31 Facts About Nikolai Uspensky

Nikolai Vasilyevich Uspensky was a Russian writer, and a cousin of fellow writer Gleb Uspensky.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Uspensky was born on 31 May, 1837, in Stupino, a small village in Tula Governorate, Russian Empire, to a local clergyman.

Nikolai Uspensky had seven siblings, brothers Ivan, Alexander and Mikhail, and sisters Anna, Maria, Elizaveta and Seraphima.

In 1848, Nikolai Uspensky joined the theological seminary in Tula where he was flogged on a daily basis.

The only person who took interest in Nikolai Uspensky's life was his uncle, Ivan Nikolai Uspensky, a wealthy Tula-based state official.

Nikolai Uspensky rolled like cheese in butter in his youth, I gnawed my crust.

Nikolai Uspensky spent most of his time in local traktirs, playing pool and getting drunk, and was described as a "haggard loafer going on a downward spiral," but it was in those days that he started writing.

In 1856, prior to graduation, Nikolai Uspensky left the seminary and moved to Saint Petersburg to enroll in the Medical Surgical Academy.

Nikolai Uspensky joined the St Petersburg University historical and philological faculty, but soon left it too.

Besides, the editor Nikolai Nekrasov asked the Saint Petersburg University rector Pletnyov to support Uspensky financially.

Nikolai Uspensky's stories, describing the poverty and the misery of the peasants, the lives of Russian clergymen, and raznochintsy intellectuals, attracted the attention of many prominent radicals.

In 1860 Nikolai Uspensky Dobrolyubov recommended several of his stories for the school reader compiled by Alexey Galakhov.

In January 1861, Nikolai Uspensky went abroad to travel through Italy and Switzerland, and spent some time in France, financed by Nekrasov who was waiting from him a big novel.

In Rome, Nikolai Uspensky met Vasily Botkin, an expert in antique culture, who tried to share his love for it with his companion.

Nikolai Uspensky's best known stories of the time, the anti-liberal "Country Apothecary" and "Village Theatre", targeted people posing as 'enlighteners' as vile and dangerous schemers.

Nikolai Uspensky opposed the Narodnik movement, which held the obschina as their ideal, seeing it as just another mechanism for making rich peasants richer and push the poor men further into poverty.

In January 1862, Nikolai Uspensky asked Chernyshevsky to summon a court of arbitration to resolve the financial issue, the latter refused, and said that should such a hearing ever take place, he will be on Nekrasov's side.

In early1862, Nikolai Uspensky severed all ties with the magazine and retired to Stupino, very ill and depressed.

In 1862, Tolstoy invited Nikolai Uspensky to teach Russian grammar to his Yasnaya Polyana school.

Nikolai Uspensky returned to his backwater Tula village to submerge himself into the petty routine and, totally discarding his own literary past, started to write small sketches on microscopic themes.

In 1878,42-year-old Nikolai Uspensky married a 16-year-old woman called Elizaveta, the daughter of a rich local priest who disapproved of their relationship and refused her financial support.

Nikolai Uspensky responded with a short story about an affluent clergyman who drives his daughter to consumption by plunging her into poverty.

Occasionally attempts were successful, and then Nikolai Uspensky arrived to 'besiege' the house.

Gleb Nikolai Uspensky wrote a letter demanding to stop publishing these slanderous pieces, and after the proof emerged showing that Nikolai Uspensky's memoirs on Nekrasov were libelous, the series abruptly stopped.

Shortly after his visit to Stupino, Nikolai Uspensky returned to Moscow, where he committed suicide on 2 November 1889.

In 1861 the Stories by Nikolai Uspensky came out in two miniature volumes and caused an uproar.

Sovremenniks reply was quick and to the effect that Nikolai Uspensky indeed has slid down towards the 'arts for arts sake' platform and for that very reason his newest work is worthless.

Nikolai Uspensky was referred to as "a forgotten writer" even by those who made attempts to remind the reading public about him.

Nikolai Uspensky fell into oblivion that lasted almost half a century, not because of his artistic decline, Chukovsky insisted, but for the change of the general atmosphere in the Russian society and the rapid rise of Narodnitchestvo, a peasant's Socialism doctrine.

Later literary historians agreed that Nikolai Uspensky was the first writer from the Russian lower class who came up with stark and cruel pictures of rural life.

Nikolai Uspensky is regarded as a precursor for Anton Chekhov's country prose cycle and, to a greater extent, for Ivan Bunin, who spent some time in 1890 to gather facts about Nikolai Uspensky's life for future biographers.