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"Each letter cost me a drop of blood"

Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin was born on February 2, 1855 in the Bakhmut district of the Yekaterinoslav province, into a poor noble family. His father was an officer in a cuirassier regiment. His colleagues who took part in the recently ended Crimean War often gathered in their house, so the boy grew up under the impression of their stories about the heroic defense of Sevastopol.
Raised the young Garshin P.V. Zavadsky, who was a member of a secret society that maintained ties with Herzen. The future writer grew up under the influence of advanced democratic ideas. He even learned to read from one of the Sovremennik books. In his biography, Garshin noted that at the age of 8 he had already read the novel by N.G. Chernyshevsky "What to do".
In 1864, Garshin entered one of the St. Petersburg real gymnasiums. He read a lot, was interested in social problems. The boy spent hours watching nature, plants and animals. He carried his interest in natural science throughout his life. Contemporaries who talked with Garshin, a high school student, spoke of him as an inquisitive and thoughtful young man who very early began to experience vague aspirations to fight "world evil." One of Garshin’s comrades at the gymnasium later wrote about this: “It often happened that this cheerful-looking, carefree schoolboy would suddenly calm down, fall silent, as if dissatisfied with himself and those around him, as if bitter to him that there was not enough smart and good around. Sometimes, at the same time, remarks about the need to fight evil came out of his mouth, and sometimes very strange views were expressed on how to arrange the happiness of all mankind.
The painful impression that the social life of that time had on Garshin often led to an exacerbation of mental illness, to which he was subject from an early age. Her seizures were infrequent. In his normal state, Vsevolod Mikhailovich was a cheerful and purposeful young man.
In 1874 Garshin graduated from the gymnasium. The dream of entering the university was not destined to come true, because graduates of real gymnasiums were not accepted there. Therefore, Vsevolod Mikhailovich decided to enter the Mining Institute, although he never experienced any particular zeal for mastering engineering skills.
Education at the institute was interrupted in April 1877, when the war with Turkey began for the liberation of the Balkan Slavs. Garshin met the day Russia declared war on Turkey like this: “April 12, 1877, my friend (Afanasiev) and I were preparing for an exam in chemistry. They brought a manifesto about the war. Our notes are open. We filed a letter of resignation and left for Chisinau, where we entered the 138th Bolkhovsky Regiment as privates and went on a campaign a day later ... ”Later, Garshin will describe this campaign in the story“ From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov.
Vsevolod wrote to his mother about his decision to volunteer for the active army: “I can’t hide behind the walls of an institution when my peers expose their foreheads and chests to bullets. Bless me." In response, he received a short telegram "With God, dear."
On August 11, Garshin was wounded in the battle of Ayaslar (Bulgaria). The report about him said that he "by an example of personal courage led his comrades forward in the attack, during which he was wounded in the leg." Then, while being treated in a military hospital, he wrote his first story "Four Days", which was regarded by critics and contemporaries as a brilliant writing debut. This small work was put on a par with such outstanding creations as L.N. Tolstoy and battle paintings by V. Vereshchagin. In May 1878, at the end of the war, Garshin was promoted to officer, but less than a year later he retired for health reasons and devoted himself entirely to literary work.
Garshin's works began to be published in those years when he was a student. In 1876, his first newspaper essay "The True History of the Ensk Zemstvo Assembly" was published. In it, Garshin addressed such acute social problems of his time as famine in the countryside and complete indifference to the situation of the people of the zemstvo authorities. This satire on zemstvo institutions appeared just at the time when the zemstvo was considered the basis of people's self-government and was regarded as one of the most important achievements of the era of "great reforms."
Garshin's skeptical attitude towards reforms ran counter to public opinion. Indicative in this sense is a poem written by Vsevolod Mikhailovich on February 19, 1876, on the 15th anniversary of the abolition of serfdom, in which the poet says that the fall of the "rusty shackles" of serfdom did not alleviate the situation of the peasantry.

“... Shameless crowd
Do not doze off; webs are coming soon
Wounded body entangled
And the old torment began! .. "

In 1877, the story "Four Days" was published in Fatherland Notes. It reflected the attitude of Garshin himself to the war, which, according to the author, is unnatural and hostile to man. However, despite the fact that the hero of the story is not able to explain why people wage wars and kill each other, he again and again goes into battle, obeying duty, a natural sense of justice.
In the story "Coward", written in 1879, the main character again appears as a man, shocked by the realization of the incalculable suffering that war brings to people. The story begins with the words "The war definitely haunts me." Garshin put his own opinion into the mouth of the hero. He also cannot reconcile himself to the legitimacy of deliberately orchestrated bloodshed. “I do not talk about the war,” he writes, “and I relate to it with a direct feeling, outraged by the mass of shed blood.” Nevertheless, the rejection of the war did not become a reason for the hero to avoid participation in it, which he would consider dishonorable for himself.
The special tone of narration inherent only to Garshin even today gives his works an extremely modern sound. Vsevolod Mikhailovich was one of the first to comprehend the philosophy of war. This is how he describes the movement of the army to the place of future battles in his last military story “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov” “We went around the cemetery, leaving it to the right. And it seemed to me that it was looking at us through the fog in a misunderstanding. “Why do you, thousands, thousands of miles away, die in foreign fields, when you can die here too, die peacefully and lie down under my wooden crosses and stone slabs .. Stay!”
But we didn't stay. We were attracted by an unknown secret force, there is no greater force in human life. Each one would go home separately, but the whole mass walked, obeying not discipline, not the consciousness of the rightness of the cause, not the feeling of hatred for the unknown enemy, not the fear of punishment, but that unknown and unconscious that for a long time will lead humanity to a bloody slaughter - the biggest reason all sorts of human troubles and suffering ... "
In the same story, Garshin gives a description of the battle, in which, as if looking ahead, he refutes the accusation of the Russian army of mythical bloodthirstiness, which was repeatedly heard during the war in Chechnya. “They say that there is no one who would not be afraid in battle; every unboastful and direct person, when asked if he is afraid, will answer terribly. But there was not that physical fear that takes possession of a person at night, in a back alley, when meeting with a robber; there was a full, clear consciousness of the inevitability and proximity of death. And - these words sound wild and strange - this consciousness did not stop people, did not make them think about flight, but led them forward. The bloodthirsty instincts did not wake up, I did not want to go forward to kill someone, but there was an inevitable urge to go forward at all costs, and the thought of what to do during the battle would not be expressed in words need to be killed, but rather must die."
In works devoted to civilian life, Garshin, as well as in military prose, is a master of socio-psychological storytelling. His hero - “a humble, good-natured young man who until now knew only his books, and the audience, and his family, who thought in a year or two to start a different work, a work of love and truth” - suddenly encounters some glaring fact, full of deep tragedy and abruptly changing his attitude to life. Such a clash leads to a severe moral crisis, which is resolved either by immersion "there, in this grief", as happens in the story "Artists", or by the suicide of the protagonist, who could not cope with mental discord ("The Incident"). Usually, it is precisely according to this scheme that the action develops in the works of Garshin.
The writer considers social contradictions in their everyday appearance, but the everyday in his stories ceases to be such and takes on the character of a crushing nightmare. In order to see the tragedies of everyday life hidden from the ordinary view, it is necessary to experience a sudden mental shock that brings a person out of passive participation in everyday evil. Faced with the fact of injustice or untruth, the hero of Garshin's stories begins to reflect on his situation and painfully seek a way out of the situation. Often these reflections lead to a tragic denouement.
For the writer, there were no single expressions of life's untruth; in each specific image, he saw "all the innocently shed blood, all the tears, all the bile of mankind." Therefore, along with psychological stories, Vsevolod Mikhailovich turned to the genre of allegorical fairy tales. Among his indisputable masterpieces is the story "The Red Flower", which combines the features of these two genres. Showing social evil in all its nakedness, Garshin, like many of his contemporaries, seeks to awaken the reader's hard work of thought, "kill his calmness", disturb his conscience, make him rise up against the evil and injustice of the cruel world of people.
Professor Sikorsky, a well-known psychiatrist in the 19th century, believed that in the story "The Red Flower", which takes place in a psychiatric hospital, Garshin gave a classic depiction of mental illness. Unfortunately, many episodes of this story were autobiographical in nature. Its main character, a poor madman, saw three red flowers in the hospital garden and, imagining that they contained all the world's evil, destroyed them at the cost of his own life.
Garshin ended his story with the words “In the morning he was found dead. His face was calm and light; emaciated features with thin lips and deeply sunken closed eyes expressed a kind of proud happiness. When they put him on a stretcher, they tried to open his hand and take out a red flower. But his hand became stiff, and he took his trophy to the grave.
Many critics wrote that Garshin portrayed the fight not with evil, but with an illusion or metaphor of evil, showing the heroic madness of his character. However, in contrast to those who create illusions that he is the ruler of the world, who has the right to decide other people's destinies, the hero of the story died with the belief that evil can be defeated. Garshin himself belonged to this category. This is evidenced, perhaps somewhat childishly naive, by the writer’s tales “Attalea princeps”, “That which was not”, “The Tale of the Toad and the Rose” and, of course, the last literary work written by him - “The Frog -traveler".
In the mid-1880s, Garshin experienced a creative crisis. The genre of the psychological story ceased to satisfy the writer, since it focused on the spiritual drama of the main character, and the outside world around him remained on the sidelines. “I feel,” Vsevolod Mikhailovich wrote in 1885, “that I need to retrain first. For me, the time has passed for terrible, fragmentary cries, some kind of “poetry in prose”, with which I have until now dealt with the material, I have enough, and I need to depict not my “I”, but the big outside world.
In the last years of his life, Garshin felt the need to create a great epic work. However, this did not mean at all that he was going to abandon his former principles. Vsevolod Mikhailovich set himself the task of combining the image of the inner world of people with a heightened sense of responsibility for the untruth prevailing in society, with broad everyday pictures of the "big outside world".
Garshin had far-reaching creative plans. He collected historical materials dating back to the time of Peter the Great, conceived a semi-philosophical, semi-scientific novel with elements of spiritualism, and was also preparing to work on the novel "People and War". But Garshin failed to fully open up in the new style. His creative quest was interrupted by a sudden death. In the new manner, the writer created only a few works, in particular the stories "Nadezhda Nikolaevna" and "From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov."
In 1888, Vsevolod Mikhailovich's health deteriorated sharply. As G. Uspensky, who was a friend of Garshin, wrote, his illness “feeded the impressions of real life”, which were painful even for healthy people, and turned out to be fatal for the sick psyche of the writer. In his article “Death of V.M. Garshin" G. Uspensky characterizes these impressions of the "reactionary era" in this way: "The same daily "rumor" - and always gloomy and disturbing; one and the same blow to the same sore spot, and certainly, moreover, to the sick one, and certainly to such a place that needs to “heal”, get better, rest from suffering; a blow to the heart that asks for a good feeling, a blow to a thought that yearns for the right to live, a blow to the conscience that wants to feel like ... - that's what life gave Garshin after he had already suffered her grief.
Vsevolod Mikhailovich could not endure all these blows. On March 19, 1888, during another bout of mental illness, being in a state of severe anguish, Garshin rushed into the flight of stairs of one of the gloomy St. Petersburg houses. On March 24, the writer died.
V.M. Garshin was called "modern Hamlet", "Hamlet of the heart". According to contemporaries, the writer was brought closer to this Shakespearean hero by a painfully aggravated rejection of any injustice, imperfection of human relationships, which caused him constant, almost physical torments of conscience and compassion. Garshin himself, shortly before his tragic death, admitted: “Whether it was written well or not well is an outside question; but that I really wrote with my nerves alone, and that each letter cost me a drop of blood, this, really, will not be an exaggeration.
Once, talking with A.P. Chekhov, V.G. Korolenko suggested that if Vsevolod Mikhailovich during his lifetime could be protected “from the painful impressions of our reality, to remove for a while from literature and politics, and most importantly, to remove from a tired soul that consciousness of social responsibility that so oppresses a Russian person with a sensitive conscience. ..”, then his sick soul could find peace. But Anton Pavlovich answered this remark: “No, this is an irreparable matter, some molecular particles in the brain have moved apart, and nothing can move them ...”
The dramatic nature of the situation lies in the fact that in his own work Garshin strove with all the forces of a kind and vulnerable heart, “with his nerves alone” to connect the disintegrated “molecular particles” of the world in which he lived. It can be stated with absolute certainty that the impetus for writing each work was the shock experienced by the author himself. Not excitement or chagrin, but shock, and therefore each letter cost the writer "a drop of blood." At the same time, Garshin, according to Yu. Aikhenvald, “did not breathe anything sick and restless into his works, did not frighten anyone, did not show neurasthenia in himself, did not infect others with it ...”.

Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (1855-1888) was born on the estate of Pleasant Valley in the Bakhmut district of the Yekaterinoslav province into a noble family, his father was an officer in the cuirassier regiment, a participant in the Crimean War of 1853-1856, his mother was from the family of a naval officer. In childhood, Garshin and his brothers had to endure severe mental trauma: their mother Ekaterina Stepanovna, carried away by the teacher of older children P.V. :Zavadsky, left her family in 1860.

Zavadsky, the organizer of a secret student political society, after Garshin's father contacted the police, who was trying to return his wife, was arrested and exiled to the Olonets province, where Garshin's mother, together with her son Vsevolod, went several times. The communication of the future writer with the revolutionary-democratic intelligentsia would later become the basis of his closeness to the populists and the influence of their ideas on his work.

In his youth, Garshin was interested in the natural sciences, but his desire to engage in them could not come true: a graduate of a real school was deprived of the right to enter the university. Therefore, he chose the Mining Institute, although the profession of an engineer did not particularly attract him. Soon after Russia declared war on Turkey in 1877, Garshin, obsessed with the impulse to share "common suffering", leaves the institute and participates in hostilities in the Balkans.

In one of the battles, he was wounded in the leg and ended up in the hospital. The report reported that Garshin "led his comrades into the attack with an example of personal courage." A year later, he was promoted to officer, but did not want to continue the service in order to be able to complete his studies and engage in literary activities.

The sharpness of the moral sense prompted Garshin to bright, selfless deeds. In 1880, after the assassination attempt of the revolutionary I.O. Mlodetsky to M.T., who was especially close to the emperor and endowed with emergency powers. Loris-Melikov, Garshin seeks an audience with the general in order to ask for pardon for the criminal, since, in his opinion, only mercy can stop government and revolutionary terror. Nevertheless, the execution took place, and it was a blow to the writer.

These experiences exacerbated his hereditary mental illness (manic-depressive syndrome, due to which Garshin was in a psychiatric hospital in 1880, and eight years later committed suicide by throwing himself into the flight of stairs of his house), he wrote little and, not counting on literary earnings, was forced to get a job in 1882 as an official in the office of the Congress of Railway Representatives. In addition, he collaborated with V.G. Chertkov in the publishing house "Posrednik", and also took an active part in the work of the Society's Committee for assistance to needy writers and scientists.

Garshin's literary activity began in 1876 with a satirical essay "The True History of the Ensk Zemstvo Assembly" (Molva newspaper), which reflected his impressions of Starobelsk, where he once lived with his father. Garshin wrote a little. But this little brought into literature that note, which was not in it before, or it did not sound as strong as it did with him. "The voice of conscience and its martyr" rightly called Garshin critic Y. Aikhenvald. That is how he was perceived by his contemporaries.

In the writings of Garshin, a person is in a state of mental confusion. In the first story, "Four Days", written in a hospital and reflecting the writer's own impressions, the hero is wounded in battle and awaits death, and the corpse of the Turk he killed is decomposing nearby. This scene has often been compared to the scene from War and Peace, where Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, wounded in the Battle of Austerlitz, looks at the sky. The hero of Garshin also looks at the sky, but his questions are not abstractly philosophical, but quite earthly: why the war? why was he forced to kill this man, to whom he had no hostile feelings and, in fact, was not guilty of anything?

Garshin's military theme is passed through the crucible of conscience, through the soul, bewildered by the incomprehensibility of this premeditated and unnecessary massacre by no one knows. Meanwhile, the Russian-Turkish war of 1877 was started with the noble goal of helping the Slavic brothers get rid of the Turkish yoke. Garshin is concerned not with political motives, but with existential questions. The character does not want to kill other people, does not want to go to war (the story "Coward"). Nevertheless, obeying the general impulse and considering it his duty, he signs up as a volunteer and dies. The senselessness of this death haunts the author.

But what is essential is that this absurdity is not unique in the general structure of being. In the same story, "Coward" dies of gangrene that began with a toothache, a medical student. These two events are parallel, and it is in their artistic conjugation that one of the main Garshin questions is highlighted - about the nature of evil.

This question tormented the writer all his life. It is no coincidence that his hero, a reflective intellectual, protests against world injustice, embodied in some faceless forces that lead a person to death and destruction, including self-destruction. It's a specific person. Personality. Face.

At the same time, the writer's pain about one person, about a single life, is inseparable from his desire, at least at the level of the name of the main character, to achieve an all-encompassing generalization. His hero has the surname Ivanov and the name Ivan Ivanovich. This is the originality of Garshin's humanism: he has a man himself and at the same time a part of the whole - a people, a country, a society. Garshin was associated with the populist "Russian wealth" and collaborated with its leaders - N. Mikhailovsky and others. However, his anxiety and sadness about the disasters of the people went beyond the framework of traditional populism.

Beneath Garshin's pain for the people lurked suffering about the fate of man in general. About personality. And this distinguished his ideological and artistic position among the writers of the 70-80s. He approached the drama of human life not so much from the position of social criticism, but rather from the position of existential confusion in the face of world evil and protest against it, as a rule, unsuccessful and tragic.

His allegorical stories "Red Flower" and "Attalea princeps" became textbooks. In the first, a mentally ill person in a psychiatric hospital fights the world's evil in the form of dazzling red poppy flowers in a hospital bed. In the second, a greenhouse palm tree, rushing towards freedom, breaks through the roof. And - dies.

Characteristic for Garshin (and this is by no means only an autobiographical moment) is the image of the hero on the verge of insanity. It's not so much about illness, but about the fact that the writer's man is unable to cope with the inescapability of evil in the world.

Contemporaries appreciated the heroism of Garshin's characters: they are trying to resist evil, despite their own weakness. It is madness that turns out to be the beginning of rebellion, since, according to Garshin, it is impossible to rationally comprehend evil: the person himself is involved in it - and not only by social forces, but also, which is no less, and perhaps more important, internal forces. He himself is partly the bearer of evil - sometimes contrary to his own ideas about himself. The irrational in the soul of a person makes him unpredictable, the splash of this uncontrollable element is not only a rebellion against evil, but evil itself.

Most of Garshin's stories are full of hopelessness and tragedy, for which he was repeatedly reproached by critics who saw in his prose the philosophy of despair and the denial of struggle. Two of them - about love - are built around the main character Nadezhda Nikolaevna. Coming from an intelligent family, who, by the will of circumstances, ended up on the panel, she, a complex and contradictory nature, seems to be striving for death herself. And in the story "The Incident" she rejects Ivan Nikitin's love for her, fearing moral enslavement, which leads him to suicide.

Her social position, her past does not allow her to trust the nobility and disinterestedness of another person. Self-love and pride, which is more than pride, lead to the fact that it is to these principles of her strong and complex nature that the possibility of another, purer life is sacrificed, and, the saddest thing, a living person. Life is sacrificed to some abstractions.

The image of a fallen woman becomes for Garshin a symbol of social trouble and more - world disorder. And the salvation of a fallen woman for the Garshin hero is tantamount to a victory over world evil, at least in this particular case. But even this victory ultimately turns into the death of the participants in the collision. Evil still finds a loophole. One of the characters, the writer Bessonov, also once thought about saving Nadezhda Nikolaevna, but did not dare, and now he suddenly realized what she really meant to him. Analyzing the motives of his own actions, removing cover after cover, layer after layer, he suddenly discovers that he was deceiving himself, that he was drawn into some game-intrigue of his pride, ambition, jealousy. And, unable to come to terms with the loss of his beloved, he kills her and himself.

All this brings to Garshin's stories not only an expression of tragedy, but also a share of melodrama, a romantic escalation of passions and blood. The writer gravitates toward theatricality and even cinematography, although the invention of the Lumiere brothers has not yet reached. His poetics is characterized by contrasts, sharp changes in light and shadow (L. Andreev will become Garshin's follower). His stories are often built like diaries or notes, but in some scenes it is theatrical exaggeration that is felt, even some details in them have a sham eccentricity.

Garshin loved painting, wrote articles about it, supporting the Wanderers. He was closely acquainted with I. Repin, who used a sketch from Garshin (the writer’s pensive, affectionately sad eyes made a special impression on everyone) for the face of Tsarevich Ivan in the painting “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan”, and a portrait of Garshin painted by him separately - one of the best works of the artist in this genre.

He gravitated toward painting and in prose - not only making artists his heroes ("Artists", "Nadezhda Nikolaevna"), but he himself masterfully mastered verbal plasticity. Pure art, which Garshin almost identified with handicrafts, he contrasted with the closer realistic art, rooting for the people. Art that can touch the soul, disturb it.

Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich

one of the most prominent writers of the 70s and 80s of the 19th century; born February 2, 1855, died March 24, 1888, buried at the Volkov cemetery in St. Petersburg. The Garshin family is an old noble family, descending, according to legend, from Murza Gorsha or Garsha, a native of the Golden Horde under Ivan III. Grandfather V. M. Garshin on his father's side was a tough, cruel and domineering man; towards the end of his life, he greatly upset his large fortune, so that Mikhail Yegorovich, the father of Garshin, one of eleven children, got only 70 souls in Starobelsky district. Mikhail Yegorovich was "the complete opposite of his father": he was an extremely kind and gentle man; serving in cuirassiers in the Glukhovsky regiment, in Nikolaev time, he never beat a soldier; “Unless when he gets very angry, he hits with his cap.” He graduated from the course at the 1st Moscow Gymnasium and spent two years at Moscow University at the Faculty of Law, but then, in his own words, "became interested in military service." During the liberation of the peasants, he worked in the Kharkov Committee as a member of the Starobelsk district, where he settled after his resignation in 1858. In 1848, he married Ekaterina Stepanovna Akimova. “Her father,” says G. in his autobiography, “the landowner of the Bakhmut district of the Yekaterinoslav province, a retired naval officer, was a very educated and rarely good person. His relations with the peasants were so unusual at that time that the surrounding landowners glorified him as a dangerous freethinker, and then and a lunatic. His “madness” consisted, among other things, in the fact that during the famine of 1843, when in those places almost half the population died of starvation typhus and scurvy, he mortgaged his estate, borrowed money and himself brought “from Russia” a large amount of bread, which he distributed to the starving peasants, his own and others. He died very early, leaving five children, of whom the eldest, Catherine, was still a girl; but his efforts to educate her bore fruit, and teachers and books continued to be subscribed after his death, so that by the time of her marriage she had become a well-educated girl. Garshin was born the third child in the family, on the estate of his grandmother A. S. Akimova "Pleasant Valley" of the Bakhmut district. The external conditions of Garshin’s childhood life were far from favorable: “as a child, Vsevolod Mikhailovich had to go through a lot that only a few fall to the lot,” writes Ya. Abramov in his memoirs of G. In any case, there is no doubt that childhood had a great influence to the storehouse of the character of the deceased. At least, he himself explained many details of his character precisely by the influence of facts from his childhood life. In the very first years of his childhood, when his father was still serving in the regiment, G. had to travel a lot and visit various places in Russia; despite such a young age, many travel scenes and experiences left a deep mark and indelible memories in the receptive soul and lively impressionable mind of the child. For five years, the inquisitive child had learned to read from the home teacher P. V. Zavadovsky, who then lived with the Garshins. The primer was an old book of Sovremennik. Since then, G. has become addicted to reading, and it was rarely possible to see him without a book. In his memoirs about little G., his uncle V.S. Akimov writes: “In the beginning of 1860, he, that is, G., came with his mother to me in Odessa, where I had just returned from a London voyage on a steamer "Vesta" (later famous). It was already a five-year-old boy, very meek, serious and handsome, constantly rushing about with Razin's "World of God", which he left only for the sake of his favorite drawing. About the subsequent period of his life, from five to eight years, G. writes the following: “The older brothers were sent to St. Petersburg; my mother went with them, and I stayed with my father. We lived with him either in the countryside, in the steppe, or in the city, or with one of my uncles in Starobelsk district. Never, it seems, have I read such a mass of books as when I was 3 years old with my father, from the age of five to eight. In addition to various children's books (of which Razin's excellent World of God is especially memorable to me), I re-read everything I could barely understand from Sovremennik, Vremya, and other magazines over several years. Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin and Negro Life) had a strong effect on me. How free I was in reading can be shown by the fact that I read Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris at the age of seven and, having reread it at twenty-five, did not find anything new, but "What to do?" I read from books at the very time when Chernyshevsky was in the fortress. This early reading was, no doubt, very harmful. Then I read Pushkin, Lermontov (“The Hero of Our Time” remained completely incomprehensible, except for Bela, about whom I wept bitterly), Gogol and Zhukovsky.

In August 1863, his mother came for little Vsevolod to Starobelsk and took him to St. Petersburg, which made a huge impression on the future writer, whom he loved so much and where, with comparatively short breaks, he lived almost his entire life. In 1864, Mr.. G. entered the 7th St. Petersburg. gymnasium (later transformed into the first real school). G. himself says that he studied rather poorly, "although he was not particularly lazy," but he spent a lot of time on extraneous reading, and adds that during the course he was ill twice and once "remained in class due to laziness" so that the seven-year course turned into a ten-year course for him. His comrade Ya. V. Abramov, in his collection of materials for the biographies of V. M. G., says that G. studied well and "left the most pleasant memories in his teachers and educators." Such a contradiction happened, probably because G.'s ability to quickly grasp the subject being studied and delve into its essence did not require such perseverance in his studies as from most of his comrades, and his conscientiousness required him to devote himself entirely to the cause of teaching and not devote so much time to an outsider reading. G. treated the study of Russian literature and the natural sciences with great interest and love; in these subjects he always got good grades; by the way, one of his essays “Death”, submitted by him in 1872 to a teacher of literature, has been preserved; this work already shows signs of the birth of an outstanding talent. Mathematics H. "sincerely hated" and, if possible, avoided them, although mathematics was not particularly difficult for him. “Already at that age,” says Ya. V. Abramov, “all those charming features of his character were clearly manifested in him, which later involuntarily fascinated and conquered anyone who had anything to do with him; his extraordinary softness in relations with people, deep justice, accommodating, strict attitude towards himself, modesty, responsiveness in grief and the joy of his neighbor " all these qualities attracted the sympathy of his superiors and teachers and the love of his comrades, of whom many remained his friends for life life. “At the same age, says M. Malyshev, began to appear in V. M. and those mental qualities that amazed everyone who knew his thoughtful attitude to everything seen, heard and read, the ability to quickly grasp the essence of the matter and find a solution to the issue , to see in the subject those aspects that usually escape the attention of others, the originality of conclusions and generalizations, the ability to quickly and easily look for arguments and arguments to support one’s views, the ability to find a connection and dependence between objects, no matter how obscure they may be. And in these young years, when other children are a faithful reflection of their environment, G. showed amazing independence and independence of his views and judgments: he went all into his little world, created by himself, which consisted of books, drawings, herbariums and collections, compiled by him, or engaged in some kind of manual labor, for the love of which his relatives jokingly called him Gogol's governor, for manual labor later he often considered his works. Love for nature, a passion for observing its phenomena, making experiments, and especially for compiling various collections and herbariums remained with him throughout his life.

During his stay in the gymnasium G. took an active part in the "gymnasium literature"; from the fourth grade, he was an active employee of the Vechernyaya Gazeta, published weekly by pupils; in this newspaper he wrote feuilletons under the signature "Agasfer", and these feuilletons enjoyed great success among young readers. In addition, G. composed another long poem in hexameter, which described the gymnasium life. Being a passionate lover of reading, G. founded with his comrades a society to compile a library. The capital needed to purchase books from second-hand booksellers was made up of membership dues, of voluntary donations; money received from the sale of old notebooks to a small shop and often money received for breakfast came here.

The first three years after entering the gymnasium, G. lived with his family, and after her relocation to the south, he lived at one time in an apartment with his older brothers (who were then already 16 and 17 years old). Since 1868, he settled in the family of one of his gymnasium comrades, V. N. Afanasyev, who was very sympathetic to him. Around the same time, G., thanks to his other friend at the gymnasium, B. M. Latkin, entered the family of A. Ya. of its development. From the 6th grade, G. was admitted to a boarding school at public expense. Throughout his stay at the gymnasium, as well as later at the Mining Institute, up to entering the army, that is, until 1877, G. always came to his relatives in Kharkov or Starobelsk for the summer holidays. At the end of 1872, when G. had already moved to the last class, for the first time he manifested that severe mental illness that periodically covered him later, poisoned his life and led to an early grave. The first signs of the disease were expressed in a strong excitement and in increased feverish activity. He turned the apartment of his brother Viktor G. into a real laboratory, attached almost world significance to his experiments and tried to attract as many people as possible to his studies. Finally, his fits of nervous excitement became so aggravated that he had to be placed in the hospital of St. Nicholas, where by the beginning of 1873 his condition worsened so much that people who wanted to visit him were not always allowed to see him. In the intervals between such severe attacks, he had moments of enlightenment, and in these moments everything that he did during the period of insanity rose painfully clear before him. This was the whole horror of his position, since in his painfully sensitive consciousness he considered himself responsible for these actions, and no convictions could calm him down and make him think otherwise. All subsequent attacks of the disease proceeded in G. with approximately the same phenomena, sensations and experiences. When G. felt a little better, he was transferred from the hospital of St. Nicholas to the hospital of Dr. Frey, where, thanks to attentive, skillful care and reasonable treatment, he completely recovered by the summer of 1873, so that in 1874 he successfully completed the course of the school . The best memories were left in him by the years of his stay at the school; with special warmth and gratitude, he always remembered the director of the school V. O. Ewald, the teacher of literature V. P. Genning and the teacher of natural history M. M. Fedorova. “Unable to go to university,” writes G. in his autobiography, “I thought about becoming a doctor. Many of my comrades (previous issues) ended up in the medical academy, and now they are doctors. But just at the time of my completion of the course, D-v submitted a note to the sovereign that, they say, realists enter the medical academy, and then penetrate from the academy to the university. Then it was ordered not to let realists into the doctor. I had to choose one of the technical institutions: I chose the one with less mathematics, the Mining Institute. G. again devotes only as much time to studying at the institute as is necessary to keep up with the course, but he uses the rest for reading and, most importantly, for preparing himself for literary activity, in which he sees his true vocation. In 1876, G. first appeared in print with a short story: “The True History of the Ensk Zemstvo Assembly”, published in the weekly newspaper Molva (No 15) signed by R. L., but the author himself did not attach much importance to this first debut and did not like to talk about him, as well as about his articles about art exhibitions, published in Novosti for 1877. These articles were written by him under the influence of rapprochement with a circle of young artists. G. was an indispensable participant in all the "Fridays" of this circle, here for the first time he read some of his works, here it is hot, hotter than many artists, he argued about art, which he looked at as serving the highest ideals of goodness and truth and from which, on this basis , demanded not to satisfy the need to enjoy the beautiful, but to serve the cause of the moral improvement of mankind. The same view of art is clearly expressed by G. in his poem, written in connection with the exhibition of military paintings by Vereshchagin in St. Petersburg in 1874, which made a huge, amazing impression on V. M. Here, perhaps for the first time, his sensitive conscience clearly prompted him, that war is a common disaster, a common grief, and that all people are responsible for the blood that is shed on the battlefield, and he felt all the horror and all the depth of the tragedy of war. These deep feelings forced him to take part in the Russian-Turkish war. Since the spring of 1876, when rumors began to reach Russia about the unprecedented atrocities of the Turks in Bulgaria and when the Russian society, which warmly responded to this disaster, began to send donations and volunteers to help the suffering brothers, G. wholeheartedly strove to become in their ranks, but he was of military age, and they did not let him in. By this time, by the way, is his poem: "Friends, we have gathered before parting!". The news from the theater of war had a tremendous effect on the sensitive soul of G.; he, like the hero of the story "Coward", could not calmly, like other people , to read reports that say that “our losses are insignificant”, so many were killed, so many were injured, “and even rejoice that there are few”, no, when reading each such report, “an entire bloody picture immediately appears before his eyes ", and he seems to be experiencing the suffering of each individual victim. The idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe obligation to "take on the share of the disaster that has befallen the people" is growing and strengthening in G.'s soul, and when April 12, 1877, while V. M .together with his friend Afanasyev, he was preparing for the transitional exams from the 2nd to the 3rd year of the Mining Institute, a manifesto about the Eastern War came, G. threw everything and rushed to where his conscience and duty called him, dragging along his comrades Afanasyev and the artist M. E. Malyshev .

