prominent Russian Freemasons (colonel Marfin in Aleksey's novel Masons) and Vsevolod Bartenev (Esper Ivanovich in People of the Forties), a Navy officer; both exerted considerable influence upon the boy.[5]

Pisemsky spent the first ten years of his life in the small regional town of Vetluga where his father served as Mayor, appointed by the local Society of Wounded Soldiers.[6] Later he moved with his parents to the countryside. Pisemsky described the years he spent there in Chapter 2 of People of the Forties, an autobiographical novel in which he figured under the name of Pasha. If this semi-fictional memoir is to be believed, he was fond of hunting and horseback-riding as a teenager. The education he was given was scant and cheaply acquired for him: his tutors were a local deacon, a defrocked drunkard, and a strange old man who was known to have toured the area for decades, giving lessons. Aleksey learned reading, writing, arithmetics, Russian and Latin from them. Nobody read to him on a regular basis, so he "started grabbing whatever novels he could find on his father's shelves".[4] In his autobiography Pisemsky wrote: "Nobody had ever forced me to learn, and I wasn't an avid learner, but I read a lot and that was my passion: by 14 I consumed, in translation, of course, most of Walter Scott's novels, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Faublas, Le Diable boiteux, The Serapion Brethren, a Persian novel called Haggi Baba... As for children's books, I couldn't stand them and, as far as I remember now, considered them very silly".[4] Pisemsky wrote rather scornfully of his primary education and regretted failing to learn any languages besides Latin. This early education, he reflected, accounted for some of his problems at the University where he frequently had trouble studying and sometimes forgot what he had been taught. He found in himself, however, a natural predisposition to mathematics, logic and aesthetics.[4]

Formal education

In 1834, at the age of 14, Alexey's father took him to Kostroma, to enroll him in the local gymnasium. Memories of his school life found their way into his short story "The Old Man" and his novel Men of the Forties.[6] "I started well, was perceptive and hard-working, but gained most of my popularity as an amateur actor", he later remembered. Inspired by a rendition of The Dnieper Mermaid (an opera by Ferdinand Kauer), performed by a wandering troupe of actors, Pisemsky, along with an older boy, his roommate, organized a home theater and had great success with his first role, that of Prudius in The Cossack Poet by Prince Alexander Shakhovskoy. This first triumph had a dramatic effect upon the boy who started to imagine himself a great actor and adopted what he called an "aesthetic way of life", much under the influence of Vsevolod Nikitovich Bartenev, his uncle. Bartenev supplied his nephew with the newest novels and journals and has been credited with prompting him to begin studying music and playing the piano, which he did, according to one of his friends, "with expressiveness yet unheard of".[4]

It was while in school that Pisemsky started writing. "My 5th form teacher of literature credited me with having talent; in the 6th form I wrote a novella called The Circassian Girl, and in the 7th a still longer one entitled The Iron Ring, both worthy of mention, apparently, only as stylistic exercises, dealing as they did with things I was totally ignorant of at the time," Pisemsky remembered. In The Iron Ring, he wrote of his first love, the focus of his romantic passion – his cousin Mary, a girl who was much older than Aleksey and treated him like a baby. Not only did Pisemsky read his novel to his beloved but also sent the manuscript to several Saint Petersburg journals only to meet with all-round rejection.[4] Several months later, already a university student, he gave the novel to Stepan Shevyryov and the professor's reaction was sharply negative: he made a point to discourage the young man from writing about things he knew nothing of.[3]

In 1840, upon graduation from the gymnasium, Pisemsky joined the Faculty of Mathematics at Moscow State University, having overcome, apparently, serious resistance from his father who insisted upon his son enrolling in the Demidov Lyceum, for the purely practical reason that it was closer to home and his education there would have been free. Pisemsky later regarded his choice of faculty as a very fortunate one, even while admitting he drew little practical value out of university lectures. "Having been prone to posh eloquence, I thank God that I picked the mathematics faculty – it was my experience there that quickly sobered me up and taught me to speak only of things that I knew something about," he wrote. Having attended assorted lectures by professors from other faculties, he became acquainted with Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Corneille, Racine, Rousseau, Voltaire, Hugo and George Sand and was now better able to form an educated view on the history of Russian literature. Contemporaries pointed at Pisemsky's two major influences of the time: Belinsky and Gogol. Besides these Russian writers, according to Pisemsky's friend Boris Almazov, Pavel Katenin, the follower of French classicism and Russian translator of Racine and Cornel, whom Pisemsky knew through being a neighbour, exerted some influence upon him as well. Strange as this friendship might have seemed, it was important for the youth. According to Almazov, Pisemsky had a considerable dramatic talent, and it was Katenin who helped him to develop it.[4]

Acting

By 1844 Pisemsky was known as a gifted reciter, his repertoire consisting mostly of works by Gogol. According to Almazov, his solo concerts in his flat on Dolgoruky Lane were immensely popular among both students and visiting schoolboys. A real hit was Pisemsky's performance as Podkolyosin in Gogol's Marriage featured by one of Moscow's small private theaters. "Those were the times when Podkolyosin was being portrayed by our great comedian Schepkin, the Imperial Theater star. Some of those who'd seen Pisemsky's performance were of the opinion that Pisemsky presented this character better than Schepkin did", wrote Almazov who also insisted that it was through following the 'Katenin school' that the young actor developed his "extraordinary art of self-possession, and distinctive yet reserved intonations" on stage. Having earned a word-of-mouth reputation as a master of recitals, Pisemsky started to get invitations to perform all over Saint Petersburg and its provinces.[4]

