Aleksey Pisemsky

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Aleksey Pisemsky : biography

23 March 1821 – 2 February 1881

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. 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. Annenkov wrote: 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. 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.

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). 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). 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.

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. 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.