45 Facts About Aleksey Pisemsky

Aleksey Pisemsky wrote plays, including A Bitter Fate, which depicts the dark side of the Russian peasantry.

Aleksey Pisemsky was born at his father's Ramenye estate in the Chukhloma province of Kostroma.

Aleksey Pisemsky's parents were retired colonel Feofilakt Gavrilovich Pisemsky and his wife Yevdokiya Shipova.

One of my ancestors, a diak named Aleksey 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.

Aleksey Pisemsky remained the only child in the family, four infants dying before his birth and five after.

Aleksey 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.

Aleksey Pisemsky remembered his mother a nervous, dreamy, astute, eloquent and rather sociable woman.

Aleksey 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.

Aleksey Pisemsky learned reading, writing, arithmetics, Russian and Latin from them.

Aleksey Pisemsky found in himself a natural predisposition to mathematics, logic and aesthetics.

Aleksey Pisemsky sent The Iron Ring to several Saint Petersburg journals and met with all-round rejection.

In 1840, upon graduation from the gymnasium, Aleksey 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.

Aleksey Pisemsky later regarded his choice of faculty as a very fortunate one, even while admitting he drew little practical value out of university lectures.

Equally brilliant was Aleksey Pisemsky's rendering of his collection of anecdotes concerning his earlier life experiences.

Aleksey Pisemsky had loads of such anecdotes and each contained a more or less complete character type.

Aleksey Pisemsky finally quit the civil service in 1872.

Aleksey Pisemsky 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.

The old school followers led by the brothers Aksakov, Ivan Kireyevsky and Aleksey Pisemsky Khomyakov, grouped first around Moskovsky Sbornik, then Russkaya Beseda.

In 1850 Moskvityanin invited Aleksey Pisemsky to join in and the latter promptly sent Ostrovsky his second novel The Simpleton he'd been working on throughout 1848.

Now raised to the ranks of "the best writers of our times", Aleksey Pisemsky found his works compared to those of Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov and Alexander Ostrovsky.

The laughter that Aleksey Pisemsky's stories provoked was different from that of Gogol, although, as it follows from our author's autobiography, his initial efforts reflected much of Gogol and his work.

Aleksey Pisemsky's laughter stripped its subject down to the vulgar core, and to expect anything like "hidden tears" in it would be impossible.

Aleksey Pisemsky's was the joviality of, as it were, physiological nature, which is extremely rare with modern writers and more typical to the ancient Roman comedy, Middle Age farce or our common man's re-telling of some low-brow joke.

In 1854 Aleksey Pisemsky decided to leave his post as a local government assessor in Kostroma and moved to Saint Petersburg where he made quite an impression upon the literary community with his provincial originality, but some ideas which the Russian capital's cultural elite found shocking.

Aleksey Pisemsky had no time for the idea of women's emancipation and confessed to experiencing a "kind of organic revolt" towards all foreigners which he couldn't overcome by any means.

In Saint Petersburg Aleksey Pisemsky made friends with Ivan Panaev, one of the editors of Sovremennik, and sent him his novel The Rich Fiance, written in 1851 and satirizing characters like Rudin and Pechorin.

Petersburg for Aleksey Pisemsky looked like living proof of how a state-run order could bring about total lifelessness and what a well of outrageousness could be concealed in a seemingly honest and harmonious state of things.

Aleksey Pisemsky's house was kept in perfect order by his wife but the simplicity of it showed that the economy was forced.

Aleksey Pisemsky remained relatively poor up until 1861 when the publisher and entrepreneur Fyodor Stellovsky bought the rights to all of his works for 8 thousand rubles.

Upset by this, Aleksey Pisemsky sent his novel One Thousand Souls to Otechestvennye Zapiski where it was published in 1858.

One was that, as Skabichevsky noted, Aleksey 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.

The Russky Mir newspaper defended Aleksey Pisemsky and published a letter of protest, signed by 30 authors.

This, in its own turn, provoked Sovremennik to come up with a letter denouncing Aleksey Pisemsky and signed, among others, by its leaders Nikolay Nekrasov, Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Ivan Panaev.

Aleksey Pisemsky worked in a hectic manner, devoting the whole of 1862 to Troubled Seas.

Skabichevsky doubted the chronology, though, reminding that in the end of 1862 Aleksey Pisemsky was already in Moscow.

Aleksey Pisemsky scolded his critics, calling them "vipers", but was aware that his golden days were over.

Vasily Avseenko, describing Aleksey Pisemsky's visit to Saint Petersburg in 1869 after the publication of People of the Forties, recalled how old and tired he looked.

Aleksey Pisemsky's widow said later she never suspected that the end was near and thought the bout would pass, dissolving as it used to into physical weakness and melancholy.

On 21 January 1881 Aleksey Pisemsky died, only a week before the death of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Whereas the latter's funeral in Saint Petersburg became a grandiose event, Aleksey Pisemsky's burial went unnoticed.

People who knew Aleksey Pisemsky personally remembered him warmly, as a man whose weaknesses were outweighed by virtues, of which a keen sense of justice, good humour, honesty, and modesty were the most obvious.

In retrospect, this position altered dramatically with the times and, as critic and biographer Lev Anninsky noted, while Melnikov-Pechersky or Nikolai Leskov have always been far from the literary mainstream, Aleksey Pisemsky spent some time as a 'first rank' author and was praised as an 'heir to Gogol' in the course of the 1850s, then dropped from the elite to slide into almost total oblivion which lasted for decades.

The ground that Aleksey Pisemsky stood on, as Anninsky saw it, was doomed from the start: stronger authors entered the scene, created new, more interesting characters, re-worked this soil and made it their own.

Aleksey Pisemsky, who kept himself uncontaminated by idealism, was in his own time regarded as much more characteristically Russian than his more cultured contemporaries.

Aleksey Pisemsky was, together with Ostrovsky and before Leskov, the first to open that wonderful gallery of Russian characters of non-noble birth.