Other contemporaries praised Pisemsky's gift as a recital artist: Ivan Gorbunov, describing the author's stage reading of his own play Carpernters' Cartel, noted that it was "so much more than a mere reading; rather a high quality theater act, each character presented as a living being, boasting their own tone of voice, manner of gesture and individuality."[4] Pavel Annenkov remembered: "He performed his own works masterfully, and was able to find exceptionally expressive intonations for every character he was bringing to the stage, which gave a strong effect in his dramatic plays. Equally brilliant was Pisemsky's rendering of his collection of anecdotes concerning his earlier life experiences. He had loads of such anecdotes and each contained a more or less complete character type. Many found their way into his books in a revised form." Annenkov disagreed with Almazov, though, in his assessment of Pisemsky as a fine Gogol actor and considered his 1860 playing of Gorodnichy (The Mayor) in Revizor 'lackluster'. "The problem is that Pisemsky has always succeeded in finding one definitive note for each role and following it through, ignoring undertones," Annenkov explained. He also cited a discussion Pisemsky had with the then famous actor Alexander Martynov, explaining his reason for altering some of his performances with the argument that since Gogol had never intended his masterpiece for the stage, he for this reason felt free to add to the Gorodnichy role, letting him go off on tangents which, Annenkov thought, thwarted the actor in presenting his character in a harmonious fashion. Martynov, for his own part, gave much significance to these seemingly off-the-cuff details, feeling that they served to create a whole, unique picture.[4]

State official career

Portrait of Pisemsky by Vasily Perov, 1869

After graduating from the University in 1844, Pisemsky joined the Office of State Properties in Kostroma and was soon transferred to the corresponding department in Moscow. In 1846 he retired and spent two years living in Moscow Province. In 1848 he married Ekaterina, Pavel Svinyin's daughter, and returned to the state office, again in Kostroma, as a special envoy for Prince Suvorov, then the Kostroma governor. After a stint as an assessor in the local government (1849–1853) Pisemsky joined the Ministry of Imperial Lands in Saint Petersburg where he stayed until 1859. In 1866 he joined the Moscow government as a councilor, soon becoming Chief councilor. He finally quit the civil service (as Court Councilor) in 1872. Pisemsky's state official career in the provinces had a profound effect upon him and his major works.[4]

Later Boris Almazov made an important observation in a speech: "Most of our writers who describe the lives of Russian state officials and people from governmental spheres have only fleeting experiences of this kind... More often than not they've served only formally, hardly noticing the faces of their chiefs, let alone those of their colleagues. Pisemsky treated working for the State differently. He gave himself to serving the Russian state wholeheartedly and, whatever post he occupied, had one single objective in mind: fighting the dark forces which our government and the best part of our society try to fight..." This, according to the speaker, enabled the author not only to fathom the depths of Russian life but to delve down "to the very core of the Russian soul".[4]

Biographer and critic Alexander Skabichevsky, having found similarities in the development of Pisemsky and Saltykov-Schedrin, another author who examined the provincial bureaucracy in the times of "total corruption, embezzlement, no laws for landowners, wild atrocities, and a total lack of real state power"; times when "provincial life was mostly uncultured and lacked even basic morality", and "the life of the intelligent classes had the character of one wanton, never ending orgy", concluded: "Both writers lost all motivation not just for the idealization of Russian life, but also of highlighting its lighter, positive sides". Skabichevsky went on, though, to define one profound difference between the mindsets of the two authors. While Saltykov-Schedrin, a forward-looking stalwart of the Saint Petersburg circles, had every opportunity to be imbued with the high ideals which were making their way into Russian cities from Europe, and to make these ideals the foundation to build his outward negativity upon, Pisemsky, once he found himself in the Russian provinces, became disillusioned in whatever ideas he'd gotten at the University, seeing them as idealistic with no roots in Russian reality.[4] Skabichevsky wrote:

Following Gogol, Pisemsky depicted [provincial Russia] as being exactly as ugly as he saw it, seeing everywhere around him the most rigid resistance to those new ideals he'd pick up at the University, realizing how incongruous those ideals were with reality... and becoming greatly skeptical towards those ideals as such. The idea of implementing them in such places now looked like an absurdity to him; all the more so, that he had seen such attempts, when they were being made, as caricatures, marred by unspeakable vulgarity.[4]

"Thus, adopting a 'rejection for rejection's sake' attitude, he entered tunnels of utter pessimism without any light at the end of them, with pictures of outrage, dirt and amorality working to convince the reader: no other, better life here would be possible anyway, for man – a scoundrel by nature, worshipping only the needs of his own flesh – is always ready to betray all things sacred for his egotistic schemes and lowly instincts," Skabichevsky wrote.[4]

Literary career

Pisemsky's early works exhibited profound disbelief in the higher qualities of humanity, and a disdain for the opposite sex, although he appeared to have been attached to a particularly devoted and sensible wife. Reflecting upon possible reasons for this, Skabichevsky pointed at those first years spent in Kostroma when the young Pisemsky had lost sight of whatever lofty ideals he might have been exposed to while studying in the capital. Pisemsky himself thought little of his provincial life experience. "With my [stage] success as Podkolesin my scientific and aesthetic life ended. What lie ahead was only grief and the need to find work. My father was dead already, my mother, shocked by his death, was paralyzed and lost her speech, my means were meagre. With this in mind I returned to the country and gave myself to melancholy and hypochondria," Pisemsky wrote in his autobiography.[4] On the other hand, it was his continuous official errand trips throughout the Kostroma governorate that provided Pisemsky with the priceless material he used in his future literary work.[7]

Debut

Pisemsky's first novella Is She to Blame? was written while he was still at the University. He gave it to professor Stepan Shevyryov and the latter, being a great opponent of the "natural school", recommended to the author "to soften up everything and make it more gentlemanly". Pisemsky agreed to do so, but didn't hurry to follow this advise. What he did instead was send the professor Nina, a naive story about a fresh-looking, beautiful girl who turns into a dull matron. Shevyryov made some editorial cuts and then published the story in the July 1848 issue of the obscure Syn Otechestva magazine.[8] So curtailed and disfigured was this version, that the author never even thought of re-issuing it. The story made its way into the posthumous Wolf's Publishing House 1884 collection of Pisemsky's works (Volume 4). Even in this curtailed form it bore, according to Skabichevsky, every mark of misanthropy and pessimism, seeds of which were sown in Boyarschina.[4]

Pisemsky's first novel Boyarschina was written in 1845. Sent in 1847 to Otechestvennye Zapiski, it was banned by the censors – allegedly for promoting the idea of "George Sandean [free] love" that the author was under the influence of at the time. This was the reason as Pisemsky saw it himself, though, according to Skabichevsky, "the unthinkable loads of filth the author had drawn" and its rather provocative title were more obvious reasons. When finally published in 1858, the novel failed to make any impact.[4] Still, according to biographer A. Gornfeld, it featured all the elements of Pisemsky's style: expressive naturalism, bright imagery, high vitality, the presence of comical motives, total lack of positivity with lots of 'bad guys' around, skepticism for the notion of love being anything long-lasting and serious, and brilliant, powerful language.[5]

