Evgeny Chirikov
| Evgeny Chirikov | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
August 5, 1864 Kazan, Russia |
| Died | January 18, 1932 (aged 67) Prague, Czechoslovakia |
| Genre | fiction, drama |
| Notable works |
The Jews The Life of Tarkhanov |
Evgeny Nikolayevich Chirikov (Russian: Евге́ний Никола́евич Чи́риков), 5 August 1864 – 18 January 1932, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and publicist.
Chirikov was born in Kazan into a gentry family. His father, a former office in the Imperial Russian Army, was a policeman. He studied mathematics at Kazan University, and became interested in populist ideas, joining revolutionary student circles and an early Marxist group founded in Kazan by N. E. Fedoseyev. He was expelled in 1887 for taking part in student demonstrations, and exiled to Nizhni Novgorod. He was arrested in January 1888 for writing and publicly performing an antimonarchist poem, and in 1892 for his involvement in a group of young followers of Narodnaya Volya. He lived in several cities during this time, always under police surveillance.
His first articles appeared in the Kazan newspaper Volga Herald in 1885. He published his first story Red in January 1886, in the same paper. That same year, he met Maxim Gorky while living in Tsaritsyn. A few months later, after moving to Astrakhan, he met radical writer and critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky. He continued to publish his works in the provincial papers until 1894, when one of his stories was accepted by Nikolay Mikhaylovsky for publication in the Saint Petersburg magazine Russkoye Bogatstvo. This publication allowed Chirikov to begin publishing in other major magazines, including Vestnik Evropy and Severny Vestnik.
In the 1890s he moved to Samara, a place that exercised a strong influence on his ideological and artistic evolution. He re-examined his old populist views and maintained steady contact with the marxist movement, and though he never became deeply involved, he continued to hold democratic views. His works of the period give truthful and sympathetic depictions of the life of the peasants and their struggles with poverty and government indifference, and the stale and boring lives of lower and middle-class people living in small towns and cities. He was considered as a successor to the Narodnik writers of the 1860s, such as Nikolai Uspensky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich Reshetnikov, and Alexander Levitov. His works of the late 1890s and early 1900s began to be critical of the Populist movement, drawing negative criticism from Mikhaylovsky and fellow Populist Alexander Skabichevsky, and breaking Chirikov's connection with Russkoye Bogatstvo. In 1900-1901 Chirikov contributed to the magazine Life, which also published works by Gorky and Vladimir Lenin.
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