As a volunteer, G. was enrolled in the 138th Bolkhov Infantry Regiment, in the company of Iv. Naz. Afanasyev, the elder brother of his comrade V. N. Afanasyev. On May 4, G. had already arrived in Chisinau, joined his regiment, and, having set out from here on May 6, made the entire difficult transition on foot from Chisinau to Sistov. He writes about this from Banias (a suburb of Bucharest) to Malyshev: “The campaign made was not easy. The crossings reached 48 versts. This is in terrible heat, in cloth uniforms, knapsacks, with overcoats over his shoulder. One day, up to 100 people from our battalion fell on the road; by this fact you can judge the difficulties of the campaign. But V. (Afanasiev) and I hold on and don’t mess up.” G. later described this whole transition in detail in his story “Notes of Private Ivanov”. “Alive by nature, a fidget, extremely sociable, simple and affectionate, G. was very fond of the soldiers, who were accustomed to seeing a candidate for an officer, and not their comrade, in a volunteer,” writes Malyshev, who a little later G. entered the regiment. G. became close friends with them, taught them to read and write, wrote letters, read newspapers and talked with them for hours on end. The soldiers treated G. very carefully, with restraint and kindness, and long later, when the wounded G. had already left for Russia, they remembered him: “He knew everything, he could tell everything, and how many different stories he told us in hike! We'll starve, we'll stick out our tongues, we'll barely drag our feet, and even the goryushka is not enough for him, he scurries between us, with that he will chat, with another. We’ll come to a halt, just to poke where, and he will collect the kettles and fetch water. Such a wonderful, alive! Glorious master, soul! ”Especially, he probably attracted the sympathy of the soldiers by the fact that he did not tolerate any differences and served on an equal footing with them, not allowing any benefits and indulgences. On August 11, in the battle of Ayaslar, G. was wounded in the leg by a bullet through the hole. In the report on the Ayaslar case, it was said that "an ordinary volunteer, Vsevolod Garshin, with an example of personal courage, carried his comrades into the attack and thereby contributed to the success of the case. " G. was "introduced to George", but for some reason - then he did not receive it; having learned about the latter circumstance, the soldiers of his company were very sorry that they had hoped that he would receive this insignia and did not award him "company George". To cure V. M. went to his relatives in Kharkov and from here to At the end of 1877, he sent his story “Four Days” to Otechestvennye Zapiski (Otech. Zap., 1877, No. 10, a separate edition in Moscow in 1886), which immediately made me pay attention to the young author, made him a literary name and put along with outstanding artists the words t th time. G. began to write this story in fits and starts on halts during the war, and the topic was a real fact, when, after the battle of Yezerdzhi, soldiers sent to clean up corpses found between the last living soldiers of the Bolkhov regiment, who had lain on the battlefield for 4 days without food and drinking with broken legs.

Since this success in the literary field, G. decides to devote himself entirely to literary activity; he is busy about resigning (although at one time he had the idea to remain in the military for ideological service in this service) and, having barely recovered, hurries to Petersburg. Here, shortly after his arrival, he wrote two short stories: "A Very Short Novel", published in the "Dragonfly", and "The Incident" ("Notes of the Fatherland", 1878, No 3). In the spring of 1878, Mr.. G. was promoted to officer, and at the end of the same year he was resigned, having previously spent quite a long time in the Nikolaev military land hospital "on trial." In St. Petersburg, G. seriously engaged in his scientific and artistic education; he read a lot (although without any system), in the autumn of 1878 he entered the university as a volunteer at the Faculty of History and Philology for a better acquaintance with history, which he was especially interested in, and again became close to the circle of artists. During the winter of 187879 G. wrote stories: "Coward" ("Fatherland. Zap.", 1879, No. 3), "Meeting" (ibid., No. 4), "Artists" (ibid., No. 9), "Attalea princeps "(" Russian Wealth ", 1879, No. 10). As usual, G. spent the summer of 1879 with his relatives in Kharkov, where, by the way, he went with fifth-year medical students to a psychiatric hospital for "analysis of patients." In addition In addition, G. traveled a lot during this summer, visiting his friends.In this increased desire for movement, perhaps, that heightened nervousness was manifested - a companion of spiritual anguish, which had already appeared to him from time to time and earlier and resulted this time, by the autumn of 1879 ., in severe and prolonged fits of melancholy. It can be assumed that in the story "Night" ("Otechestven. Zap.", 1880, No. 6), written by G. in this winter, partly reflected his difficult internal state, which turned into early 1880 in an acute manic illness, which again expressed itself in increased activity and in the desire to move: V. M., after an attempt on Mr. R. Loris-Melikova, goes to him at night and ardently convinces him of the need for "reconciliation and forgiveness", then ends up in Moscow, where she also talks with the chief police chief Kozlov and wanders through some slums; from Moscow he goes to Rybinsk, then to Tula, where he leaves his things and wanders either on horseback or on foot through the Tula and Oryol provinces, preaching something to the peasants; lives for some time with the mother of the famous critic Pisarev, finally comes to Yasnaya Polyana and "poses" L. N. Tolstoy questions that torment his sick soul. At the same time, he is also occupied with broad plans for literary work: he intends to publish his stories under the title "The Sufferings of Mankind", he wants to write a big novel about Bulgarian life and publish a big work "People and War", which was supposed to be a vivid protest against the war. The story "The orderly and the officer", published around this time in "Russian Wealth" (1880, No. 8), was apparently a small part of this work. Finally, the wandering G. was found by his elder brother Evgeny and taken to Kharkov, where V. M. had to be placed at Saburov's dacha, after he fled from his relatives and ended up in Orel, in a lunatic asylum. After a four-month treatment at the Saburova dacha and a two-month stay in the hospital of Dr. Frey in St. Petersburg, G. at the end of 1880 finally returned to full consciousness, but the feeling of pointless longing and oppression did not leave him. In this state, he was taken to his village Efimovka (Kherson province), on the banks of the Dnieper-Bug estuary, by his uncle V.S. Akimov, and he created the most ideal life and environment for him there. During his stay in Akimovka, i.e., from the end of 1880 to the spring of 1882, G. wrote only a short fairy tale, “That which was not there,” which was first intended for a handwritten children's magazine that A.'s children planned to publish. . Gerda; but the tale came out not for children, but “skaldyrnicheskaya”, as V. M. himself put it, that is, too pessimistic, and was published in the journal Ustoi in 1882 (No No 34). This tale, by the way, caused various rumors in the public, against which G. protested ardently, in general he always rejected any allegorical interpretation of his works. During his stay in Akimovka, G. translated Merimee's Colomba; this translation was published in the “Fine Literature” for 1883. How V. M. generally looked at his studies in literature at that time can be seen from his letter to Afanasiev dated December 31, 1881 “I can’t write (should be), but if I can, I don't want to. You know what I wrote, and you can have an idea how I got this writing. Whether the writing came out well or not is an outside question: but that I actually wrote with my unfortunate nerves, and that each letter cost me a drop of blood, this, really, will not be an exaggeration. To write now for me means to start the old fairy tale again and in 34 years, maybe again to end up in a hospital for the mentally ill. God bless her, with literature, if it leads to what is worse than death, much worse, believe me. Of course, I'm not giving it up forever; In a few years, maybe I'll write something. But to make literary studies the sole occupation of life I resolutely refuse.

In May 1882, G. arrived in St. Petersburg and published the first book of his stories, and spent the summer, taking advantage of the invitation of I. S. Turgenev, who treated him with great sympathy, in Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, together with the poet Ya. P. Polonsky and his family . In a quiet, comfortable, rural environment conducive to work, he wrote Notes from the Memoirs of Private Ivanov (Otechestven. Zap., 1883, No 1, published separately in 1887). Returning to St. Petersburg in the fall, G. became At first he joined the assistant manager of the Anopov stationery factory for 50 rubles salary, but classes here took up a lot of time and greatly tired V. M. In the following (1883) year, G. received the post of secretary of the general congress of representatives Russian Railways, which he occupied for almost five years, leaving him only 3 months before his tragic death.This place gave him good material support, and intensive work required only 12 months a year when the congress was held; the rest of the time In the service of G., the most sympathetic and good relations were established both with superiors and with colleagues, the latter were always willing to replace him during subsequent attacks of the disease. In the same year, on February 11, V. M. married Nadezhda Mikhailovna Zolotilova, a student of medical courses. They didn't have children. This marriage was very happy; in addition to love and conformity of characters, G. in the person of his wife acquired a caring doctor-friend who constantly surrounded him with caring and skillful care, which was so necessary for a sick writer. And G. highly appreciated this tender care and infinitely patient care, which surrounded his wife until her death. On October 5, 1883, G. was elected a full member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature in Moscow. In 1883, Mr.. G. wrote the stories: "Red Flower" ("Fatherland. Zap.", No. 10) and "Bears" ("Fatherland. Zap.", No. 11, published separately in 1887 and 1890). In the same year, he translated from English two fairy tales by Uid: “The Ambitious Rose” and “The Nuremberg Oven” and from German several fairy tales by Carmen Silva (in the publication “Kingdom of Fairy Tales”, St. Petersburg, 1883). Since that time, G. has been writing little: in 1884, “The Tale of the Toad and the Rose” (“For twenty-five years, a collection of the Society for Assistance to Needy Writers and Scientists”), in 1885 the story “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”, (“ Russkaya Mysl”, No. 2 and 3), in 1886 “The Tale of the Proud Haggai” (“Russian Thought”, No. 4), in 1887 the story “Signal” (“Severny Vestnik”, No. 1, separately in 1887 and 1891 ), the fairy tale “The Traveler Frog” (“Spring”, 1887) and an article about a traveling exhibition in the “Northern Messenger”. In 1885, his "Second Book of Stories" was published. In the same 1885, G., together with A. Ya. Gerd, edited the editions of the bibliographic leaflet "Review of Children's Literature". In addition, he again intensively studied Russian history of the 18th century. and cherished the idea of ​​writing a long historical story depicting the struggle between old and new Russia; the representatives of the latter were to be Peter the Great and the "pie-maker" Prince Menshikov, and the representative of the first - the clerk Dokukin, who decided to bring Peter the well-known "letter", in which he boldly pointed out to the tsar all the dark sides of his reform activities. But this story was not destined to pour out from the pen of G. and see the light, just as his fantastic story, written on the theme of “defending heresies in science and supposed to be a protest against scientific intolerance,” did not see the light either. G. spoke about this story to his friend V. A. Fausek in 1887 and even told its contents in detail, but probably then burned it during a fit of his illness, which since 1884 was repeated every spring, prevented him from working and poisoned his existence. Every year these fits became longer and longer, beginning earlier in the spring and ending later in the autumn; but for the last time, in 1887, the illness manifested itself only late in the summer, when the writer himself and all those close to him already hoped that she would not appear again. The stubborn nature of this last disease was partly facilitated by some troubles that befell the unfortunate V. M. during the winter of 188788, from which his relatives were unable to protect him. In the early spring of 1888, Mr.. finally felt a little better, and at the insistence of doctors and at the request of close friends decided to go to the Caucasus. But this trip was not destined to come true: on March 19, on the eve of the scheduled departure, at nine o'clock in the morning, sick G., having quietly gone out onto the stairs from his apartment and descended from the 4th floor to the second, rushed into the flight of stairs, badly crashed and broke own leg. At first, G. was fully conscious and, apparently, suffered greatly; in the evening he was transferred to the Red Cross hospital, where by 5 o'clock the next morning he fell asleep and did not wake up again until his death, which followed at 4 o'clock in the morning on March 24, 1888. On March 26, he was buried at the Volkovo cemetery. A huge crowd of people followed the white-glazed coffin of the dear deceased writer; the coffin was carried all the way in the arms of students and writers. An autopsy of the skull did not reveal any painful changes in the brain.