Moskvityanin

In the early 1840s the Slavophile movement divided into two branches. The old school followers (the brothers Aksakov and Kireevsky, Khomyakov and others) grouped first around the publication Moskovsky sbornik, then Russkaya Beseda. Mikhail Pogodin's Moskvityanin became the center of the younger Slavophiles who were later labeled potchvenniky ('soil-bound'), Apollon Grigoriev, Boris Almazov, and Alexander Ostrovsky among them. In 1850 Moskvityanin invited Pisemsky, who by this time had gotten much notoriety due to his banned Boyarschina, to join in. Encouraged, Pisemsky wrote a letter to Alexander Ostrovsky, telling him he had a new work ready. The latter was interested and immediately wrote back to have the manuscript sent, that of the novel The Simpleton, Pisemsky's second novel which he'd been working on throughout 1848. "Do with it whatever you want and call it whatever you like, Bashmetev, The Muff, whatever", the author wrote. Ostrovsky chose the latter ("thus demonstrating intuition and taste", according to Lev Anninsky) and in November the story of a young idealist who dies after his illusions have been destroyed, was published in Moskvityanin, to great critical and public acclaim.[8] A year later Marriage of Passion (Брак по страсти) appeared in the same magazine, again to much critical acclaim. Pisemsky was immediately raised to the ranks of "the best writers of our times",[4] and his name began to be mentioned alongside those of Turgenev, Goncharov and Ostrovsky in critical reviews.[7]

Pavel Annenkov wrote:

I remember well the impression Pisemsky's first two novels made upon me... How hilarious they seemed, what an abundance of comic situations there were and how the author made these characters funny without trying to impose any moral judgement upon them. The Russian provincial philistine community was shown at its most self-celebrational, it was brought under the light and made to look almost proud of its own wildness, its unique outrageousness. The comical nature of these sketches had nothing to do with the author's juxtaposing them with one kind of doctrine or another. The effect was achieved by showing the complacency with which all those ridiculous characters were leading their lives full of absurdity and moral looseness. The laughter that Pisemsky's stories provoked was different from that of Gogol, although, as it follows from our author's autobiography, his initial efforts reflected much of Gogol and his work. Pisemsky's laughter stripped its subject down to the vulgar core, and to expect anything like "hidden tears" in it would be impossible. His was the joviality of, as it were, physiological nature, which is extremely rare with modern writers and more typical to the ancient Roman comedy, Middle Age farce or our common man's re-telling of some low-brow joke."[9]
Portrait of Pisemsky by Sergei Levitsky, 1856.

Pisemsky published his novella The Rich Fiancée (1851) in Moskvityanin, seen by some as a satire on characters like Rudin and Pechorin (Pisemsky himself disagreed).[8] Then followed his debut play The Hypochondriac (1852), somewhat similar to Gogol's Marriage, and his first stories from Sketches of Peasant life, a three-part cycle which made his reputation as a chronicler of the life of the common people.[10] In Pisemsky's second play, The Divide (Раздел, 1853), a typical 'natural school' piece, parallels have been found with Turgenev's comedy Breakfast at the Chief's.[7]

Speaking about Pisemsky's early works, Skabichevsky wrote:

Just dig deeper into the kind of pessimism which has gone into full swing in The Muff and Marriage by Passion, put it next to the mindset of an ordinary provincial man for examination and you'll be struck by the identical nature of the two. At the bottom of this outlook lies the conviction that man deep in his soul is a scoundrel, moved only by practical interests and egotistical, mostly dirty impulses, and for this reason one has to be on one's guard with one's neighbour and always keep 'a stone by one's bosom'.[4]

Influenced for many years by this provincial philosophy, Pisemsky to a large extent made it his own, the biographer argued. "Mind you, long before Troubled Seas, people of high education, embracing progressive ideas and a new outlook were being shown invariably as outrageous, vulgar rogues, worse than even the ugliest freaks of the uneducated community," he wrote, analyzing the character of Shamilov, from The Rich Fiancee, who, full of philosophical pretences, always starting on books and articles he never finishes... in a moral sense "loses even next to the half-wit Styopushka, a society jester."[4]

According to Annenkov, some of the 'thinking men of the time' simply refused to put up with this peculiar kind of "delight, drawn from the naked comic nature of situations," seeing this as akin to "the rapture a street mob enjoys when shown a hunch-backed Petrushka or other physical deformities". Annenkov quoted Vasily Botkin, a "strict and far-seeing critic" as saying that he "could not sympathize with the author who, although unquestionably gifted, apparently has neither principles of his own nor ideas to base his stories upon."[9]

Sovremennik

Much encouraged by the success of his first two long works, Pisemsky became very active and in 1850–1854 several of his novels, novellas, comedies, and sketches appeared in different journals, among them The Comic Actor, The Petersburg Man and M-r Batmanov. In 1854 he decided to leave his post as a local government assessor in Kostroma. For all his leanings towards Moscow where he had friends and where his literary career had begun, he chose Saint Petersburg for practical reasons. There Pisemsky made a shocking impression upon the literary community with his provincial originality of a very special kind, deep Kostroma accent, and the set of ideas, totally his own, none of them derived from a trendy source. In fact, Pisemsky appeared to be in opposition to all the ideas held as indisputable by the Russian capital's cultural elite. He had no time for the idea of women's emancipation and professed an exotic opinion that "a woman provides nothing but a feature in a man's life and on her own has no value". Rather good-naturedly he confessed to experiencing a "kind of organic revolt" towards all foreigners which he couldn't overcome by any means, adding: "The mere presence of a foreigner affects me in a devastating way. I lose my peace of mind and any will to either think or speak. As I see them before me I fall into a kind of stupor and lose all ability to understand the person". The notion of human development in general was totally foreign to him: the idea of a particular nation's development was something he refused to see beyond, Skabichevsky wrote. Some saw all this as affectation, but, as a biographer wrote, "dig deeper into the well of Pisemsky's most outrageous opinions and ideas and you'll discover bits and pieces of our ancient, now almost extinct culture, only fragments of which remain in our people". His humour and set of paradoxes had this special parfum de terre and his whole appearance made one think of "some kind of ancient Russian peasant man who'd come through the University, learnt something about the civilization but still retained in himself most of the characteristics he had before".[4] That he was regarded by some of the literary society of St. Petersburg as a "coarse peasant with few social graces and a provincial accent" didn't prevent him from achieving a solid career in literature, and by the end of the 1850s his reputation was at its peak.[10]

