Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (, ; 27 July 1853 – 25 December 1921) was a Russian writer, journalist and humanitarian of Ukrainian origin. His best-known work includes the short novel The Blind Musician (1886), as well as numerous short stories based upon his experience of exile in Siberia. Korolenko was a strong critic of the Tsarist regime and in his final years of the Bolsheviks.

Biography

Early life

Vladimir Korolenko was born in Zhitomir, Volhynian Governorate), Russian Empire (now in Ukraine). His Ukrainian Cossack father, Poltava-born Galaktion Afanasyevich Korolenko (1810–1868), was a district judge who, "amongst the people of his profession looked like a Don Quixote with his defiant honesty and refusal to take bribes", as his son later remembered. His mother Evelina Skórewicz (1833–1903) was of Polish origin. In his early childhood Korolenko "did not very well know to which nationality he belonged and learned to read Polish before he did Russian," according to D.S. Mirsky. It was only after the 1863 January Uprising that the family did have to 'choose' its nationality and decided to 'become' Russians. After the sudden death of her husband in Rovno in 1866, Evelina Iosifovna, suffering enormous hardships, somehow managed to raise her five children, three sons and two daughters, on a meagre income.

Education and first exile

Korolenko started his education in a Polish Rykhlinsky boarding school to continue it in the Zhitomir and later Rovno gymnasiums, graduating the latter with silver medal. Xavier was Korolenko's younger brother; he was 23 at the time, when he heard the news about his brother coming out of his exile he was reunited with Korolenko.

In August 1881, while in Perm, Korolenko and Xavier refused to swear allegiance to the new Russian Tsar Alexander III (the act that some political prisoners and exiles were demanded to perform, after the assassination of Alexander II) and was exiled again, this time much farther, to Yakutia. He spent the next three years in Amga, a small settlement 275 versts from Yakutsk, where he did manual work, but also studied local customs and history. His impressions from his life in exile provided Korolenko with rich material for his writings, which he started to systematize upon arriving at Nizhny Novgorod, where in 1885 he was finally allowed to settle in. comprised his first collection Sketches and Stories (Очерки и рассказы), which, featuring pieces from both the Ukrainian and Siberian cycles, came out in the late 1886. After visiting the Chicago exhibition during 1893 as a correspondent for Russkoye Bogatstvo, Korolenko wrote the novella "Bez yazyka" (Без языка, Without Language, 1895) telling the story of an uneducated Ukrainian peasant, struggling in America, unable to speak a word in English.

In 1896 Korolenko moved his family to Saint Petersburg. Suffering from some stress-induced psychological disorders, including insomnia, in September 1900 he returned to Poltava. There he experienced a bout of creativity and, having finished his Siberian short story cycle, published his third volume of Sketches and Stories in 1903.

In the autumn of 1905 he started working upon the extensive autobiography The History of my Contemporary (История моего современника), fashioned to some extent after Alexander Hertzen's My Past and Thoughts.

Activism and human rights

thumb|Korolenko in 1885

Throughout his writing career Korolenko advocated for human rights and against injustices and persecutions. Considering himself 'only a part-time-writer', as he put it, he became famous as a publicist who, never restricting himself to mere journalistic work, was continually and most effectively engaged in the practical issues he saw as demanding immediate public attention.

In 1891-1892, when famine struck several regions of Central Russia, he went to work on the ground, taking part in the relief missions, collecting donations, supervising the process of delivering and distributing food, opening free canteens (forty five, in all), all the while sending to Moskovskiye Vedomosti regular reports which would be later compiled in the book V golodny god (В голодный год, In the Year of Famine, 1893) in which he provided the full account of the horrors that he witnessed, as well as the political analysis of the reasons of the crisis.

In 1895-1896 he spent enormous amount of time supervising the court case of the group of the Udmurt peasants from Stary Multan village who were falsely accused of committing ritual murders. Writing continuously for numerous Russian papers (and in 1896 summarizing his experiences in "The Multan Affair", Мултанское дело) Korolenko made sure the whole country became aware of the trial, exposed the fabrications, himself performed as barrister in court and almost single-handedly brought about the acquittal, thus "practically saving the whole little nation from the horrible stain which would have remained for years should the guilty verdict have been passed," according to the biographer.

"The House No.13", his historic description of the Chișinău pogrom of 1903, was banned by the Russian censorship and appeared in print in 1905 for the first time. It was also published in English. Foreworded by Tolstoy, it was published abroad in Russian, Bulgarian, German, French and Italian languages.

Yulian Korolenko (born 16 February 1851, died 15 November 1904) in the 1870s worked as a proofreader in Saint Petersburg. As a narodnik circle's member, he was arrested in 1879 and spent short time in jail. Later in Moscow he joined the staff of Russkye Vedomiosti newspaper and contributed to its Moscow Chronicles sections. In his early life Yulian was interested in literature, wrote poetry and co-authored (with Vladimir) the translation of "L'Oiseau" by Jules Michelet, published in 1878 and signed, collectively, "Коr-о".