After G.'s death, his Third Book of Stories was published (St. Petersburg, 1888). In the collection “In Memory of V. M. Garshin” (St. Petersburg, 1889), three poems by G. are placed: “The Captive”, “No, power has not been given to me” and “Candle” (p. 6567). In the collection "Hello" (St. Petersburg, 1898), one of his poems in prose was printed; On the day of the 25th anniversary of the writer's death, S. A. Vengerov published in the Russian Word his poem, written under the impression of Turgenev's funeral, and also reprinted the poem mentioned above in prose. A bibliographic list of G.'s works is given by D. D. Yazykov in the Review of the Works of Late Russian Writers, vol. 8, and P. V. Bykov in the collected works of G. in the edition of Marx. Stories G. withstood many editions; they have been translated into various foreign languages ​​and enjoy great success abroad.

G.'s work is extremely subjective. The inner appearance of Garshin the man is so closely connected and so in harmony with the personality of the writer that writing about his work without touching his personality, his character and views is less possible than about any other writer. Almost each of his few stories is, as it were, a particle of his autobiography, a part of his thoughts and experiences, which is why they so vividly capture the reader with their life truth and excite him so much. G. himself created his works, experiencing them "like a disease," and got along with his heroes so much that he experienced their suffering deeply and realistically; that is why the literary work, deeply captivating him, so tired and tormented his nerves.

Not only the writer's friends and his colleagues, but also people who only briefly came into contact with him, unanimously testify to the charmingly sympathetic impression that V. M. Garshin's personality made on them. A. I. Ertel writes: “At the first meeting, you were unusually attracted to him. The sad and thoughtful look of his large “radiant” eyes (eyes that remained sad even when G. laughed), the “childish” smile on his lips, now shy, now clear and good-natured, the “sincere” sound of his voice, something unusual simple and sweet in movements everything in him seduced ... And behind all that, everything he said, everything he thought did not contradict his external circumstances, did not introduce dissonance into this amazingly harmonious nature. It was difficult to find greater modesty, greater simplicity, greater sincerity; in the slightest nuances of thought, as in the slightest gesture, one could notice the same gentleness and truthfulness inherent in him. “I often thought,” said V. A. Fausek, “that if one could imagine such a state of the world when there would be complete harmony in humanity, then it would be if all people had such a character as V. M. He was not capable of any bad mental movement. His main feature was an extraordinary respect for the rights and feelings of other people, an extraordinary recognition of human dignity in every person, not rational, not arising from developed convictions, but unconscious, instinctive, inherent in his nature. The feeling of human equality was inherent in him to the highest degree; always with all people, without exception, he behaved in the same way. But for all his delicacy and gentleness, his truthful and direct nature did not allow not only lies, but even omissions, and when, for example, novice writers asked his opinion about their works, he directly, without softening, expressed it. There was no place for envy in his crystal clear soul, and he always welcomed with sincere enthusiasm the appearance of new talents, which he knew how to guess with his inherent fine artistic flair. So he guessed and greeted A.P. Chekhov. But the most striking feature of his character was his humanity and his painful sensitivity to evil. “His whole being,” says Ertel, “was a protest against violence and that false beauty that so often accompanies evil. At the same time, this organic denial of evil and untruth made him a deeply unhappy and suffering person. Treating everything desecrated and offended with a feeling of passionate and almost painful pity, perceiving with burning pain the impressions of evil and cruel deeds, he could not calm these impressions and this pity with outbursts of anger or indignation or a sense of satisfied revenge, for neither "explosions" was not capable of a "sense of revenge". Thinking about the causes of evil, he only came to the conclusion that “revenge” would not heal him, malice would not disarm him, and cruel impressions lay deep in his soul, with unhealed wounds, serving as sources of that inexplicable sadness that colors his works with an invariable color and which gave his face such a characteristic and touching expression. Especially, however, it must be borne in mind that, "hating evil, G. loved people, and fighting evil, he spared people." But despite all this, despite the attacks of boundless melancholy that captured him from time to time, G. was not and did not become a pessimist, on the contrary, he had “an enormous ability to understand and feel the happiness of life”, and in his sad stories sometimes sparks of genuine good-natured humor slip through. ; but since sadness could never completely freeze in his heart and "damned questions did not cease to torment his soul," he could not completely surrender to the joy of life even in the happiest time of his life and was as happy as "as a person can be happy, who, according to his structure, is inclined to take sweet, if not for bitter, then for not very sweet, ”as he wrote about himself. Painfully sensitive to all the phenomena of life, striving not only theoretically, but also in fact to take on his shoulders part of human suffering and grief, G. could not, of course, treat his talent undemandingly; talent imposed a heavy burden of responsibility on him, and the words in the mouth of a man who wrote with his own blood sound like a heavy groan: “no work can be as hard as the work of a writer, a writer suffers for everyone he writes about.” Protesting with all his being against violence and evil, G., of course, had to portray them in his works, and it sometimes seems fatal that the works of this “quietest” writer are full of horror and filled with blood. In his military stories, G., like Vereshchagin in his paintings, showed all the madness, all the unvarnished horror of war, which are usually obscured by the bright brilliance of resounding victories and glorious deeds. Drawing a close-knit mass of people who are not aware of “why they go thousands of miles away to die in foreign fields”, a mass drawn by “an unknown secret force that is no greater in human life”, a mass “obeying that unknown and unconscious, which for a long time will still lead humanity to a bloody slaughter, the biggest cause of all kinds of troubles and suffering, ”G., at the same time, shows that this mass consists of individual“ unknown and ingloriously ”perishing little people, with a special world of inner experiences and suffering for each . In these stories, G. carries out the idea that a sensitive conscience can never find satisfaction and peace. From the point of view of G., there are no right: all people are to blame for the evil that reigns on earth; there are not and should not be people who would stand apart from life; everyone must participate "in the mutual responsibility of mankind." To live already means to be involved in evil. And people go to war, like G. himself, who have nothing to do with the war, and stands before them, for whom to take the life of even the most insignificant creature, not only consciously, but also inadvertently, seems incredible, the formidable demand of life to kill others, the whole horror of the tragedy is revealed not by Cain, but by “Abel who kills,” as Yu. I. Aikhenvald says. But these people have no thought of killing, they, like Ivanov in the story "Four Days", do not want harm to anyone when they go to fight. The thought that they will have to kill people somehow escapes them. They only imagine how they will put "their chest under the bullets." And Ivanov exclaims with bewilderment and horror at the sight of the fellah he has killed: “Murder, murderer... And who is it? I!” But the thinking, suffering “I” must be erased and destroyed in the war. Maybe that makes a thinking person go to war, that, surrendering to this tiring movement, he will make the tormenting thought freeze that “by movement he will tire evil.” "He who has given himself all over has little grief ... he is no longer responsible for anything. I do not want ... he wants. " Very brightly, G. also emphasized how illusory the hatred between enemies in the war: by a fatal coincidence, the one who was killed remained in his a bottle of water keeps his murderer alive.In this deep sincere humanity and in the fact that in the days of malice the author "loved people and man", lies the reason for the success of G.'s military stories, and not in the fact that they were written at a time when there was no more burning and more touching topic, that is, during the Turkish campaign.

On the basis of the same idea that a person will never be justified before his conscience and that he must take an active part in the fight against evil, the story "Artists" arose, although, on the other hand, in this story one can hear an echo of the dispute that divided the 70- In the 1990s, artists were divided into two camps: some argued that art should please life, while others that it only satisfies itself. Both heroes of this story, the artists Dedov and Ryabinin, seem to live and fight in the soul of the author himself. The first, as a pure esthete, wholly surrendering to the contemplation of the beauty of nature, transferred it to the canvas and believed that this artistic activity was of great importance, like art itself. The morally sensitive Ryabinin cannot so carelessly retreat into his own, also dearly beloved art; he cannot indulge in pleasure when there is so much suffering around; he needs at least first to make sure that all his life he will not serve only the stupid curiosity of the crowd and the vanity of some "get rich stomach on his feet." He needs to see that with his art he really ennobled people, made them seriously think about the dark sides of life; he throws down to the crowd, as a challenge, his "Capercaillie", and he himself almost loses his mind at the sight of this terrible image of human suffering, embodied with artistic truth in his creation. But even after the embodiment of this image, Ryabinin did not find peace, just as G. did not find it, whose sensitive soul was painfully tormented by something that barely affects ordinary people. In morbid delirium, it seemed to Ryabinin that all the evil of the world was embodied in that terrible hammer, which mercilessly strikes the “grouse” sitting in the cauldron in the chest; so it seemed to another madman, the hero of the story "The Red Flower", that all the evil and all the untruth of the world were concentrated in the red poppy flower growing in the hospital garden. In the consciousness obscured by illness, however, love for all mankind shines brightly and the lofty bright idea burns - to sacrifice oneself for the benefit of people, to buy the happiness of mankind with one's death. And the madman (only a madman can come up with such a thought!) decides to uproot all evil from life, decides not only to pluck this flower of evil, but also to put it on his tormented chest in order to take all the poison into his heart. The trophy of this martyr's self-sacrifice - the red flower - he, in his striving for the bright stars, took with him to the grave: the guards could not remove the red flower from his stiff, tightly clenched hand. This story is unquestionably autobiographical; G. writes about him: “It dates back to the time of my sitting at the Saburova dacha; something fantastic comes out, although in fact it is strictly real. If we recall the fact that G. perfectly remembered what he experienced and committed during his painful seizures, it becomes clear that prominent psychiatrists recognize this story as a strikingly true, even scientifically correct, psychological study. But the desire to wash away the crime of other people with his blood is born not only in great heroes and not only in the dreams of madmen: the little man, the humble railway watchman Semyon Ivanov, in the story "Signal", with his blood prevented the evil conceived by Vasily, and this made the latter come to terms, just as “Proud Haggai” humbled himself when he descended to people from his proud loneliness and closely touched human misfortunes and disasters. “Night” depicts the suffering of human conscience, which reached its extreme limits because a person “lived alone, as if standing on a high tower, and his heart hardened, and love for people disappeared.” But at the last minute, when the hero was already quite ready to commit suicide, the ringing of a bell broke through the open window and reminded that, in addition to his narrow little world, there is also “a huge human mass, where you need to go, where you need to love”; reminded him of that book where great words are written: “be like children”, and children do not delimit themselves from those around them, reflection does not make them break away from the stream of life, and they finally have no “debts”. Alexei Petrovich, the hero of the story "Night", realized "that he owes himself all his life" and that now, when "the time for settlement has come, he is bankrupt, malicious, notorious ... He remembered the grief and suffering that he had seen in life, real worldly grief, before which all his torment by oneself meant nothing, and realized that he could no longer live at his own expense and fear, realized that he needed to go there, into this grief, take a part of it for his share, and only then would peace come to his soul. And this bright thought filled the human heart with such delight that this sick heart could not stand it, and the beginning day illuminated “a loaded weapon on the table, and in the middle of the room a human corpse with a peaceful and happy expression on its pale face.”