In Saint Petersburg Pisemsky made friends with Ivan Panaev, one of the editors of Sovremennik, and sent him his novel The Rich Fiancee. This work had success with the leaders of the so-called "natural school", who, according to Skabichevsky "were won by the pessimism of his work. Nobody could imagine at the time that this pessimism, based on no principals whatsoever, was merciless to everybody regardless of their belonging to any particular camps," he added.[4] Skabichevsky thought it was ridiculous the way the magazine which pretended to be the guiding light of the Russian intelligentsia had fallen for the Rich Fiancee where this very same intelligentsia (in the Shamilov character) was dragged through the mud. For Pisemsky, the Sovremennik alliance felt natural, for he was indifferent towards all political parties and the Slavophile movement appealed to him as little as the ideas of the Westernizers.[4] Annenkov wrote:

For all of his spiritual closeness to the common people, Pisemsky was not a Slavophile. He brought to Saint Petersburg his pride of being from Moscow... and he did love Moscow, but not for its sacred places, historical memories, or its world-famous name, but because in Moscow people never took 'organic passions' and manifestations of natural energy for 'looseness', or regarded a deviation from the police-driven order a crime. Equally important for him was the fact that thousands of raznochintsy and muzhiks were coming to the city from all over Russia, making it harder for the authorities to keep social hierarchies intact. Petersburg for Pisemsky looked like living proof of how a state-run order could bring about total lifelessness and what a well of outrageousness could be concealed in a seemingly honest and harmonious state of things.[9]

From 1853 onwards Pisemsky's life was completely changed. For five of six years he enjoyed enormous popularity, editors (according to Pyotr Boborykin) "pestered him", he was seen in fashionable salons where they knew him as a declamator and amateur actor. But his goal of achieving material wealth was still unrealized. He, according to Annenkov, "was still a literary proletarian who had to count money. His house was kept in perfect order by his wife but the simplicity of it showed that the economy was forced. To improve his situation he resumed working as a governmental clerk but soon stopped." Pisemsky started to write less. 1854 saw the publication of Fanfaron (in Sovremennik) and a patriotic drama The Veteran and the Newcomer (in Otechestvennye zapiski). In 1855, the latter published Carpenters' Cartel and Is She To Blame?. Both enjoyed success and in his 1855 end of the year review Nikolai Chernyshevsky picked the latter as his book of the year.[5] All of this still failed to translate into financial stability and the author openly criticized editors and publishers for exploiting their employees. He remained poor up until 1861 when the publisher and entrepreneur Stellovsky bought the rights to all of his works and paid him 8 thousand rubles.[4]

In 1856 Pisemsky, along with several other writers, was commissioned by the Russian Navy ministry to report on the ethnographical and commercial conditions of the Russian interior, his particular field of inquiry being Astrakhan and the region of the Caspian Sea. Critics later opined that the author hadn't been prepared for such a task and what little material he produced was "insufferably dull and filled not with his own impressions but with fragments of other works concerning the lands he visited" (Skabichevsky).[4] Four of his stories appeared in 1857 in Morskoi sbornik, and Biblioteka dlya chteniya published another three in 1857–1860. Later they were all issued as one book called Traveller's Sketches (Путевые очерки).[7] 1857 saw just one short story, "The Old Lady", which appeared in Biblioteka dlya Chtenia, but by this time he was working on his novel One Thousand Souls, his would-be masterpiece.[4]

Pisemsky's short stories of the late 1850s – early 1860s, which dealt primarily with rural life ("The Carpenters Cartel", "Leshy", "The Old Man") again demonstrated the author's utter pessimism and skepticism towards all the most fashionable ideas of his time. Neither idealizing the Russian peasantry, nor mourning its faults (both tendencies were common in Russian literature of the time), the author was critical of the Emancipation reform of 1861 which gave freedom to serfs. "Pisemsky thought that without strong moral authority in the lead, the Russians wouldn't be able to get rid of the vices they'd acquired through centuries of slavery and state oppression; that they'd easily adapt to the new institutions and that the worst side of their national character would flourish with still greater fervency. His own life experience led him to believe that the well-being would father more vice than the misery that had initially been at the root of it," Annenkov wrote.[9] According to Skabichevsky, in Pisemky's peasant stories, showing as they do a deep knowledge of common rural life, the protest against oppressionwas conspicuously absent which made them look as impassively objective as Émile Zola's novel La Terre. "Pisemsky's peasants, like those of Zola, are wild men driven by basic animal instincts; as all primitive men do, they combine high spiritual aspirations with beastly cruelty, often veering between these two extremes with ease," the biographer argued.[4]

Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya

Alexey Pisemsky in the 1860s

In the mid-1850s Pisemsky's relationship with Sovremennik started to deteriorate. On the one hand, he was uninterested in the magazine's social stance; on the other, Sovremennik, although greatly respecting his talent and always ready to published any strong piece of Pisemsky's work that came their way, were keeping their distance. One exception was Alexander Druzhinin, described as a man of "eclectic views, a snobbish anglomaniac and a follower of the 'art for art's sake' doctrine" who was on friendly terms with the 'soil-bound' Moskvityanin (the latter praising him as 'an honest knight' for this). To Sovremennik' (who hated even as great a writer as Ostrovsky simply for his belonging to the Moskovian 'patriotic' circle) this was unacceptable. After the Crimean War the new Sovremennik radicals' clique removed Druzhinin from the magazine staff and he moved to Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya. This upset Pisemsky, causing him to send his novel One Thousand Souls (the title refers to the number of serfs a landowner had to have in order to be considered wealthy) to Otechestvennye Zapiski where it was published in 1858. In his previous works the author had dealt with local aspects of provincial life; he now endeavoured upon creating a full and damning picture of it "highlighting atrocities which were common at the time." "The history of governor Kalinovich was no worse than Saltykov-Schedrin's Provincial Sketches and easily as important", Skabichevsky said. The figure of Kalinovich, a man full of contradictions and conflicts, caused much controversy.[4] Nikolay Dobrolyubov barely mentioned Pisemsky's masterpiece in Sovremennik, (alleging only that "the social side of the novel was artificially sewn to a made-up idea"). As editor of Biblioteka Dlya Chtenya, which was in decline, Druzhinin (now terminally ill with consumption) invited Pisemsky to be co-editor. From 1858–1864 the latter was the actual leader of the magazine.[4]