Sofia Korolenko (1886—1957) worked for several years as a school teacher in rural area, then in 1905 became her father's personal secretary and was one of co-editors of the 1914 A.F. Marks' edition of the Complete Korolenko. Following her father's death Sofia Vladimirovna initiated the foundation of the Korolenko Museum in Poltava, of which for many years she has been the director. Her Book on My Father (Книга об отце, 1966-1968, posthumously) is a biography taken up exactly where his own The History of My Contemporary left of, in 1885 when, having just returned from exile, he settled in Nizhny Novgorod.

Assessment and legacy

thumb|left|A later photograph of Korolenko; used for a postage stamp

D.S. Mirsky considered Korolenko to be "undeniably the most attractive representative of the idealist radicalism in Russian literature." "Should it not be for Chekhov, he would have been the first among the writers and poets of his time," the critic argued. The important part of Korolenko's artistic palette was his "wonderful humor... often intertwined with poetry," according to Mirsky. "Completely devoid of the intricacies that usually come with the satire, it is natural, unforceful and has this levity which is rarely met with Russian authors," the critic opined. For Mirsky, Korolenko's style and language, full of "emotional poeticism and Turgenevesque pictures of nature," was "typical for what in the 1880s-1890s was considered to be 'artistry' in Russian literature." For the Soviet biographer V.B. Katayev, Korolenko was "a realist continually gravitating towards the romantic side of life" who has "walked his life the hard way of a hero."

Writing in 1921, Anatoly Lunacharsky declared Korolenko "undoubtedly the biggest contemporary Russian writer" even if belonging wholly to the Russian historical and literary past, a "shining figure looming large between the liberal idealists and revolutionary narodniks." Like many others he too chose 'humanism' as the most striking feature of Korolenko's legacy and argued that "in all our literature, so marked with humanism there has never been a more vivid proponent of the latter." Seeing the whole Russian literature as divided into two distinct sections, the one that tended towards simplicity (Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy) and another that went for "the musical quality, for outward perfection (Pushkin, Turgenev)", Lunacharsky placed Korolenko firmly into the latter camp and praised him for having "...enriched the Russian literature with true gems, one of the best in the Russian canon." Mark Aldanov also considered him "the symbol of civil consciousness and lofty ideals in literature."

The Soviet biographer F. Kuleshov praised Korolenko as "the defender of the oppressed" and a "truth-seeker, ardent and riotous, who with the fervency of a true revolutionary fought the centuries-long traditions of lawlessness."

S. Poltavsky, calling his 1922 essay the "Quiet Hurricane", defined Korolenko as "the knight of the high image of Justice" who conducted his 'tournaments' with 'quiet humaine gentleness'. Semyon Vengerov called Korolenko "a humanist in the most straightforward sense of the word" whose sincerity was so overwhelming as to "win [people] over no matter which political camp they belonged." "The high position Korolenko occupies in our contemporary literature is in equal degree the result of his fine, both humane and elegant literary gift, and the fact that he was "the 'knight of quill' in the best sense of the word," Vengerov wrote in 1911. Lauding Korolenko for being "Russia's pre-1905 one-man constitution," and the one who "just could not pass by without responding to any serious wrong-doing or social injustice," the critic noted: "He meddled with lots of things and those who disliked that were tempted to liken him to Don Quixote, but valiance was not just one single virtue of our Russian knight, for he was also highly reasonable and never spared his fighting powers for naught." According to Kogan, there is hardly anything more powerful [in Russian journalism] than Korolenko's articles denouncing the political and religious violence of the old regime. "His works on the Beilis and the Multan affairs, the Pogroms of the Jews amounted to the journalistic heroism," the critic argued.

Selected works

  • Son Makara (1885) translated as Makar's Dream (1891);
  • Slepoi Muzykant (1886) translated as The Blind Musician (1896–1898);
  • V durnom obshchestve (1885) translated as In Bad Company (1916);
  • Les Shumit translated as The Murmuring Forest (1916);
  • Reka igraet (1892) The River Sparkles;
  • Za Ikonoi After the Icon
  • Bez Yazyka (1895) or Without Language;
  • Mgnovenie (1900) or Blink of an Eye;
  • Siberian Tales 1901;
  • Istoria moego sovremmenika or The History of My Contemporary an autobiography (1905–1921)
  • Тени (1890) or The Shades, translated by Thomas Seltzer, available through Project Gutenberg

Quotes

  • "Человек создан для счастья, как птица для полета, только счастье не всегда создано для него." (Human beings are to happiness like birds are to flight, but happiness is not always for them.) (Paradox)
  • "Насилие питается покорностью, как огонь соломой." (Violence feeds on submission like fire feeds on dry grass.) (Story about Flora, Agrippina and Menachem)
  • "Лучше даже злоупотребления свободой, чем ее отсутствие." (It is better to abuse freedom than to have none.)

Footnotes

  • Korolenko's articles and Call to the Russian People in regard to the Beilis Trial

References

  • Answers.com resources on Korolenko
  • Student Encyclopedia article
  • The 2-Hryvnia coin dedicated to Korolenko (National Bank of Ukraine)
  • Life of Korolenko by Rosa Luxemburg
  • Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko, 1853-1921 Published in Reference Guide to Russian Literature (1998)

;In Russian

  • Live Consciousness of the Russian People
  • Bio