Pity for fallen humanity, suffering and shame for all the “humiliated and insulted” led G. to the idea, so vividly expressed by Maeterlinck, “that the soul is always innocent”; G. managed to find a particle of this pure innocent soul and show the reader at the extreme stage of a person’s moral fall in the stories “The Incident” and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”; the latter, however, ends with the same sad chord that “for the human conscience there are no written laws, there is no doctrine of insanity,” and a person acquitted by a human court must still bear the penalty for the crime committed.

In the graceful, charming poetic tale Attalea princeps, which was originally written by G. in the form of a poem, the writer draws the desire of a sensitive and tender soul for freedom and the light of moral perfection. This is the longing of the soul, chained to the earth, "for the homeland is inaccessibly distant", and nowhere can one be happy, except for one's native land. But tender dreams and lofty ideals perish from the cold touch of life, perish and fade. Having achieved its goal at the cost of incredible efforts and suffering, having broken the iron frames of the greenhouse, the palm tree exclaims in disappointment: “Just something?” In addition, she should have already died because “everyone was together, and she was alone.” But not as soon as she died, she carried away with her the little grass that loved her so dearly.Life sometimes makes demands to kill the one we love, this idea is even more clearly expressed in the story "Bears".

All G.'s stories are imbued with quiet sadness and have a sad ending: the rose left the nasty toad, which wanted to "devour" it, but bought it at the price of being cut off and placed in the baby's coffin; a joyful meeting of two comrades in a distant foreign city ends with a sad recognition of the unsuitability of the ideal, pure views on life of one of them; and even a cheerful company of small animals, gathered on the lawn to talk about the goals of life, is crushed by the coachman Anton with a heavy boot. But G.’s sadness and even death itself is so enlightened, so pacifying that Mikhailovsky’s lines about G. are involuntarily recalled: “In general, it seems to me that G. does not write with a steel pen, but with some other, soft, gentle, caressing, steel is too rough and hard material. V. M. possessed in the highest degree that “human talent” that Chekhov speaks of, and he attracts the reader with his subtle and elegant simplicity, warmth of feeling, artistic form of presentation, forcing him to forget his small shortcomings, like the abuse of the form of a diary and often found in him by the method of opposition. G. wrote not many stories, and they are not large in volume, “but in his small stories,” in the words of Ch. Uspensky, “the whole content of our life is positively drawn”, and with his works he left an indelible bright mark on our literature.

Collection "In Memory of V. M. Garshin", 1889 Collection "Red Flower", 1889 "Volzhsky Vestnik", 1888, No 101. "Spring", 1888, No 6. " News”, 1888, March 25th. Peterburgskaya Gazeta, 1888, Nos. 83, 84 and 85. Novoye Vremya, 1888, Nos. 4336 and No 4338. Women's Education, 1886, No 67, p. 465. Bulletin of clinical and forensic psychiatry and neuropathology, 1884 (article by Prof. Sikorsky). In the book of N. N. Bazhenov "Psychiatric Conversations on Literary and Social Themes", the article "Garshin's Soul Drama". Volzhsky, "Garshin as a religious type." Andreevsky, "Literary Readings". Mikhailovsky, vol. V². K. Arseniev, “Critical Studies”, vol. ²², p. 226. “Way-Road”, Literary Collection, ed. K. M. Sibiryakova, St. Petersburg, 1893. Skabichevsky, “The History of Modern Literature”. Chukovsky's article in "Russian Thought" for 1909, book. XII. Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary. Y. Aikhenwald, "Silhouettes of Russian Writers", vol. I. D. D. Yazykov, "Review of the Life and Works of Russian Writers", vol. 8, pp. 2831. S. A. Vengerov, “Something new from the literary heritage of Garshin” (“Russian Word”, March 24, 1913). S. Durylin, “The lost works of V. M. Garshin” (“Russian Vedomosti”, March 24, 1913). Review of articles caused by the 25th anniversary of Garshin's death, see Voice of the Past, 1913, May, pp. 233, 244 ("New about Garshin" by N. L. Brodsky).

O. Davydova.

Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich

one of the most prominent writers of the literary generation of the seventies. Genus. February 2, 1855 in the Bakhmut district, in an old noble family. His childhood was not rich in gratifying impressions; in his receptive soul, on the basis of heredity, a hopelessly gloomy outlook on life began to develop very early. This was also facilitated by an unusually early mental development. For seven years, he read Victor Hugo's Notre Dame Cathedral and, rereading it 20 years later, found nothing new in it. For 8 and 9 years he was reading Sovremennik. In 1864, Mr.. G. entered 7 St. Petersburg. gymnasium (now the first real school) and at the end of the course in it, in 1874, he entered the Mining Institute. In 1876, he was already about to go as a volunteer to Serbia, but they did not let him in because he was of military age. On April 12, 1877, Mr.. G. was sitting with a friend and preparing for an exam in chemistry, when they brought a manifesto about the war. At the same moment, the notes were abandoned, G. ran to the institute to apply for dismissal, and a few weeks later he was already in Chisinau as a volunteer of the Volkhov regiment. In the battle on August 11 near Ayaslar, as the official report said, "an ordinary volunteer V. Garshin, with an example of personal courage, led his comrades forward into the attack, during which he was wounded in the leg." The wound was not dangerous, but G. no longer took part in further hostilities. Promoted to an officer, he soon retired, spent six months as a volunteer at the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg University, and then devoted himself entirely to literary activity, which he had begun shortly before with brilliant success. Even before his wound, he wrote the military story "Four Days", published in the October book "Notes of the Fatherland" in 1877 and immediately attracted everyone's attention. The short stories "The Incident", "Coward", "Meeting", "Artists" (also in "Otech. Zap.") that followed "Four Days" strengthened the young writer's fame and promised him a bright future. His soul, however, more and more and more clouded, and at the beginning of 1880 serious signs of a mental disorder appeared, to which he had been subject even before the end of the gymnasium course.At first it was expressed in such manifestations that it was difficult to determine where the high order of the soul ends and where madness begins. after the appointment of Count Loris-Melikov as head of the supreme administrative commission, Garshin went to him late in the evening and, not without difficulty, managed to get a meeting with him. During the conversation, which lasted more than an hour, Garshin made very dangerous confessions and gave very bold advice to pardon and forgive everyone. Loris-Melikov treated him extremely kindly. With the same projects of forgiveness, G. went to Moscow to the chief police chief Kozlov, then went to Tula and walked on foot to Yasnaya Polyana to Leo Tolstoy, with whom he spent the whole night in enthusiastic dreams of how to arrange the happiness of all mankind. But then his mental disorder took such forms that his relatives had to place him in the Kharkov psychiatric clinic. After staying there for some time, G. went to the Kherson village of his maternal uncle, stayed there for 1 1/2 years and, completely recovered, at the end of 1882 arrived in St. Petersburg. In order to have a certain non-literary income, he entered the office of the Anolovsky paper mill, and then received a seat in the general congress of Russian railways. Then he got married and felt generally well, although at times he had periods of deep, causeless longing. At the beginning of 1887, threatening symptoms appeared, the disease developed rapidly, and on March 19, 1888, G. rushed from the 4th floor platform into the gap of the stairs and died on March 24. An expression of deep grief caused by the untimely death of G., were two collections dedicated to his memory: "Red Flower" (St. Petersburg, 1889, edited by M. N. Albov, K. S. Barantsevich and V. S. Likhachev) and “In Memory of V. M. Garshin” (St. Petersburg, 1889, edited by Y. V. Abramov, P. O. Morozov and A. N. Pleshcheev), in the compilation and illustration of which our best literary and artistic forces took part.

In the extremely subjective work of G., that deep spiritual discord was reflected with extraordinary brightness, which is the most characteristic feature of the literary generation of the 70s and distinguishes it both from the straightforward generation of the 60s, and from the new generation, which cares little about ideals and guiding principles of life. According to the main warehouse of his soul, Garshin was an unusually humane nature, and his very first artistic creation “Four Days” reflected precisely this side of his spiritual being. If he himself went to war, it was solely because it seemed shameful to him not to take part in the liberation of the brothers who were languishing under the Turkish yoke. But for him, the first acquaintance with the actual situation of the war was enough to understand the full horror of the extermination of man by man. Adjacent to the Four Days

"Coward" is the same deeply felt protest against the war. The fact that this protest had nothing in common with stereotyped humanity, that it was a cry from the heart, and not a tendency to please the camp that G. joined, can be seen from the largest “military” thing G. “From the notes of an ordinary Ivanov" (excellent screening scene). Everything that G. wrote was, as it were, excerpts from his own diary; he did not want to sacrifice any of the feelings that freely arose in his soul for the sake of anything. Sincere humanity was also reflected in G.'s story "The Incident", where, without any sentimentality, he managed to find the human soul at the extreme stage of moral decline.

Along with the all-pervading sense of humanity in the work of Garshin, as well as in himself, there also lived a deep need for an active struggle against evil. Against this background, one of his most famous stories was created: "Artists". Himself an elegant artist of the word and a subtle connoisseur of art, G., in the person of the artist Ryabinin, showed that a morally sensitive person cannot calmly indulge in the aesthetic delight of creativity when there is so much suffering around. The thirst to exterminate the untruth of the world was most poetic in the surprisingly harmonious fairy tale "The Red Flower", a half-biographical fairy tale, because G., in a fit of madness, dreamed of immediately destroying all the evil that exists on earth. But a hopeless melancholic throughout the warehouse of his spiritual and physical being, G. did not believe either in the triumph of good, or in the fact that victory over evil could bring peace of mind, and even more happiness. Even in the almost humorous fairy tale “That which was not”, the reasoning of a cheerful company of insects, who have gathered on the lawn to talk about the goals and aspirations of life, ends with the coachman coming and crushing all the participants in the conversation with his boot. Ryabinin from the "Artists", who abandoned art, "did not flourish" and went to the people's teacher. And this is not because of the so-called "independent circumstances", but because the interests of the individual, in the end, are also sacred. In the enchantingly poetic tale Attalea princeps, the palm tree, having reached the goal of aspirations and escaping to “freedom”, asks with mournful surprise: “and only that”?

G.'s artistic powers, his ability to paint vividly and expressively are very significant. He wrote little - about a dozen short stories, but they give him a place among the masters of Russian prose. Its best pages are at the same time full of poignant poetry and such deep realism that, for example, in psychiatry, the "Red Flower" is considered clinical picture, down to the smallest details of the relevant reality. Written by G. collected in three small "books" (St. Petersburg, 1882 and later). All of them went through several editions. G.'s stories are also very successful in numerous translations into German, French, English, and other languages.