The 1859 play A Bitter Fate marked another peak moment in Pisemsky's career. It was based on a real life story which the author encountered when, as a Governor's special envoy in Kostroma, he took part in investigating a similar case. Until the emergence of Tolstoy's Power Of Darkness it remained the only drama about Russian peasant life staged in Russia. A Bitter Fate was awarded the Uvarov Prize, was staged at Alexandrinsky Theatre in 1863, and later gained the reputation of a classic of 19th century Russian drama. In 1861 his short novel An Old Man's Sin was published, arguably "one of his gentlest and most emotional works, full of sympathy for the lead character."[5][10] It was during these years that Pisemsky's literary career reached its height; he was the star of literary salons, and was regarded as a first class novelist and dramatist.[4] Even as late as 1864 Dostoyevsky, in one of his letters, referred to "the colossal name that is Pisemsky".[11]

Nikita Bezrylov scandal

In the mid-1850s Pisemsky was widely praised as one of the leading authors of the time, alongside Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Then came his dramatic fall from grace, for which there were several reasons. One was that, as Skabichevsky noted, Pisemsky had never repudiated his 'troglodyte' mindset of a 'provincial obscurantist'; exotic in the early 1850s, it became scandalous at the end of the decade. Another had to do with the fact that people he regarded as "crooks, whores and demagogues" had suddenly reinvented themselves as "progressives". Gradually Biblioteka Dlya Chtenya, the journal he was now leading, came into a direct opposition with Sovremennik. First, as P. D. Boborykin remembered, this opposition was of a moderate character, "at home, in his cabinet, Pisemsky spoke about this with sorrow and regret, rather than aggression". Later biographers conceded that there had been some logic to his chagrin. "People who came to herald such radical principles, in his eyes, should have been impeccable in every respect, which wasn't the case", Skabichevsky remarked.[4]

Following the common trend, Biblioteka started its own comedy section for humorous sketches and feuilletons, and in 1861 Pisemsky debuted there – first as "State councillor Salatushka", then as Nikita Bezrylov. The latter's first feuilleton, published in the December issue and making fun of liberal trends and views, made quite a stir. In May 1862 Iskra magazine came up with a scathing retort, calling the unknown author 'dumb and ignorant', 'having by nature a very limited mind' and accusing the editor of Biblioteka of providing space for 'reactionaries'. Pisemsky, in a rather reserved way, blamed Iskra for trying to "soil his honest name", but then Nikita Bezrylov came up with a reply of his own which was quite a match for the Iskra article in terms of outright rudeness. Iskra editors Viktor Kurochkin and N. A. Stepanov went so far as to challenge Pisemsky to a duel, but the latter refused. The Russky mir newspaper defended Pisemsky and published a letter of protest, signed by 30 authors. This, in its own turn, provoked Sovremennik to come up with a letter denouncing Pisemsky and signed, among others, by its leaders Nikolay Nekrasov, Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Ivan Panaev.[4]

Move to Moscow

The scandal had a devastating effect upon Pisemsky. Annenkov wrote, "he has fallen into a state of total apathy, as he used to do in difficult times". Pisemsky retired from his position at Biblioteka Dlya Chtenya, severed all ties with literary Saint Petersburg and at the end of 1862 moved to Moscow, where he spent the rest of his life. His next novel Troubled Seas provided a comprehensive reply to his enemies.[10] Of this book's background P. D. Boborykin wrote: "A journey abroad, to the London exhibition, meeting Russian émigrés there, and hearing many curious stories and anecdotes concerning the propagandists of these times confirmed Pisemsky in his decision to paint a broader picture of Russian society, and I don't doubt the sincerity with which he embarked upon this task."[4] Indeed, in April 1862 Pisemsky went abroad and in June visited Alexander Herzen in London so as to explain his position towards the revolutionary democratic press. He failed to get any support, though.[7]

Pisemsky worked in a hectic manner, devoting the whole of 1862 to Troubled Seas. The first two parts of it, Boborykin opined, might as well have been published by Sovremennik; in fact, the latter's envoys visited Pisemsky, with this in mind. "These two parts I've heard recited by the author himself and by them nobody could have guessed that the novel would turn out to be so unpleasant for the younger generation," Boborykin wrote. Skabichevsky doubted the chronology, though, reminding that in the end of 1862 Pisemsky was already in Moscow. According to his theory, the novel's first two parts might have been ready by late 1861 when, despite strained relations between the journal and the author the latter still wasn't known as 'an irreconcilable reactionary', the label that given to him in early 1862. The second part, written after the break, was extraordinarily vicious in tone. In general, the novel showed Russian society in the most miserable light, as a "sea of grief", harbouring beneath the surface "vile monsters and anemic fishes amongst stinking sea-weed." The novel, where the ugliest characters turned out to be political radicals, naturally received negative reviews, not only in the democtatic press (M. A. Antonovich in Sovremennik, and Zaitseva in Russkoye Slovo) but in centrist magazines like Otechestvennye Zapiski which described Troubled Seas as a rude caricature of the new generation.[4]

Later life

After moving to Moscow, Pisemsky joined The Russian Messenger as the head of the literary department. In 1866, on the recommendation of Interior minister Pyotr Valuyev, he became a local government councilor. Pisemsky started to prosper, having gained the financial independence he'd always wanted. He was highly paid for his writing: each novel brought him 10 to 12 thousand rubles. Being a thrifty man, Pisemsky was soon able build his fortune enough to enable him to leave work both at the magazine and the government office. In the late 1860s he bought a small piece of land on Borisoglebsky Lane in Moscow and built himself a house there.[4] All seemed well, but only on the face of it. Troubled Seas (1863) and Russian Liars (1864) were his last strong works. Then came the political drama The Warriors and Those Who Wait (1864) and the dramatic dilogy Old Birds (1864), and Birds of the Latest Gathering (1865), followed by the tragedy Men Above the Law, as well as two historical plays, full of melodramatic turns and naturalistic elements, Lieutenant Gladkov and Miloslavskys and Naryshkins (both 1867).[7]

