Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov
| Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov | |
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Portrait by Pyotr Borel
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| Born |
November 6, 1818 Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Empire |
| Died | February 13, 1883 (aged 64) Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Empire |
| Pen name | Andrey Pechersky |
| Alma mater | Kazan University |
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Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov (alias Andrey Pechersky, Russian: Па́вел Ива́нович Ме́льников (Андре́й Пече́рский), 1818, Nizhny Novgorod—1883) was a Russian writer, best known for his novels In the Forests and On the Hills, which describe the unique life of Transvolga and use its dialects.
Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov was born in Nizhny Novgorod to a noble family of moderate means and spent his early years in Semyonov, a small provincial town. His childhood impressions, pictures of Transvolga, its common people's ways of life had a strong impact upon his later worldview.
In 1834 he enrolled at the Kazan University's philological faculty and graduated in 1837. As a student he became interested in the works of Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol, as well as Vissarion Belinsky's critical essays. Melnikov was about to embark upon the academic career at the University when for some kind of wrongdoing (the nature of which remains unknown) he was deported to Perm to start work there as a teacher of history and statistics. In 1838 he was transferred to Nizhny where he spent the major part of his life. From his teens, Melnikov's major interests were the economics and history of Russia.
As a writer, Melnikov debuted in 1839 in Otechestvennye Zapiski with the series of sketches called From Tambov Governorate to Siberia: The Traveller's Notes. But his first stab at fiction, a short story "About Who Epidor Perfilievich Was and Which Preparation Were Taken for his Birthday", published by Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1840, proved to be a failure; critics dismissed it as a poor imitation of Gogol. Dismayed, Melnikov stopped writing fiction for the next 12 years.
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