S. Vengerov.

Big Encyclopedic Dictionary, ed. F. A. Brockhaus and I. A. Efron (1890-1907, 82 + 4 vols. [more precisely, half volumes, but most often the number of half volumes is indicated as a volume, for example, v. 54; more correctly, 43 volumes, of which 2 are additional .])

Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich

izv. Russian writer, author of a number of military. stories: "Four days", "Coward", "Batman and officer", "From the notes of Private Ivanov". Genus. 2 fb. 1855 Father G. served in the Glukhovsky cuirass. etc., and from the impressions of childhood, the future writer has firmly preserved the fast in his memory. roaming with a regiment, a hike. regiments. setting: "huge red horses and huge people in armor, in white and blue tunics and hairy helmets." The Garshin family was military: both the father and the maternal grandfather, and her brothers were military. Their stories had a strong effect on the boy, but the impressions from them paled before the stories of the old. a disabled hussar who served in the Garshin household. Little G. struck up a friendship with this old serviceman and decided to “go to war” himself. This desire took possession of him so strongly that his parents had to forbid the old. the hussar to maintain the heroic spirit in the child; his parents gave him to the 7th St. Petersburg. gymnasium (now the 1st real. school), but the frail and weak boy was full and heroic there. dreams. Just before the end of the course of the gymnasium, in 1873, G. fell ill with acute mental illness. illness and spent almost 1/2 years in the hospital. Having recovered after him, G. not only withstood the release. exams, but also successfully passed will enter. exams at the Mining Institute (1874). He was already in his 2nd year when the war between Serbia and Turkey began, and he decided to go to war as a volunteer, which, however, failed. Being by this time already a principal. the prot-com of the war, he was, however, deeply convinced that if the war is a nationwide grief, the general public. suffering, everyone should share it equally with others. And when on April 12, 1877 Vysoch. manifesto about the war between Russia and Turkey, G. hastily left for Chisinau. Enlisted as a private in the 138th infantry. Volkhovskaya p., he went with him through the whole of Romania. “Never,” G. later recalled, “I was so full in me. sincerely calmness, peace with oneself and such an attitude to life, as when I experienced these hardships and went under bullets to kill people ”(“ From the memories of a row. Ivanova ”). The first battle in which G. took directly. participation, took place at the village of Ezerdzhi (it is described by G. in the story “From the memories of a row. Ivanov”; it also served as the background for the story “Four days on the battlefield”). Following. battle, at Ayaslyar (described in the points “On the Ayaslyar Case”), G. was wounded by a bullet right through the lion. leg, and in the order for the regiment it was noted that “an ordinary volunteer Vsevolod G. is an example of a personal. courage led his comrades into the attack and thus contributed to the success of the case. For the Ayaslyar case G. was introduced to the production of officers and sent for treatment to his homeland, to Kharkov. Here in the state-le he sketched his first story ("Four Days"), conceived back in Bulgaria and published in October. book. "Father. Notes ”1878. He drew general attention to the young. writer. The stories that followed him ("Coward", "Incident", "Meeting", "Artists", "Night", etc.) strengthened G.'s fame. He wrote slowly, creatively. The job cost him a lot. nervous tension and ended with the return of souls. ailment. In the period 18831888. he wrote: "Red Flower", "Notes of Private Ivanov", "Nadezhda Nikolaevna", "Signal" and "The Tale of the Proud Ageya". Recent works were written by G. already in a depressed state. Longing, insomnia and the consciousness of the impossibility of continuing such a life did not leave him. On the eve of his departure abroad, after a tedious night spent without sleep, G. left his apartment, walked several times. steps up the stairs and rushed over the railing down. 24 mri. 1888 he was gone. An outstanding place in the work of G. occupy his military. stories, and in them the war, its events and its psyche are of predominant importance. Theoretical The attitude of the “Garshinsky hero” towards war is directly negative: war, in his opinion, is evil, and he treats it with “immediate. a feeling outraged by the mass of spilled blood” (“Coward”); war “murder” (“Four days”), “wild inhuman dump” (“From the notes of a row. Ivanova”). But at the same time, "the war decisively haunts" the Garshin hero ("Coward"). Military telegrams produce "a much stronger effect on him than on those around him." His thought does not find support in feeling. "Something not subject to definition sits inside me, discusses my situation and forbids me to shirk war as a common grief, a common suffering." This sharp split in the feelings and thoughts of the Garshin hero and his heroes in general must be borne in mind, for it is the cornerstone. the stone of all their worldview and the source of many that seem in the first. view of irreconcilable contradictions. Feeling in them is always more active than thought, and life's creativity comes out of it, and reflective thought beats in the snares of feeling, always deeply sincere, although somewhat affected. It is only by the feeling of his solidarity with the suffering that the Garshin hero goes to war, into its very hell, and it also draws him to the immediate surroundings. participation in what his mind until recently called "human slaughter". In battle, he was also possessed by a new, hitherto unknown, unexperienced feeling that did not correspond to his previous theoretical. reasoning: “There wasn’t that physical. fear, which takes possession of a person at night, in a back alley, when meeting with a robber; there was a complete clear consciousness of the inevitability and proximity of death. And this consciousness did not stop people, did not make them think about flight, but led them forward. The bloodthirsty instincts did not wake up, I did not want to go forward to kill someone, but there was an inevitable impulse to go forward at all costs, and the thought of what to do during the battle could not be expressed in words: you need to kill, but rather: one must die. (“From the reproduction row. Ivanov”). In the words of the oath “not sparing the stomach”, at the sight of the rows of “gloomy people ready for battle”, the Garshin hero himself felt that these were “not empty words”, “and disappeared without a trace before the ghost of death, looking straight into the eyes, and caustic , a reflective thought of fear, and fear. The terrible has recently become inevitable, inevitable and not terrible. Thus the “personal” dissolves in the general war, and the big external world absorbs the small individual “I”, and this psychological. the process is beautifully and subtly revealed in the military. G.'s stories, of which the first two appeared during the life of the writer (T. I. SPb., 1882. T. 2. SPb., 1887), went through a number of editions. G.'s letters to his mother from the theater of war from Bulgaria were published in the journal. "Rus. Review”, 1895, No 24. Two letters are dedicated to G.'s memory. art. collection: "In memory of V. M. Garshin" and "Red Flower". SPb., 1889 (about G. as a military writer, see V. A. Apushkin’s article in “Military Sat.” for 1902 “The War of 187778 in Correspondence and Novel”; “About G. about the war "see "Priaz. Kray" 1895 No. 93. About G., as a person and a writer: TO.TO.Arseniev. Critical sketches; A.M.Skabichevsky. Works. T. VI. T.I. H.TO.Mikhailovsky. Works. T. VI; WITH.A.Andreevsky. Literary essays; M.P.Protopopov. Liter. crit. characteristics; G.AND.Uspensky. Works. T. XI. Ed. Fuchs).

"Military Encyclopedia" edited by K. I. Velichko, V. F. Novitsky, A. V. Schwartz and others (published by I. V. Sytin, vols. 1-18, P., 1911-1915, unfinished)

Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich

fiction writer; R. February 2, 1855; took his own life in a fit of mental illness (thrown himself down a flight of stairs) on March 19, 1888.

Russian Biographical Dictionary (1896-1918, published by the Russian Historical Society, 25 vols., unfinished; the publication was initially carried out under the supervision of A. A. Polovtsov [Polovtseva; 1832-1909], who was the chairman of the Society since 1978)

Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich

Rod. in an old noble family. He spent his childhood in a military environment (his father was an officer). Already as a child, Garshin was extremely nervous and impressionable, which was facilitated by too early mental development (later he suffered from bouts of nervous breakdown). He studied at the Mining Institute, but did not complete the course. The war with the Turks interrupted his studies: he volunteered for the army, was wounded in the leg; after retiring, he devoted himself to literary activity. In 1880, shocked by the death penalty of a young revolutionary, G. became mentally ill and was placed in a mental hospital. In the eighties, the seizures became more frequent, and in one of the attacks he threw himself into a flight of stairs from the fourth floor and crashed to death.

G. entered the literary field in 1876 with the story "Four Days", which immediately made him famous. This work clearly expresses the protest against the war, against the extermination of man by man. A number of stories are devoted to the same motif: “Barmen Officer”, “Ayaslyar Case”, “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov” and “Coward”; the hero of the latter is tormented by heavy reflection and hesitation between the desire to "sacrifice himself for the people" and the fear of an unnecessary and senseless death. G. also wrote a number of essays, where social evil and injustice are already drawn against the backdrop of peaceful life. "Incident" and "Nadezhda Nikolaevna" touch on the theme of the "fallen" woman. In "Attalea Princeps" in the fate of a palm tree, torn to freedom and dying under a cold sky, G. symbolized the fate of terrorists. In 1883, one of his most remarkable stories, "The Red Flower", appeared. His hero, mentally ill, fights against world evil, which, as it seems to him, was embodied in a red flower in the garden: it is enough to pluck it and all the evil of the world will be destroyed. In The Artists, Garshin, exposing the cruelty of capitalist exploitation, raises the question of the role of art in bourgeois society and fights against the theory of pure art. The essence of the capitalist system with its dominant personal egoism is clearly expressed in the story "Meeting". G. wrote a number of fairy tales: "That which was not", "The Frog Traveler", etc., where the same Garshin theme of evil and injustice is developed in the form of a fairy tale full of sad humor.

G. legitimized in literature a special art form, the short story, which was later fully developed by Chekhov. The plots of the short story by G. are simple. It is always built on one main motive, deployed according to a strictly logical plan. The composition of his stories, surprisingly complete, reaches an almost geometric certainty. The absence of action, complex conflicts is characteristic of G. Most of his works are written in the form of diaries, letters, confessions (for example, "The Incident", "Artists", "Coward", "Nadezhda Nikolaevna", etc.). The number of actors is very limited.

The drama of action is replaced in Garshin by the drama of thought revolving in a vicious circle of "damned questions", the drama of experiences, which are the main material for G.

It should be noted the deep realism of Garshin's manner. His work is characterized by the accuracy of observation and the certainty of expressions of thought. He has few metaphors, comparisons, instead, a simple designation of objects and facts. A short, polished phrase, with no subordinate clauses in the descriptions. "Hot. The sun burns. The wounded man opens his eyes, sees bushes, a high sky” (“Four Days”). A wide coverage of social phenomena did not work out for G., just as a quieter life was not possible for a writer of a generation for whom the main need was to “endure”. He could depict not a large outside world, but a narrow "own". And this determined all the features of his artistic manner. "Own" for the generation of advanced intelligentsia of the 70s. These are damned questions of social untruth. The sick conscience of the penitent nobleman, not finding an effective way out, always hit one point: the consciousness of responsibility for the evil that reigns in the field of human relations, for the oppression of man by man - the main theme D. The evil of the old serfdom and the evil of the emerging capitalist system equally fill the pages of Garshin's stories. The heroes of G. are saved from the consciousness of social injustice, from the consciousness of responsibility for it, just as he himself did, leaving for the war, so that there, if not to help the people, then at least to share their hard fate with them ... This was temporary salvation from pangs of conscience, redemption of a penitent nobleman (“They all went to their death calm and free from responsibility...” “Memoirs of Private Ivanov”). But this was not the solution of a social problem. The writer did not know the way out. And therefore, all his work is permeated with deep pessimism. G.'s significance lies in the fact that he was able to keenly feel and artistically embody social evil.

