21 Facts About Dmitry Grigorovich

Dmitry Grigorovich was born in Simbirsk to a family of the landed gentry.

Dmitry Grigorovich's Russian father was a retired hussar officer, his French mother, Cydonia de Varmont, was a daughter of a royalist who perished on guillotine in the times of the Reign of Terror.

In 1832 Dmitry Grigorovich entered a German gymnasium, then was moved to the French Monighetty boarding school in Moscow.

In 1840 Dmitry Grigorovich quit the institute after the severe punishment he'd received for failing to formally greet the Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, as the latter was passing by.

Dmitry Grigorovich joined the Imperial Academy of Arts where Taras Shevchenko was his close friend.

Greatly impressed, Dmitry Grigorovich took the manuscript to Nekrasov, who promptly published it.

Dmitry Grigorovich's epic, sprawling novel Cart-Tracks with its gallery of social parasites came under criticism for being overblown and derivative, Gogol's Dead Souls considered the obvious point of reference.

Several years later, as Druzhinin and his fellow proponents of the 'arts for arts' sake' doctrine instigated a dispute along the lines of "free-thinking Pushkin versus overcritical Gogol," Dmitry Grigorovich backed the Chernyshevsky-led Sovremennik group, despite being friends with Druzhinin.

In 1858, Dmitry Grigorovich accepted the Russian Navy Ministry's invitation to make a round-Europe voyage on warship Retvizan and later described it in The Ship Retvizan.

Back in Russia, Dmitry Grigorovich started his own Popular Readings project but this 10-book series failed to make an impact.

Dmitry Grigorovich was planning to comment on the demolition of serfdom in Two Generals, but this novel, recounting the story of two generations of landowners, remained unfinished.

In 1862 Dmitry Grigorovich travelled to London to study the English fine arts at the 1862 International Exhibition, as well as several other galleries.

Dmitry Grigorovich especially liked the works of William Holman Hunt.

In 1864 Dmitry Grigorovich was elected the Secretary of the Russian Society for Encouraging Artists and held this post for twenty years, doing much to improve the art education throughout the country.

At the Society's School of Drawing Dmitry Grigorovich gathered the best teachers from all over Russia, and made sure exhibitions and contests were being held regularly, with winners receiving grants from the Society.

Dmitry Grigorovich was the first to discover and support the soon-to-become famous painters Fyodor Vasilyev and Ilya Repin.

Also in 1883 Dmitry Grigorovich translated Prosper Merimee's "Le Vase Etrusque" into Russian, his version of it regarded in retrospect as unsurpassed.

In 1886, Dmitry Grigorovich famously encouraged young Anton Chekhov, telling him in a letter that he had a gift and should approach literature with more seriousness.

Dmitry Vasilyevich Grigorovich died in Saint Petersburg on January 3,1900.

Dmitry Grigorovich is generally regarded as the first writer to have shown the real life of the Russian rural community in its full detail, following the tradition of the Natural School movement to which he in the 1840s belonged.

Some critics belonging to the Russian left made much of the fact that Dmitry Grigorovich allegedly 'hated' Chernyshevsky; others considered his works deficient, for being not radical enough.