Aleksey Feofilaktovich Pisemsky () () 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. "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), ' (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. 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:

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.

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.

His first novella Is She to Blame? Pisemsky wrote while still a university student. He gave it to professor Stepan Shevyryov and the latter, being an 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 advice. 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 Syn Otechestva magazine. 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.

Pisemsky's debut play The Hypochondriac (1852) was followed by the Sketches of Peasant life, a three-part short stories cycle. 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. 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 the "progressives". Gradually Biblioteka Dlya Chtenya, the journal he was now leading, came into a direct opposition with Sovremennik. First, as Pyotr 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. was so outright in its critique of higher spheres it was banned by censors. Others were staged, but enjoyed only short-lived success, having to do mostly with the sensationalist aspect, for 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. After the stage production of the play flopped, Pisemsky returned to the form of the novel and in his last 4 years produced two of them: The Philistines, and Masons, the later being notable for its picturesque historical background created with the help of Vladimir Solovyov.

Selected works

Novels and novellas

  • The Simpleton (Тюфяк, 1850)
  • The Comic Actor (Комик, 1851)
  • The Rich Fiancé (Богатый жених, 1854)
  • The Old Proprietress (Старая барыня, 1857)
  • Boyarschina (Боярщина, 1858)
  • One Thousand Souls (Тысяча душ, 1858)
  • An Old Man's Sin (Старческий грех, 1861)
  • Troubled Seas (Взбаламученнео море, 1863)
  • Men of the Forties (Люди сороковых годов, 1869)
  • In the Whirlpool (В водовороте, 1871)
  • The Philistines (Мещане, 1877)
  • Masons (Масоны, 1880)

Plays

  • The Hypochondriac (Ипохондрик, 1852)
  • The Allotment (Раздел, 1852)
  • A Bitter Fate (Горькая судьбина, 1859)
  • Lieutenant Gladkov (Поручик Гладков, 1864)
  • The Warriors and Those Who Wait (Бойцы и выжидатели, 1867)
  • Miloslavsky and the Naryshkins (Милославский и Нарышкины, 1967)
  • Men Above the Law (Самоуправцы, 1867)
  • Predators (Хищники, 1872)
  • Baal (Ваал, 1873)
  • The Enlightened Times (Просвещённое время, 1875)
  • The Financial Genius (Финансовый гений, 1876)

English translations

  • The Old Proprietress, (story), from Anthology of Russian Literature, Vol 2, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1903.
  • One Thousand Souls, (novel), Grove Press, NY, 1959 (translated by Ivy Litvinov).
  • A Bitter Fate, (play), from Masterpieces of the Russian Drama, Vol 1, Dover Publications, NY, 1961.
  • Nina, The Comic Actor, and An Old Man's Sin, (short novels), Ardis Publishers, 1988.
  • The Simpleton, (novel), Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow.

Notes

References

Sources

  • Banham, Martin, ed. 1998. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. .
  • Introduction to Nina, The Comic Actor, and An Old Man's Sin, Maya Jenkins, Ardis Publishers, 1988.
  • McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama, Volume 1, Stanley Hochman, McGraw-Hill, 1984.