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Aleksey Pisemsky
Aleksey Feofilaktovich Pisemsky (Russian: Алексе́й Феофила́ктович Пи́семский) (23 March [O.S. 11 March] 1821 – 2 February [O.S. 21 January] 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.[need quotation to verify] "Pisemsky's great narrative gift and exceptionally strong grip on reality make him one of the best Russian novelists" according to D.S. Mirsky.
Pisemsky's 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 (1859; 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.
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. In his autobiography, Pisemsky 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:
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 fourteen. 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.
Aleksey remained the only child in the family, four infants dying before his birth and five 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. Pisemsky remembered his father as a military service man in every sense of the word, strict and duty-bound, a man of honesty in terms of money, 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 remembered his mother a nervous, dreamy, astute, eloquent (even if not well educated) and rather sociable woman. "Except for those clever eyes of hers, she wasn't good-looking, and once, when I was a student, my father asked me: '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 later wrote. His mother's cousins were Yury Bartenev, one of the most prominent Russian Freemasons (colonel Marfin in the novel Masons) and Vsevolod Bartenev (Esper Ivanovich in People of the Forties), a Navy officer; both exerted considerable influence upon the boy.
Pisemsky spent the first ten years of his life in the small regional town of Vetluga where his father served as Mayor. 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. Fond of hunting and horseback riding, the boy received scant education: 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. 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 Hajji Baba... As for children's books, I couldn't stand them and, as far as I remember now, considering them very silly." Pisemsky wrote scornfully of his primary education and regretted failing to learn any languages besides Latin. He found in himself, however, a natural predisposition to mathematics, logic and aesthetics.
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 the short story "The Old Man" and the novel Men of the Forties. "I started well, was perceptive and hard-working, but gained most of my popularity as an amateur actor," he later remembered. Inspired by The Dnieper Mermaid (an opera by Ferdinand Kauer), performed by a wandering troupe of actors, Pisemsky, along with 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 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 prompted him to begin studying music and playing the piano, which the boy did, according to one of his friends, "with the expressiveness yet unheard of".
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Aleksey Pisemsky
Aleksey Feofilaktovich Pisemsky (Russian: Алексе́й Феофила́ктович Пи́семский) (23 March [O.S. 11 March] 1821 – 2 February [O.S. 21 January] 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.[need quotation to verify] "Pisemsky's great narrative gift and exceptionally strong grip on reality make him one of the best Russian novelists" according to D.S. Mirsky.
Pisemsky's 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 (1859; 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.
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. In his autobiography, Pisemsky 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:
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 fourteen. 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.
Aleksey remained the only child in the family, four infants dying before his birth and five 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. Pisemsky remembered his father as a military service man in every sense of the word, strict and duty-bound, a man of honesty in terms of money, 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 remembered his mother a nervous, dreamy, astute, eloquent (even if not well educated) and rather sociable woman. "Except for those clever eyes of hers, she wasn't good-looking, and once, when I was a student, my father asked me: '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 later wrote. His mother's cousins were Yury Bartenev, one of the most prominent Russian Freemasons (colonel Marfin in the novel Masons) and Vsevolod Bartenev (Esper Ivanovich in People of the Forties), a Navy officer; both exerted considerable influence upon the boy.
Pisemsky spent the first ten years of his life in the small regional town of Vetluga where his father served as Mayor. 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. Fond of hunting and horseback riding, the boy received scant education: 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. 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 Hajji Baba... As for children's books, I couldn't stand them and, as far as I remember now, considering them very silly." Pisemsky wrote scornfully of his primary education and regretted failing to learn any languages besides Latin. He found in himself, however, a natural predisposition to mathematics, logic and aesthetics.
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 the short story "The Old Man" and the novel Men of the Forties. "I started well, was perceptive and hard-working, but gained most of my popularity as an amateur actor," he later remembered. Inspired by The Dnieper Mermaid (an opera by Ferdinand Kauer), performed by a wandering troupe of actors, Pisemsky, along with 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 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 prompted him to begin studying music and playing the piano, which the boy did, according to one of his friends, "with the expressiveness yet unheard of".