page_title: Aleksey Pisemsky
section_title: Moskvityanin
hierarchical_section_title: Aleksey Pisemsky / Biography / Literary career / Moskvityanin
caption_attribution_description: English: Russian writer Aleksey Feofilaktovich Pisemsky
context_page_description: Aleksey Feofilaktovich Pisemsky was a Russian novelist and dramatist who was regarded as an equal of Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the late 1850s, but whose reputation suffered a spectacular decline after his fall-out with Sovremennik magazine in the early 1860s. A realistic playwright, along with Aleksandr Ostrovsky he was responsible for the first dramatization of ordinary people in the history of Russian theatre. "Pisemsky's great narrative gift and exceptionally strong grip on reality make him one of the best Russian novelists," according to D.S. Mirsky.
  Pisemsky's first novel Boyarschina was originally forbidden for its unflattering description of the Russian nobility. His principal novels are The Simpleton, One Thousand Souls, which is considered his best work of the kind, and Troubled Seas, which gives a picture of the excited state of Russian society around the year 1862. He also wrote plays, including A Bitter Fate, which depicts the dark side of the Russian peasantry. The play has been called the first Russian realistic tragedy; it won the Uvarov Prize of the Russian Academy.
context_section_description: In the early 1840s the Russian Slavophile movement divided into two branches. The old school followers led by the brothers Aksakov, Ivan Kireyevsky and Aleksey Khomyakov, grouped first around Moskovsky Sbornik, then Russkaya Beseda. Mikhail Pogodin's  Moskvityanin became the center of the younger Slavophiles who were later labeled potchvenniky ('the soil-bound'), Apollon Grigoriev, Boris Almazov, and Alexander Ostrovsky among them. In 1850 Moskvityanin invited Pisemsky to join in and the latter promptly sent Ostrovsky his second novel The Simpleton he'd been working on throughout 1848. In November of that year the story of a young idealist who dies after his illusions have been destroyed, was published in Moskvityanin, to a critical and public acclaim. A year later Marriage of Passion (Брак по страсти) appeared in the same magazine, again praised by the reviewers. Now raised to the ranks of "the best writers of our times", Pisemsky found his works compared to those of Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov and Alexander Ostrovsky. Pavel Annenkov remembered:
  I recall the impression Pisemsky's first two novels made upon me... How hilarious they seemed, what an abundance of comic situations there were and how the author made these characters funny without trying to impose any moral judgement upon them. The Russian provincial philistine community was shown at its most self-celebrational, it was brought under the light and made to look almost proud of its own wildness, its unique outrageousness. The comical nature of these sketches had nothing to do with the author's juxtaposing them with one kind of doctrine or another. The effect was achieved by showing the complacency with which all those ridiculous characters were leading their lives full of absurdity and moral looseness. The laughter that Pisemsky's stories provoked was different from that of Gogol, although, as it follows from our author's autobiography, his initial efforts reflected much of Gogol and his work. Pisemsky's laughter stripped its subject down to the vulgar core, and to expect anything like "hidden tears" in it would be impossible. His was the joviality of, as it were, physiological nature, which is extremely rare with modern writers and more typical to the ancient Roman comedy, Middle Age farce or our common man's  re-telling of some low-brow joke." 
  Pisemsky's debut play The Hypochondriac (1852) was followed by the Sketches of Peasant life, a three-part short stories cycle. In Pisemsky's second play, The Divide (Раздел, 1853), a typical natural school piece, parallels have been found with Turgenev's comedy Breakfast at the Chief's. Speaking about Pisemsky's early works, Skabichevsky wrote: "Dig deeper into the pessimism which has gone into full swing in The Muff and Marriage by Passion, put it next to the mindset of an ordinary provincial man for examination and you'll be struck by the identical nature of the two. At the bottom of this outlook lies the conviction that man deep in his soul is a scoundrel, moved only by practical interests and egotistical, mostly dirty impulses, and for this reason one has to be on one's guard with one's neighbour and always keep 'a stone by one's bosom'."
  Influenced for many years by this provincial philosophy, Pisemsky to a large extent made it his own, according to the biographer. "Long before Troubled Seas, people of high education, embracing progressive ideas and a new outlook were being shown invariably as outrageous, vulgar rogues, worse than even the ugliest freaks of the uneducated community," Skabichevsky argued.
  According to Annenkov, some of the 'thinking men of the time' simply refused to put up with this peculiar kind of "delight, drawn from the naked comic nature of situations," seeing this as akin to "the rapture a street mob enjoys when shown a hunch-backed Petrushka or other physical deformities." Annenkov quoted Vasily Botkin, a "terse and far-seeing critic" as saying that he "could not sympathize with the author who, although unquestionably gifted, apparently has neither principles of his own nor ideas to base hi
caption: Portrait of Pisemsky by Sergei Levitsky, 1856.
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