Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin Born February 4, 1873, Lipetsk Region Date of death January 16, 1954, Moscow — Russian, Soviet writer and philosopher. In his work, he explores the most important issues of human existence, reflecting on the meaning of life, religion, the relationship between men and women, and the connection between man and nature.
Biography
Mikhail Prishvin was born on January 23 (February 4), 1873, in the Yelets district of the Oryol province (now the Yelets district of the Lipetsk region), in the family estate of Khrushchevo-Levshino, which was once bought by his grandfather, a successful Yelets merchant Dmitry Ivanovich Prishvin. There were five children in the family (Alexander, Nikolai, Sergei, Lydia and Mikhail).
Mother — Maria Ivanovna (1842-1914, née Ignatova). The father of the future writer, Mikhail Dmitrievich Prishvin, after the division of the family, received the estate of Konstandylovo and a lot of money. He lived like a lord, bred Orlov trotters, won prizes at horse races, was engaged in gardening and flowers, and was an avid hunter.
One day, the father lost at cards, so he had to sell the stud farm and mortgage the estate. He did not survive the shock and died, paralyzed. In the novel «Kashcheev Chain» Prishvin tells how his father drew «blue beavers» for him with his healthy hand — a symbol of a dream that he could not achieve. Nevertheless, the mother of the future writer, Maria Ivanovna, who came from the Old Believer Ignatov family and was left with five children on her hands after the death of her husband and with an estate mortgaged under a double mortgage, managed to rectify the situation and give the children a decent education.
In 1882, Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin was sent to study at a village primary school, and in 1883 he was transferred to the first grade of the Yelets Classical Gymnasium. He did not excel at the gymnasium — in 6 years of study he only reached the fourth grade, and in this class he had to be held back for another year, because of a conflict with the geography teacher V. V. Rozanov — the future famous philosopher — he was expelled from the gymnasium «for insolence to the teacher». He had to finish his education at the Tyumen Aleksandrovsky Real School (1893), where the future writer moved under the wing of his uncle, the merchant I. I. Ignatov. Not giving in to the persuasion of his childless uncle to inherit his business, he went to continue his education at the Riga Polytechnic. For participating in the activities of a student Marxist circle, he was arrested and imprisoned, and after his release he went abroad. In 1900-1902 he studied at the agronomy department of Leipzig University, after which he received a diploma in land surveying. Returning to Russia, he served as an agronomist until 1905, wrote several books and articles on agronomy — «Potatoes in vegetable garden and field culture» and others. Prishvin’s first story «Sashok» was published in 1906. Having left his profession as an agronomist, he became a correspondent for various newspapers. His passion for ethnography and folklore led to the decision to travel around the European North. Prishvin spent several months in the Vygovsky region (the environs of Lake Vygozero in Pomorie). Thirty-eight folk tales that he wrote down then were included in the collection of ethnographer N. E. Onchukov «Northern Tales». In May 1907, Prishvin traveled along the Sukhona and Northern Dvina to Arkhangelsk. He then traveled along the White Sea coast to Kandalaksha, crossed the Kola Peninsula, visited the Solovetsky Islands, and returned to Arkhangelsk by sea in July. After this, the writer set off on a fishing boat on a journey across the Arctic Ocean and, having visited Kanin Nos, arrived in Murmansk, where he stayed in one of the fishing camps. Then he went by steamship to Norway and, having rounded the Scandinavian Peninsula, returned to St. Petersburg. Based on his impressions from the trip to the Olonetsk province, Prishvin created a book of essays in 1907, “In the Land of Unafraid Birds (Essays on the Vygovsky Region)”, for which he was awarded a silver medal by the Russian Geographical Society. During his travels through the Russian North, Prishvin became acquainted with the life and speech of the northerners, wrote down tales, and transmitted them in a unique form of travel essays (For the Magic Kolobok, 1908). He became famous in literary circles, became close to Remizov and Merezhkovsky, as well as M. Gorky and A. N. Tolstoy. He was a full member of the St. Petersburg Religious and Philosophical Society.
In 1908, the result of a trip to the Trans-Volga region was the book «At the Walls of the Invisible City». The essays «Adam and Eve» and «The Black Arab» were written after a trip to the Crimea and Kazakhstan. Maxim Gorky contributed to the appearance of the first collected works of Prishvin in 1912-1914.
During the First World War, he was a war correspondent, publishing his essays in various newspapers.