Bibliography: I. First book. short stories, St. Petersburg, 1885; Second book. short stories, St. Petersburg, 1888; Third book. short stories, St. Petersburg, 1891; Sochin. Garshin in I vol., 12th ed. Lit Fund, St. Petersburg, 1909; The same, in app. to the journal "Niva" for 1910; Stories with biogr., written. A. M. Skabichevsky, ed. Lit-th fund, P., 1919; Sobr. sochin., ed. Ladyzhnikova, Berlin, 1920; Selected stories, Guise, M., 1920; Stories, ed. Yu. G. Oksman (ready for publication in Giza ed.).

II. Collections about Garshin: "Red Flower", St. Petersburg, 1889; "In memory of Garshin", ed. magazine "Pantheon of Literature", St. Petersburg, 1889; App. to collection sochin. Garshin (ed. "Niva") memoirs of V. Akimov, V. Bibikov, A. Vasiliev, E. Garshin, M. Malyshev, N. Reinhardt, G. Uspensky, V. Fausek and autobiographer, Garshin's note; Arseniev K.K., Critical studies, vol. II, St. Petersburg, 1888; Mikhailovsky N. K., Sochin., vol. VI; Skabichevsky A. M., Sochin., vol. II; Protopopov M., Literary-critical. character, St. Petersburg, 1896; 2nd ed., St. Petersburg, 1898; Zlatovratsky N., From literary memoirs, Sat. "Brotherly help", M., 1898; Andreevsky S. A., Literary essays, St. Petersburg, 1902; Bazhenov, Psychiatric conversations, M., 1903; Volzhsky, Garshin as a religious type; Essays on a realistic worldview, 1904, p. Shulyatikov "Restoration of destroyed aesthetics"; Box N. I., Garshin, "Education", 1905; XI XII; Aikhenvald Yu. I., Silhouettes of Russian writers, c. I, M., 1906; Chukovsky K.I., O Vsev. Garshine, "Russian. thought", 1909, XII and in book. "Critical Stories. V. G. Korolenko, Garshin, History of Russian. Literature, ed. "World"

Biography and episodes of life Vsevolod Garshin. When born and died Vsevolod Garshin, memorable places and dates of important events in his life. writer quotes, Photo and video.

Years of life of Vsevolod Garshin:

born February 14, 1855, died April 5, 1888

Epitaph

“Whose conscience hurts most deeply for our lies,
Those longer could not drag out life between us.
And we live in darkness, and the darkness has overcome us.
It’s hard for us without you, we are ashamed to live without you!”
From a poem by Nikolai Minsky dedicated to the memory of Garshin

Biography

Dramas and tragedies in the life of Vsevolod Garshin began from early childhood. Already at the age of five, he became an unwitting participant in the family alteration. Vsevolod's mother, a typical sixties woman, fell in love with the leader of the revolutionary movement Pyotr Zavadsky and left the family, taking her young son with her. Garshin's father, a representative of an old noble family, did not want to endure betrayal and complained about Zavadsky to the police. As a result of the denunciation, the latter was sent into exile, and the woman, in order to stay closer to her lover, followed him and settled in St. Petersburg. Of course, these events were reflected in the later life of Vsevolod Garshin, significantly affecting his health and worldview.

Entering the Mining Institute, Vsevolod never finishes his studies. He goes to the army and gets wounded in a combat battle. Although the wound was not serious, military service had to be forgotten. Having received an officer's rank, he has to retire. After being discharged from the army, Garshin attends lectures at St. Petersburg University for some time, and then decides to devote himself exclusively to literary activity.

In 1877, Vsevolod Garshin became famous when he made his debut with his work Four Days. In the story, the author expresses a sincere protest against violence, war and the extermination of man by man. In the future, he wrote a number of works devoted to this topic. Peru Garshin also owns fairy tales for children, which, in fact, still carry the main idea - the need to fight injustice in this world.

But while Garshin's writing reputation is growing and getting stronger, the writer's mental health is only getting worse. So, after the public execution of Prince Molodetsky, whose views Garshin was an adherent of, anxiety states begin to visit him. The Russian prose writer spends about two years in a psychiatric hospital, and the depression seems to be receding. After leaving the hospital, Garshin marries, and calls the following years the happiest in his life. It was during this period that his best story, “The Red Flower,” came out from under his pen.

True, Garshin's happiness does not last long: bouts of longing again overcome him. On April 5, 1888, being in a depressed state, the writer attempts suicide - he throws himself into a flight of stairs from the fourth floor. However, he does not die immediately, but falls into a coma for several days. Garshin's death occurred on the fifth day of the coma, the cause of Garshin's death was injuries received from the fall. The funeral of Vsevolod Garshin took place at the Literary bridges of the Volkovsky cemetery in St. Petersburg.

life line

February 14, 1855 Date of birth of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin.
1864 Admission to the St. Petersburg 7th gymnasium.
1872 Transition to a real school.
1874 Admission to the Mining Institute.
1877 Creative debut: the release of the story "Four days".
1882 Entering the civil service at the Gostiny Dvor.
1883 Marriage with Nadezhda Zolotilova.
1885 The beginning of cooperation with the publishing house "Posrednik".
March 30, 1888 Suicide attempt.
April 5, 1888 Date of Garshin's death.
April 7, 1888 Date of Garshin's funeral.

Memorable places

1. The village of Bakhmutskoye, Yekaterinoslav province (now Donetsk region), where Garshin was born.
2. Mining University in St. Petersburg, where Vsevolod Garshin studied.
3. The village of Pereezdnoye, where the estate-museum of Vsevolod Garshin and the monument to Garshin are located.
4. Monument to Garshin in Starobelsk (at the intersection of Oktyabrskaya and Chernyshevsky streets).
5. "Literary Bridges" in St. Petersburg, where Garshin is buried.

Episodes of life

It is believed that it was the outstanding prose writer Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin who legitimized the novel genre in Russian literature. Subsequently, Anton Chekhov chose this artistic genre to realize his literary ideas.

The beginning of Garshin's literary work falls on the period of the height of the struggle between the populists and the autocracy. The tense revolutionary reality had a hard effect on the poor health of an already impressionable writer. Vsevolod Garshin fell into prolonged depression every time he learned about a new state reprisal against another revolutionary.

Covenant

“Often one powerful artistic image puts into our soul more than many years of life have produced; we realize that the best and most precious part of our self does not belong to us, but to that spiritual milk, to which the powerful hand of creativity brings us closer.

The plot of the writer Vsevolod Garshin

condolences

“We are ashamed to live without him.”
Nikolai Minsky, poet

“He has a special talent - human. He had a fine, magnificent instinct for pain in general."
Anton Chekhov, writer

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Biography, life story of Garshin Vsevolod Mikhailovich

Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin is a famous Russian prose writer of the second half of the 19th century, who also studied art and wrote critical articles.

Childhood and youth

Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin was born in 1855 on February 2 (according to the new style - on the 14th). This event took place in a family estate called Pleasant Valley, which was located in the Yekaterinoslav province and belonged to the officer family of the Russified Tatar Mikhail Yegorovich Garshin, who traced his ancestry to a Murza from the Golden Horde named Gorshi. The mother of little Seva was a typical "sixties". She was keenly interested in literature and current politics, and was completely fluent in French and German. Naturally, it was she who had a huge influence on her son.

At the age of five, Seva experienced a great family drama, which had a catastrophic effect on the boy's health and greatly influenced his attitude and character formation. Vsevolod's mother fell in love with P.V. Zavadsky, a young man who was the tutor of her older children, and left her family. It turned out that this man was the organizer of a secret society, and Garshin's father, having learned about this, informed the police. The oppositionist was arrested by the Okhrana, and he was exiled to Petrozavodsk. The unfaithful wife moved to St. Petersburg in order to be able to visit the exile. It is not surprising that the child was at that time a subject of contention for the parents. Seva lived with his father until 1864, and later his mother took him and sent him to a gymnasium in St. Petersburg.

In 1864-74, Garshin studied at the gymnasium. It was then that he began to write poems and stories in which he imitated Homer's Iliad and the famous Hunter's Notes. In the senior classes of the gymnasium, Garshin became interested in natural science, this was facilitated by friendly relations with the talented teacher Alexander Yakovlevich Gerd, who was a well-known popularizer of the natural sciences. On the advice of this man, Vsevolod entered the Mining Institute, and also listened with great interest to the lectures of Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev at St. Petersburg University.

CONTINUED BELOW

Literary activity

Garshin began to publish in 1876 (while still a student). His first published work was an essay entitled "The True History of the N-th Zemstvo Assembly", written in the spirit of satire. Then, after rapprochement with the Wanderers, Vsevolod wrote a number of articles about their work, paying special attention to the canvases presented at exhibitions. After the start of a new Russian-Turkish war, the student quit his studies at the Mining Institute and went to the front as a volunteer, participated in the Bulgarian campaign, subsequently embodying his impressions in a number of stories that were published in 1877-79.

In a battle near the village of Ayaslar, Garshin was wounded and, after treatment in the hospital, was sent on leave for a whole year home. He came to St. Petersburg already with a firm conviction that he would be engaged exclusively in literary activities. Six months later, Vsevolod received the rank of officer, and when the war ended in 1878, he was transferred to the reserve.

Garshin continued his education as a volunteer at the Faculty of History and Philology at the University of St. Petersburg.

Attitude to revolutionary events

The young writer continued to write and publish stories in which he posed the problem of choice for the intelligentsia: whether to follow the path of personal enrichment or choose the path of service to his people full of hardships.

Garshin did not accept the revolutionary terror that broke out in Russia in the late 70s. He perceived extremely acutely and painfully all the events connected with this. The inconsistency of the methods of revolutionary struggle employed by the Narodniks became more and more obvious to him. The writer expressed in the story "Night" the tragic attitude of the contemporary young generation.

Illness and death

In the early 70s, doctors diagnosed Vsevolod Mikhailovich with a mental disorder. In 1880, Garshin made an unsuccessful attempt to defend the revolutionary Ippolit Osipovich Mlodetsky, who made an attempt on the life of Count Loris-Melnikov. The execution of Hippolytus, which followed soon after, shocked the writer, and his mental illness worsened. Garshin had to spend about two years in a psychiatric clinic.

Having restored some peace of mind, Vsevolod Mikhailovich returned in May 1882 to St. Petersburg. He returned to literary creativity, published an essay entitled "Petersburg Letters", in which he deeply reflected on Petersburg as the only spiritual homeland for all of the domestic intelligentsia. Garshin even entered the civil service and married in 1883 a young female doctor, N. Zolotilova. It was, apparently, the happiest period in his short life. It was then that Vsevolod Mikhailovich wrote his best story, The Red Flower.

However, already in 1887, Garshin again experienced a severe depression, and he left the public service. Soon there were also quarrels between his mother and young wife. These events could not but lead to a tragic outcome. Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin committed suicide. On April 5 (March 24 old style), 1888, he threw himself down a flight of stairs.