Vsevolod Garshin

Vsevolod Garshin
Portrait of Vsevolod Garshin by Ilya Repin
Born	Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (1855-02-14)February 14, 1855 Ekaterinoslav Province, Russia
Died	Saint Petersburg, Russia
Nationality	Russian
Relatives	Yevgeny Garshin
Military career
Allegiance	Russian Empire
Service/branch	Imperial Russian Army
Battles/wars	Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78

Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (Russian: Всеволод Михайлович Гаршин; 14 February 1855 — 5 April 1888) was a Russian author of short stories.

Life

Garshin was the son of an officer, from a family tracing its roots back to a 15th-century prince, who entered into the service of Ivan the Great. He attended secondary school and then the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute. He volunteered to serve in the army at the start of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877. He participated in the Balkans Campaign as a private, and was wounded in action. He was promoted to the rank of an officer at the end of the war. He resigned his commission soon after in order to devote his time to literary efforts. He had previously published a number of articles in newspapers, mostly reviews of art exhibitions.

His experiences as a soldier provide the basis for his first stories, including the very first, "Four Days" (Russian: "Четыре дня"), based on a real incident. The narrative is organized as the interior monologue of a wounded soldier left for dead on the battlefield for four days, face to face with the corpse of a Turkish soldier he had killed. Garshin's empathy for all beings is already evident in this first story.

Despite early literary success, he had periodical bouts of mental illness. Garshin attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself down the stone stairs leading to his apartment building. Although not immediately fatal, he died as a result of his injuries in a hospital in April 1888, at the age of 33.

Writings

Garshin's work is not voluminous: it consists of some twenty stories, all of them included in a single volume. His stories are characterized by a spirit of compassion and pity that some have compared to Dostoevsky's.

In A Very Short Novel he examines the infidelity of a woman to a crippled hero. The story displays Garshin's talent for concentration and lyrical irony. That Which Was Not and Attalea Princeps are fables with animals and plants in human situations. The second of these stories has a sense of tragic irony. In Officer and Servant he is a forerunner of Chekhov; it is an excellently constructed story conveying an atmosphere of drab gloom and meaningless boredom. From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov — the title story in the most recent English language collection of Garshin's work — has the same Russo-Turkish War setting of Four Days, and includes as minor players the characters from Officer and Servant.

His best-known and most characteristic story is The Red Flower; it fits in the series of lunatic-asylum stories in Russian literature (including Gogol's Diary of a Madman (1835), Leskov's Hare Remise (1894) and Chekhov's Ward No. 6 (1892)).

In 1883 Garshin was the model for the younger in Ilya Repin's painting Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan.

Works in English translation

• From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov: And Other Stories (1988; contains: "Four days", "An incident," "A very brief romance," "An encounter," "The coward," "Artists," "Attaleaprinceps," "A night," "Orderly and officer," "What never was," "From the reminiscences of Private Ivanov," "The red flower," "The tale of the toad and the rose," "The legend of Haggai the Proud," "The travelling frog," "The signal")

Gallery

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  Garshin in 1877, during his service in the Russo-Turkish War

• Garshin by Repin 1883.jpg

  Vsevolod M. Garshin. Portrait by Ilya Repin (1883)

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  Garshin as Ivan the Terrible's son

• Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin 1885.jpg

  Garshin in 1885

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  1885 cover of The Red Flower by Garshin

• Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin Funeral.jpg

  Garshin at his funeral in 1888

• Literator Bridges Grave Garshin.jpg

  Garshin's grave in Saint Petersburg

References

 This article incorporates text from D.S. Mirsky's "A History of Russian Literature" (1926-27), a publication now in the public domain.

• Article on Vsevolod Garshin and fan hysteria in the 1880s
• Tumanov, Vladimir. “Ecce Bellum - Garshin's ‘Four Days’.” In P. Henry et al. Eds. Vsevolod Garshin at the Turn of the Century. Oxford: Northgate Press: 127-145, 2000.
• Colleen Lucey. Violence, murder, and fallen women: prostitution in the works of Vsevolod Garshin Canadian Slavonic Papers 58, no.4 (2016)

External links

• Works by Vsevolod Garshin at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Vsevolod Garshin at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov and other stories
• A collection of Garshin's stories translated to English