Biography

A work that recreates the history of a person’s life in conjunction with the social reality, culture, and daily life of his time. Biographies may be scholarly, artistic, popular, and so forth.
The biography of a writer or an artist may serve as a genre in which the object of study indirectly becomes the vital and personal basis for the author’s creative art (in its connection with his world view, social factors, and literary milieu). In the early examples of biography (in antiquity, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars; during the Renaissance, G. Vasari’s Lives of Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects), the characteristics of historical research and artistic literary creativity were bound together in an indivisible unity. Biography in the modern sense (critical use of sources and historical accuracy) came into being during the 18th century and developed in the 19th century. In the 20th century the work of major writers (R. Rolland, S. Zweig, and A. Maurois) created a genre of artistic biography characterized by a subjective sympathy for the hero, a striving to penetrate into his inner world by means of artistic imagination, and the predominance of the aesthetic and partly philosophical task (in Rolland) over historical cognition.
In Russia biographical dictionaries devoted to historical figures, writers, and scholars have been published since the 18th century. During the 19th century biographical literature appeared as a special branch of literary scholarship (Fonvizin, by P. A. Viazemskii; Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin: His Life and Work, by N. G. Chernyshevskii; A Biography of F. I. Tiutchev, by I. S. Aksakov; and others). In 1933 the popular biographical series Lives of Famous People was established in the Soviet Union on Gorky’s initiative. (Examples include A. Shteckley’s Campanella, C. Sandburg’s Lincoln, I. Dubinskii-Mukhadze’s Shaumian, and S. Reznik’s Nikolai Vavilov, as well as M. Bulgakov’s Moliere, L. Grossman’s Dostoevsky, and others.) The critical biographical sketch dealing with contemporary writers developed. The lives of outstanding people often become the subject matter of biographical novels, novellas, and plays. A special type of biography is the autobiography.
===REFERENCE===
Vinokur, G. Biografiia i kul’tura. Moscow, 1927.
Category:People