Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (February 2 (14), 1855, Pleasant Valley estate, Bakhmut district, Ekaterinoslav province — March 24 (April 5), 1888, St. Petersburg) — Russian writer, poet, art critic.

Biography.

The Garshins are an old noble family of Russified Tatars, descended, according to legend, from Murza Gorsha (or Garsha), a native of the Golden Horde under Ivan III. He spent his childhood in a military environment (father Mikhail Egorovich Garshin (1817-1870) was an officer). Garshin’s mother, a “typical sixties”, interested in literature and politics, fluent in German and French, had a huge influence on her son. Garshin’s teacher was P.V. Zavadsky, a leader in the revolutionary movement of the 1860s. Garshin’s mother will subsequently go to him and accompany him into exile. This family drama affected Garshin’s health and attitude.

Since 1864, he studied at the St. Petersburg 7th Gymnasium, which in 1868 was transformed into a real gymnasium (later the St. Petersburg First Real School). After graduating from a real gymnasium in 1874, Garshin entered the Mining Institute, but did not graduate. The war with the Ottoman Empire interrupted his studies: he volunteered in the active army, took part in hostilities, and was wounded in the leg. After the war he was promoted to officer rank and retired.

Already as a child, Garshin was extremely nervous and impressionable, which was facilitated by too early mental development. Subsequently, he suffered from attacks of nervous breakdown and, at the age of 33, committed suicide by throwing himself down a flight of stairs (since the fall was from a small height, death occurred only after several days of agony). The writer is buried on the Literary Bridges, the museum-necropolis of St. Petersburg.

Brother — Evgeny Mikhailovich Garshin (1860-1931). Educator, writer, critic, public figure, publisher. He graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University in 1884 and taught Russian literature at one of the St. Petersburg gymnasiums. His articles and essays were published in the magazines “Historical Bulletin”, “Russian Wealth”, “Russian School”, “Zvezda”, Bulletin of Fine Arts, as well as the newspapers “Golos”, “Birzhevye Vedomosti”, and other publications. Since 1901, he has been the director of the Taganrog Commercial School and an active state councilor. E. M. Garshin is the author of the books “Novgorod Antiquities”, “The Social and Educational Significance of Archeology”, “Critical Experiments”, “Russian Literature of the 19th Century” and some others.

Creation.

Garshin made his debut in 1877 with the story “Four Days,” which immediately made him famous. This work clearly expresses a protest against war, against the extermination of man by man. A number of stories are dedicated to the same motif: “The Orderly and the Officer”, “The Ayaslyar Case”, “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov” and “The Coward”; the hero of the latter suffers from heavy reflection and oscillations between the desire to “sacrifice himself for the people” and the fear of unnecessary and meaningless death. Garshin also wrote a number of essays where social evil and injustice are depicted against the backdrop of peaceful life.

“Incident” and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” touch on the theme of a “fallen” woman. In 1883, one of his most remarkable stories appeared, “The Red Flower.” His hero, a mentally ill person, fights the world’s evil, which, as it seems to him, is embodied in a red flower in the garden: just pick it and all the evil in the world will be destroyed. In “Artists” Garshin raises the question of the role of art in society and the possibility of benefiting from creativity; contrasting art with “real subjects” with “art for art’s sake”, he is looking for ways to combat social injustice. The essence of the author’s contemporary society, with personal egoism dominating it, is vividly depicted in the story “Meeting.” In the allegory tale “Attalea princeps” about a palm tree rushing towards the sun through the roof of a greenhouse and dying under the cold sky, Garshin symbolized the beauty of the struggle for freedom, although a doomed struggle. Garshin wrote a number of fairy tales and stories for children: “What Didn’t Happen”, “The Frog Traveler”, where the same Garshin theme of evil and injustice is filled with sad humor; “The Tale of Proud Haggai” (a retelling of the legend of Haggai), “The Signal” and others.

Garshin legitimized a special artistic form in literature — the short story, which was later fully developed by Anton Chekhov. The plots of Garshin’s short stories are simple; they are always built on one basic plan, developed according to a strictly logical plan. The composition of his stories, surprisingly complete, achieves almost geometric certainty. The lack of action and complex collisions is typical for Garshin. Most of his works are written in the form of diaries, letters, confessions (for example, “Incident”, “Artists”, “Coward”, “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”, etc.). The number of characters is very limited.

1877

The drama of action is replaced in Garshin by the drama of thought, revolving in the vicious circle of “damned questions”, the drama of experiences, which are the main material for Garshin.
It is necessary to note the deep realism of Garshin’s manner. His work is characterized by precision of observation and definite expression of thought. He has few metaphors and comparisons; instead, he uses simple designations of objects and facts. A short, polished phrase, without subordinate clauses in descriptions. «Hot. The sun is burning. The wounded man opens his eyes and sees bushes, a high sky” (“Four Days”). Garshin could not achieve a wide coverage of social phenomena, just as the writer of the generation for whom the main need was to “endure” was not able to have a calmer life. He could not depict the big outside world, but the narrow “his own.” And this determined all the features of his artistic style.

“Own” for the generation of advanced intelligentsia of the 1870s were damned questions of social untruth. The sick conscience of the repentant 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 — Garshin’s main theme. The evil of the old serfdom and the evil of the emerging capitalist system equally fill the pages of Garshin’s stories with pain. Garshin’s heroes are saved from the consciousness of social injustice, from the consciousness of responsibility for it, just as he himself did when he went to war, so that there, if not to help the people, then at least to share their difficult fate with them…
This was a temporary salvation from the pangs of conscience, the atonement of the repentant nobleman (“They all went to their deaths calm and free from responsibility…” — “Memoirs of Private Ivanov”). But this was not a solution to the social problem. The writer did not know a way out. And therefore all his work is permeated with deep pessimism. Garshin’s significance lies in the fact that he knew how to acutely feel and artistically embody social evil.

Data.
The models for the image of the prince in Ilya Efimovich Repin’s painting “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan November 16, 1581” were the writer Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin and the artist Grigory Grigorievich Myasoedov.

Garshin served as Repin’s model for the protagonist of the film “They Didn’t Expect”