In 1869 Zarya published his semi-autobiographical novel People of the Forties. The main character Vikhrov (who the author associated himself with) was shown struggling with all kinds of evil both as a state official and as a literary man. Critics, though, found this central figure wanting, preferring the secondary figures as more live and vivid.[7] In 1871 Beseda published his novel In the Vortex. All these works had one common leitmotif: seemingly attractive as they were, the new 'lofty ideals' had nothing in common with Russian practical life and were therefore worthless.[7] According to Skabichevsky, all the post-1864 works of Pisemsky were much weaker than everything he'd written before, demonstrating "the decline of a talent so dramatic it was unprecedented in Russian literature".[4]

Then followed a series of pamphlet-type dramas (Baal, The Enlightened Times, and The Financial Genius) in which Pisemsky took it upon himself to fight the "blight of the time", all manner of financial misdoings. In a letter he wrote:

In earlier years I exposed stupidity, prejudices and ignorance, ridiculed childish romanticism and empty rhetoric, fought serfdom and denounced abuses of power, documented the emergence of the first flowers of our nihilism, which has now had their fruits, and finally have taken on human kind's worst enemy, Baal, the golden calf of worship... I've also brought light to things for everybody to see: the wrong-doings of entrepreneurs and purveyors are colossal, all trade [in Russia] is based upon the most vile deceit, theft in banks is business as usual and behind all this scum, like angels, shine our soldiers and officers – but enough of it, it just cannot be expressed, all those things that've been boiling in my soul which now feels very old indeed.[4]

One of his comedies, Saps,[12] was so outright in its critique of higher spheres that the censors found it advisable to cut it out of Grazhdanin magazine where it was published in 1873.[5] Pisemsky's comedies were staged, but their success was short-lived, for it had to do mostly with the sensationalist aspect of each show where the public could recognize in certain characters real life officials and financiers. Artistically they were flawed, and even The Russian Messenger, which traditionally had supported the author, refused to publish The Financial Genius, much to the dismay of Pisemsky who, in a letter to Annenkov, complained that "an enemy party" had been formed by some new members of the magazine and was blocking publication of his works. After the production of The Financial Genius flopped, Pisemsky returned to the form of the novel and in his last 4 years produced two of them: Philistine, and Masons, the later being notable for its picturesque historical background created with the help of Vladimir Solovyov.[5] Skabichevsky described both as "anemic and dull"; Ivan Turgenev, who made great efforts to cheer Pisemsky up, still noted a streak of "tiredness" in the author's latest prose. "You were absolutely right: I am really tired of writing, and even more – of living. Of course old age is no fun for anybody, but for me it's especially bad and full of dark torment I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy," Pisemsky wrote back in a letter.[4]

On the face of it the writer seemed perfectly happy and well-off, but underneath there was darkness and misery. Losing popularity was one of the reasons. He scolded his critics, calling them "vipers", but was aware that his golden days were over. Vasily Avseenko, describing Pisemsky's visit to Saint Petersburg in 1869 after the publication of People of the Forties, recalled how old and tired he looked. "I am tired indeed... it isn't a joke: to spawn 800 characters and all of them such scum!", the latter replied. "I am beginning to feel like a victim of my own spleen", Pisemsky confessed in an August 1875 letter to Annenkov. "I am all right physically, but cannot say the same of my mental and moral state; hypochondria torments me. I am unable to write and any mental effort makes me feel sick. Thank God the religious feeling, which is now blossoming in me, gives some respite to my suffering soul," Pisemsky wrote to Turgenev in the early 1870s.[4]

In these difficult times the one person who continuously provided moral support to Pisemsky was Ivan Turgenev. In 1869 he informed Pisemsky that his One Thousand Souls had been translated into German and enjoyed "great success in Berlin". "So now the time has come for you to step outside the borders of your motherland and for Aleksey Pisemsky to become a European name", Turgenev wrote on October 9, 1869. "The best Berlin critic, Frenzel, in National Zeitung devoted a whole article to you where he calls your novel 'a rare phenomenon', and I tell you, now you are well known in Germany", wrote Turgenev in another letter, enclosing clips from other papers, too. "The success of One Thousand Souls encourages [the translator] to start upon the novel Troubled Seas and I am so happy both for you and for Russian literature in general. There is, apparently, something in us if the Germans who otherwise mistrust and dislike us, translate our work. Critical reviews of One Thousand Souls here in Germany are most favourable, your characters are being compared to those of Dickens, Thackeray, etc, etc", he continued. Julian Schmidt in Zeitgenossensche Bilder wrote a large article on him, one of a series devoted to first class European authors, and for Pisemsky this was another cause to celebrate. Following Turgenev's advice, in 1875 he visited Schmidt to thank him, but, according to Skabichevsky, "the conversation was more of a pantomime" and later Pisemsky bitterly complained to Turgenev about the fact that he knew not a single European language.[4]

Another joyful event of these final years of Pisemsky's life was the commemoration on January 19, 1875, of the 25th anniversary of his literary career. One of the speakers, I. A. Yuryev, said:

Among the brightest of our writers who have played a great role in the development of our national consciousness, A. F. Pisemsky stands on his own. His works, and his dramas in particular, reflected the spirit of our ailing times, the symptoms of which make every honest heart ache. On the one hand, there's this horrid disease that's taken over our society: greed and cupidity, the worship of material wealth, on the other, the monstrous decline of moral values in our society, the tendency to reject the most sacred foundations of human existence, looseness in relationships, both private and social. Baal and Saps are the works that document the advent of this Egyptian leprosy most eloquently... It is true that Pisemsky tends to show only anomalies, depicting the most sick and outrageous things. From this, though, it doesn't follow that he's got no ideals. Its just that the brighter the writer's ideal shines, the more ugly all deviations from it seem to him, the more ardently he comes to attack them. Only the bright light of a true idealist can reveal life's monstrosities with such intensity.[4]