During the revolutionary events and the Civil War, he managed to survive imprisonment, publish a number of articles close in views to the ideology of the Socialist Revolutionaries, and enter into polemics with A. Blok regarding the reconciliation of the creative intelligentsia with the Bolsheviks (the latter took the side of the Soviet government). Ultimately, Prishvin, albeit with great mistrust and anxiety, nevertheless accepted the victory of the Soviets: in his opinion, the colossal victims were the result of a monstrous rampage of the lowest human evil that the world war had unleashed, but the time was coming for young, active people whose cause was just, although it would not win for a very long time. After the October Revolution, he taught for some time in the Smolensk region. His passion for hunting and local history (he lived in Yelets, in the Smolensk region, in the Moscow region) was reflected in a series of hunting and children’s stories written in the 1920s, which were later included in the book «Calendar of Nature» (1935), which made him famous as a narrator of the life of nature, a singer of Central Russia. During these same years, he continued to work on the autobiographical novel «Kashcheyev’s Chain», which he began in 1923, and on which he worked until his last days. In the early 1930s, Prishvin visited the Far East, which resulted in the book «Dear Animals», which served as the basis for the story «Zhen-shen» («Root of Life», 1933). The story «Undressed Spring» describes the journey through the Kostroma and Yaroslavl lands. In 1933, the writer again visited the Vygovsky region, where the White Sea-Baltic Canal was being built. Based on the impressions of this trip, he created the fairy tale novel «The Tsar’s Road». In May-June 1935, M. M. Prishvin made another trip to the Russian North with his son Pyotr. The writer traveled from Moscow to Vologda by train and sailed on steamships along the Vologda, Sukhona and Northern Dvina to Verkhnyaya Toyma. From Verkhnyaya Toyma, M. Prishvin rode horses to the Upper Pinega villages of Kerga and Sogra, then reached the mouth of the Ilesha by rowboat, and up the Ilesha and its tributary, the Koda, by aspen boat. From the upper reaches of the Koda, the writer went on foot through the dense forest with guides to look for the «Berendeeva Chashcha» — a forest untouched by an axe, and found it. Returning to Ust-Ilesha, Prishvin went down the Pinega to the village of Karpogory, and then reached Arkhangelsk by steamboat. After this trip, a book of essays, «Berendeeva Chashcha» («Northern Forest»), and a fairy tale story, «Ship Thicket», which M. Prishvin worked on in the last years of his life, were published. The writer wrote about the fairytale forest: «The forest there is a pine tree three hundred years old, tree after tree, you can’t cut a banner there! And such straight trees, and so clean! You can’t cut down one tree, it will lean against another and not fall.»
In 1941, Prishvin was evacuated to the village of Usolye in the Yaroslavl region, where he protested against the deforestation of the village by peat miners. In 1943, the writer returned to Moscow and published the stories «Phacelia» and «Forest Drop» in the publishing house «Soviet Writer». In 1945, M. Prishvin wrote the story «Pantry of the Sun». In 1946, the writer bought a house in the village of Dunino in the Zvenigorod district of the Moscow region, where he lived in the summer of 1946-1953.
Almost all of Prishvin’s works published during his lifetime are devoted to descriptions of his own impressions from encounters with nature, these descriptions are distinguished by the extraordinary beauty of the language. Konstantin Paustovsky called him “the singer of Russian nature,” Maxim Gorky said that Prishvin possessed “a perfect ability to give an almost physical tangibility to everything through a flexible combination of simple words.”
Prishvin himself considered his main book to be the «Diaries», which he kept for almost half a century (1905-1954) and the volume of which is several times larger than the most complete, 8-volume collection of his works. Published after the abolition of censorship in the 1980s, they allowed us to take a different look at M. M. Prishvin and his work. The writer’s constant spiritual work, the path to inner freedom are clearly and vividly traced in his diaries, rich in observations («Eyes of the Earth», 1957; fully published in the 1990s), where, in particular, a picture is given of the process of «de-peasantization» of Russia and the Stalinist model of socialism, far from the one that was far-fetched by ideology; the writer’s humanistic desire to affirm the «sanctity of life» as the highest value is expressed.
The writer died on January 16, 1954 from stomach cancer, and is buried at the Vvedenskoye Cemetery in Moscow. Prishvin loved cars. Back in the 1930s, when it was very difficult to buy a personal car, he studied car manufacturing at the Gorky Automobile Plant and bought a van, which he used to travel around the country. He affectionately called it «Mashenka.» And in the last years of his life, he had a Moskvich-401, which still stands in his house-museum.
Artist of Light
Prishvin illustrated his first book, «In the Land of Unafraid Birds,» with his photographs taken in 1907 during a hike in the North with the help of a bulky camera belonging to a fellow traveler. In the twenties, the writer began to seriously study the technique of photography, believing that the use of photographs in the text would help complement the author’s verbal image with the author’s visual image: «To my imperfect verbal art I will add photographic invention.» His diary contains notes about ordering a Leica pocket camera in Germany in 1929: “not to hunt with it, but to try to introduce photographs into my stories and essays as a visual technique, … the value of photography lies in the precise transmission of the image of the world. … I want to take advantage of this feature of the camera and prove my visions of the real world with light painting.” The writer brought all the techniques of instant shooting to automatism, which he wrote down for memory in his diary:
put on pince-nez on a cord — extend the lens — set the depth of field and shutter speed («speed») — adjust the focus «with a movement of the ring finger» — cock — throw off the pince-nez and press the shutter — put on the pince-nez — write down the shooting conditions, etc.
