Nikolai Uspensky
| Nikolai Uspensky | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
May 31, 1837 Stupino, Tula Governorate, Russian Empire |
| Died | November 2, 1889 (aged 52) Moscow, Russian Empire |
| Occupation | Writer, teacher |
| Period | 1860s–1880s |
| Relatives | Gleb Uspensky |
Nikolai Vasilyevich Uspensky (Russian: Никола́й Васи́льевич Успе́нский; May 31, 1837 – November 2, 1889) was a Russian writer, and a cousin of fellow writer Gleb Uspensky. Uspensky wrote extensively about the realities of peasant life in rural Russia around the time of the Emancipation Act of 1861 by Tsar Alexander II, achieving critical and commercial success. After experiencing increasing alienation and career decline, Uspensky died on November 2, 1889, when he committed suicide.
Nikolai Vasilyevich Uspensky was born on 31 May (Old Style 18 May), 1837, in Stupino, a small village in Tula Governorate, Russian Empire, to a local clergyman. He had seven siblings, brothers Ivan, Alexander and Mikhail, and sisters Anna, Maria, Elizaveta and Seraphima. Uspensky grew up in poverty, surrounded alcoholism-driven violence, but frequently socialized with peasant children and often labored with them. "While me and brother Ivan were aspiring to the masters' children's lifestyle, Nikolai was different: he ploughed, sawn, mowed and was often making nightwatch trips into the fields," his brother Mikhail later remembered.
In 1848, Uspensky joined the Tula seminary where he was flogged on a daily basis. According to Korney Chukovsky,
Executions of this sort were the only pedagogical method known in this school. Flogging, vodka, bribery, cards, the atmosphere of servility and betrayal, outward piety and secret debauchery—such were the basic elements of Nikolai's upbringing for more than ten years. One thing he could take refuge in were wild shenanigans... in which his brilliant talents, otherwise pent up, could be realized to some extent. For, despite things that were going on around him his mirth was fountain-like, making him perform every minute some kind of trick, practical joke or mystification.
The only person who took interest in Uspensky's life was his uncle, Ivan Uspensky, a wealthy Tula-based state official. Ivan had a son, future writer Gleb, who was forbidden to communicate with "dirty bursaks" (as pupils of seminary [bursa] were known), and who every morning was taken to school in a carriage. This in itself provided enough reason for Nikolai to hate his cousin Gleb. "We are brothers with him, in law, of course. Two Lazaruses, he—the rich one, me the poor. He a son to a local government secretary, me a country boy, son of a poor priest. He rolled like cheese in butter in his youth, I gnawed my crust. He left school with all kinds of diplomas, I remained an undergraduate forever," Nikolai Uspensky later was quoted to say.
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