"My 25 years in literature have not been easy. While fully aware of how weak and inadequate my efforts have been, I still feel like I've every reason to continue: I never came under somebody else's flag, and my writing, good or bad, it's not for me to judge, contained only what I myself felt and thought. I remained true to my own understanding of things, never violating for any fleeting reason the modest talent nature gave me. One of my guiding lights has always been my desire to tell my country the truth about itself. Whether or not I succeeded, is not for me to tell," Pisemsky said in reply.[4]

The tombs of Aleksey Pisemsky and his wife at the Novodevichy Convent

In the late 1870s Pisemsky's beloved younger son Nikolai, a talented mathematician, committed suicide for reasons which were unexplained. This was a heavy blow for his father who sunk into a deep depression. In 1880 his second son Pavel, the Moscow University Law faculty docent, became fatally ill, and this finished Pisemsky off.[5] As Annenkov remembered, he "became bed-ridden, crushed by the weight of fits of pessimism and hypochondria which became more frequent after his family's catastrophe. His widow said later she never suspected that the end was near and thought the bout would pass, dissolving as it used to into physical weakness and melancholy. But this one proved to be the last for the tormented Pisemsky, who lost all willingness to resist."[4]

On January 21, 1881, Pisemsky died, only a week before the death of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Whereas the latter's funeral in Petersburg was turned into an event for the masses, Pisemsky's burial came and went unnoticed. Of well-known authors only old Alexander Ostrovsky was present. In 1885 the Wolf Publishing House issued an edition of the Complete Pisemsky in 24 volumes.[5] Pisemsky's personal archive was destroyed by fire. His house was later demolished. Borisoglebsky Lane, where he spent his last years, was renamed Pisemsky Street in Soviet times.[8]

Private life

Pisemsky's first romantic affairs, according to his autobiography, concerned various cousins. After the University, he developed an interest in what he termed "George Sandean free love" but soon became disillusioned and decided to marry, "selecting for this purpose a girl not of a coquettish type, coming from a good, even if not wealthy family", namely Yekaterina Pavlovna Svinyina, daughter of Pavel Svinyin, the founder of Otechestvennye Zapiski magazine. They married on October 11, 1848. "My wife is portrayed partially in Troubled Seas, as Evpraxia, who's also nicknamed Ledeshka (Piece of Ice)," he wrote. This was a practical marriage without any romantic passion involved, yet an extremely fortunate one for Pisemsky, for, according to many people who knew her, Svinyina was a woman of rare virtues. "This exceptional woman proved able to calm down his sick hypochondria, and free him not only from all the domestic obligations involved in bringing up children, but also from her own meddling into his private affairs, which were full of whims and rush impulses. Besides, she re-wrote by her own hand no less than two thirds of his original manuscripts which invariably looked like crooked, indecipherable scribblings furnished with ink-blots," wrote Pavel Annenkov.[4]

Biographer Semyon Vengerov quoted a source who knew Pisemsky closely as having called Yekaterina Pavlovna "a perfect literary wife who took very close to her heart all the literary anxieties and troubles of her husband, all the jigsaws of his creative career, cherishing his talent and doing whatever was possible to keep him in conditions favourable to the development of his talent. To all this was added an extraordinary leniency, of which she had to have a great deal of, to put up with Aleksey, who occasionally demonstrated qualities not congenial with being a family man."[4] Turgenev, in one of his letters, imploring Pisemsky to get rid of this spleen of his, wrote: "I think I've told you this once, but I might as well repeat it. Do not forget that in the lottery of life you've won a major prize: you have an excellent wife and nice children..."[4]

Personality

According to Lev Anninsky, Pisemsky's personal mythology "revolved around one word: fear." Biographers reproduced numerous anecdotes about him being scared of sailing and other things, and how he was often 'stuck on the front porch of his house, uncertain whether he should enter: thinking that robbers were there, or somebody had died, or a fire had started'. Quite striking were his extraordinary collection of phobias and fears, along with general hypochondria."[8] In an 1880 letter to photographer Konstantin Shapiro who had recently published his gallery of Russian writers he confessed: "My portrait repeats the one flaw which all of my photographic portraits have, my not knowing how to pose. In all of my photographs my eyes come out goggled and frightened and even somewhat mad, maybe because as they put me facing the camera obscura, I do experience – if not fear, then strong anxiety."[4]

People who knew Pisemsky personally remembered him warmly, as a man whose weakenesses were greatly outweighed by virtues, of which a keen sense of justice, good humour, honesty, and modesty were the most obvious.[5] According to Gornfeld, "His whole character, from the inability to understand foreign cultures to ingenuousness, humour, keenness of remarks and common sense – was that of a simple, if very clever, Russian muzhik. His main personal feature became a major literary asset: truthfulness, sincerity, total lack of the faults of pre-Gogol literature, like over-intensity and eagerness to say something that was beyond the author's understanding", he said in his essay on Gogol.[5] Annnekov wrote of Pisemsky:

He was an extraordinary artist and at the same time an ordinary man – in the noblest sense of this word... In our age of making huge fortunes and big reputations he remained indifferent to anything that might have incited vanity or pride... Any kind of jealousy was totally foreign to him, as well as any drive to make himself publicly noticeable, being a candidate for favorable public attention. He carried his burden of talent, inventiveness, his sharp eye, very modestly throughout his life, never pretending it was a vault of extraordinary revelations and being totally content with what sober and cool critics were saying about it... Despite the sharpness with which he expressed himself and his imagery, Pisemsky was the most good-natured person of his time. And there was another distinctive quality in him. The worst catastrophy for him was injustice, of which he considered not the suffering but the guilty side to be the major victim.[9]

Legacy

Contemporary critics differed greatly in trying to classify Pisemsky's prose or assess his position in Russian literature. In retrospect, this position altered dramatically with the times and, as critic and biographer Lev Anninsky noted, while Melnikov-Pechersky or Nikolai Leskov have always been far from the literary mainstream, Pisemsky spent some time as a 'first rank' author and was praised as an 'heir to Gogol' in the course of the 1850s, then dropped from the elite to slide into almost total oblivion which lasted for decades.[8] According to Anninsky, "more daring critics drew a parallel with Gogol... whose final years sort of pre-dated the future drama of Pisemsky: breaking away from the 'progressive Russia', the 'betrayal' and the ostracism that followed. But Russia's forgiven Gogol everything: the pose of an angry prophet, the second volume of Dead Souls, those 'reactionary' passages from The Chosen Fragments of Correspondence with Friends. As for Pisemsky, Russia failed to forgive him a single thing," the critic argued.[8]