Prishvin wrote that from the time he got a camera, he began to «think photographically», called himself an «artist of light» and was so carried away by hunting with a camera that he could not wait for the «radiant morning to come again». Working on the cycles of «photographic records» «Web», «Drop», «Buds», «Spring of Light» he took close-up pictures in different lighting conditions and angles, accompanying each photograph with comments. Assessing the resulting visual images, Prishvin wrote in his diary on September 26, 1930: «Of course, a real photographer would have taken better pictures than me, but it would never occur to a real specialist to look at what I am taking pictures of: he will never see it.» The writer did not limit himself to taking pictures in nature. At a risk to himself, in 1930 he took a series of photographs about the destruction of the bells of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius.
In November 1930, Prishvin signed a contract with the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house for the book Hunting with a Camera, in which photography was to play the main role, and addressed the USSR People’s Commissariat of Trade with the following statement: «In view of the fact that at present it is generally impossible to obtain permission to import a camera from Germany, I draw your attention to the special circumstance of my literary work at the present time and ask that you make an exception for me in the matter of obtaining a foreign currency license to obtain a camera… My photographic work has attracted attention abroad, and the editorial board of Die Grüne Post, in whose hunting department I work, is ready to provide me with the most advanced Leica camera with three variable lenses. I need such a camera all the more because my camera has become completely unusable due to intensive work…» Permission was granted, and on January 1, 1931, the desired camera and numerous accessories were in Prishvin’s possession.
For more than a quarter of a century, Prishvin never parted with his cameras. The writer’s archive contains more than two thousand negatives. His memorial office in Dunino contains everything needed for a home photo lab: a set of lenses, an enlarger, developer and fixer trays, and frames for cropping photographs.
The writer’s knowledge and experience of photography were reflected in some of his innermost thoughts, writing in his diary: «Our republic is like a photographic darkroom, into which not a single ray is let in from the outside, and inside everything is illuminated by a red flashlight.»
Prishvin did not expect to publish most of his photographs during his lifetime. The negatives were kept in separate envelopes, glued together by the writer himself from tissue paper, in candy and cigarette boxes. After the writer’s death, his widow Valeria Dmitrievna hid the negatives and kept them along with the diaries.
Memory
The asteroid (9539) Prishvin, discovered by astronomer Lyudmila Karachkina at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory on October 21, 1982, was named in honor of M. M. Prishvin.
On February 4, 2015, on the writer’s birthday, a monument dedicated to him was unveiled in the Skitskiye Prudy Park in the city of Sergiev Posad. On November 20, 2014, in the morning, a bronze sculpture of the writer Mikhail Prishvin was delivered to the Skitskiye Prudy Park.
Family
His first marriage was to a simple Smolensk peasant woman, Efrosinya Pavlovna (1883-1953, née Badykina, in her first marriage — Smogaleva). In his diaries, M. M. often called her Frosya or Pavlovna. In addition to her son from her first marriage, Yakov (who died at the front in 1919 during the Civil War), they had three more children: son Sergei died as an infant in 1905, Lev Mikhailovich (1906-1957) — a popular writer of his time, who wrote under the pseudonym Alpatov (the street name of the Prishvins in Yelets), a member of the literary group «Pereval», and Pyotr Mikhailovich (1909-1987) — a gamekeeper, author of memoirs (published for the 100th anniversary of his birth — in 2009). In 1940, M. M. Prishvin married for the second time. His wife was Valeria Dmitrievna Liorko, in his first marriage — Lebedeva (1899-1979), this woman became his muse, comrade, assistant — the main love of his life. After the writer’s death, she worked with his archives, wrote several books about him, and headed the Prishvin Museum for many years.
Selected works
In the Land of Unfrightened Birds / В краю непуганых птиц (1907)
The Bun / За волшебным колобком (1908)
У стен града невидимого (1909)
Чёрный араб (1910)
Славны бубны (1913)
Башмаки (1923)
Родники Берендея (1925–26) — Enlarged and published as Nature’s Diary / Календарь природы (1935).
Jen Sheng: The Root of Life / Женьшень (1933)
Nature’s Calendar / Календарь природы (1935)
Фацелия (1940)
Drops from the Forest / Лесная капель (1943)
Кладовая Солнца (1945)
The Chain of Kashchey / Кащеева цепь (1923–1954; published in 1960)
Осударева дорога (1957)
Корабельная чаща (1954)
Awards and honors
Order of the Badge of Honour (1939)
Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1943)
