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.Banham (1998, 861). "Pisemsky's great narrative gift and exceptionally strong grip on reality make him one of the best Russian novelists" according to D.S. Mirsky.D.S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1900 (Northwestern University Press, 1999: ), p. 211.
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.
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. 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. 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.
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 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".
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. He sent The Iron Ring (a novel telling of his first romantic passion) to several Saint Petersburg journals and met with all-round rejection. Several months later, already a university student, he gave the novel to Stepan Shevyryov. The professor's reaction was negative and he made a point to discourage the young man from writing about things he knew nothing about.
In 1840, upon graduation from the gymnasium, Pisemsky joined the Faculty of Mathematics at Moscow State University, having overcome resistance from his father who insisted upon his son enrolling in the Demidov Lyceum, for 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. Attending assorted lectures by professors from other faculties, he became acquainted with Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Corneille, Racine, Rousseau, Voltaire, Hugo and George Sand and started 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, as Pisemsky's friend Boris Almazov remembered, 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. According to Almazov, Pisemsky had a considerable dramatic talent, and it was Katenin who helped him to develop it.
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 Theatre star. Some of those who saw Pisemsky's performance were of the opinion that he presented this character better than Schepkin did," wrote Almazov. 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.
Pavel Annenkov later 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."
State official career
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.
Later Boris Almazov made an important observation in a commemorative 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."
Biographer and critic Alexander Skabichevsky found some 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." Both writers, according to the biographer, "have lost all motivation not just for the idealization of Russian life, but also of highlighting its lighter, positive sides". Yet, 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 had gotten at the university, seeing them as idealistic with no roots in Russian reality, Skabichevsky noted. The biographer wrote:
Literary career