Having entered the Russian literary scene when it was dominated by the Natural School, Pisemsky has been regarded as arguably its most notable proponent. This wasn't obvious to many of his contemporaries, though; both Pavel Annenkov and Alexander Druzhinin (critics of different camps) argued that Pisemsky's earlier works were not only foreign to the Natural School, but stood in direct opposition to it. Apollon Grigoriev (who in 1852 wrote: "The Muff is the... artistic antidote to the sickly rubbish the 'Natural School' authors produce") went even further ten years later, expounding the concept in Dostoevsky's journal Grazhdanin that Pisemsky with his "low-brow wholesomeness" was far more important to Russian literature than Goncharov (with his "affected nods to narrow-minded pragmatism"), Turgenev (who "surrendered to all false values") and even Leo Tolstoy (who had "made his way to artlessness in the most artful manner").[8]

In the 1850s, concentrating on the everyday life of the small-scale provincial Russian, Pisemsky recreated this world as totally devoid of romantic features. "He mercilessly destroyed the poetic aura of 'noblemen’s nests' that was created by Tolstoy and Turgenev," recreating the life of the community where all relations looked ugly and "real love was always losing to cool flirting or open deceit," biographer Viduetskaya wrote.[7] On the other hand, in "picturing the Russian muzhik, and being the master of reproducing the language of the lower classes, Pisemsky had no equals; after him a return to the type of peasant novel created by Grigorovich became unthinkable", critic A. Gornfeld argued.[5] As D.S.Mirsky put it in his 1926 History of Russian Literature, "Like others among the Russian realists, Pisemsky is gloomy rather than otherwise but again in a different way – his gloom is nothing like Turgenev's hopeless surrender to the mysterious forces of the universe, but a hearty and virile disgust at the vileness of the majority of mankind and at the futility in particular of the Russian educated classes."[13]

The inability of contemporary critics to sum up Pisemsky in a more or less congruous manner, according to Anninsky, might be explained by the latter's peculiarity, for, "simple and unpretentious as [the author] was, he defied categorization". The world of Pisemsky (for whom "artistic intuition was the instrument of logic") according to the critic was "rough and soft, unprepossessing and vulnerable", open to all manner of interpretations. "But critics come and go, while the soil remains, still rough and open and then it either dries out or feeds future generations". Pisemsky's 'soil', as Anninsky saw it, was doomed from the start: stronger authors (Tolstoy and Turgenev, in particular) entered the scene, created new, more interesting characters, re-worked this very same soil and made it their own.[8] According to Viduetskaya, Pisemsky's original driving force was negativism which had been played out by the early 1860s. Seeing as the peak of his post-reform legacy the cycle Russian Liars (1865), the critic considers Pisemsky the novelist a marginal force in Russian literature, admitting, though, that writers like Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak and Alexander Sheller were among his followers. But as a short story writer he might be considered as a predecessor to such masters of the form as Leskov and Chekhov, Viduetskaya suggested.[7] According to D. S. Mirsky,

Pisemsky, who kept himself uncontaminated by idealism, was in his own time regarded as much more characteristically Russian than his more cultured contemporaries. And this is true, Pisemsky was in much closer touch with Russian life, in particular, with the life of the uneducated middle and lower classes than were the more genteel novelists. He was, together with Ostrovsky and before Leskov, the first to open that wonderful gallery of Russian characters of non-noble birth... Pisemsky's great narrative gift and exceptionally strong grip on reality make him one of the best Russian novelists and if this is not sufficiently realized, it is because of his regrettable lack of culture. It was lack of culture that made Pisemsky too weak to hold out against the ravages of the age and permitted him to degenerate so sadly in his later work.[13]

Works

Fiction

Drama

English translations

Notes

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 Banham (1998, 861).
  2. D.S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1900 (Northwestern University Press, 1999: ISBN 0-8101-1679-0), p. 211.
  3. 3.0 3.1 Plekhanov, Sergey (1986). "Pisemsky" (in Russian). Young Guard Magazine, Moscow, 1986. Retrieved 2011-06-01.
  4. 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16 4.17 4.18 4.19 4.20 4.21 4.22 4.23 4.24 4.25 4.26 4.27 4.28 4.29 4.30 4.31 4.32 4.33 4.34 4.35 4.36 4.37 4.38 4.39 4.40 4.41 4.42 4.43 4.44 4.45 4.46 4.47 4.48 Skabichevsky, Alexander (1897). "Alex Pisemsky: His Life and Literary Career" (in Russian). Florenty Pavlenkov Biographical Library. Retrieved 2011-06-01.
  5. 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 Gornfeld, Arkady (1911). "A. F. Pisemsky" (in Russian). Russian Biographical Dictionary. Retrieved 2011-06-01.
  6. 6.0 6.1 Martinov. "Pisemsky". feb-web.ru. Retrieved 2011-06-01.
  7. 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 I. P. Viduetskaya (1990). "A. F. Pisemsky, from Russian Writers: Bibliographical Reference, Vol 2. М-Ya, ed. P. A. Nikolaieva" (in Russian). Enlightenment, Moscow. Retrieved 2011-06-01.
  8. 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 Anninsky, Lev (1988). "Broken: A Tale of Aleksey Pisemsky" (in Russian). Kniga, Moscow. Retrieved 2011-06-01.
  9. 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 Annenkov, Pavel. "The Artist and the Common Man" (in Russian). az.lib.ru. Retrieved 2011-06-01.
  10. 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Terras, Victor (1990). Handbook of Russian Literature. Yale University Press. pp. 340–341. ISBN 0-300-04868-8. Retrieved 2012-04-29.
  11. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Compete Collected Works, Letters: V 30 T.- L., 1985.- Т.28,-Ch. II.- С. 102.
  12. Pisemsky, Aleksey (1873). "Undermining" (in Russian). Retrieved 2011-06-01.
  13. 13.0 13.1 D.S.Mirsky (1926). A History of Russian literature from its beginnings to 1900. Retrieved 2011-06-01.

Sources