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	April 5, 1888(1888-04-05) (aged 33) Saint Petersburg, Russia
Nationality	Russian
Relatives	Yevgeny Garshin

Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (Russian: Все́волод Миха́йлович Гáршин); (14 February 1855 – 5 April 1888) was a Russian author of short stories.

Life

Garshin was the son of an officer. 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. At the age of 33, Garshin undertook an attempt to commit suicide by jumping from the fifth floor of his apartment building and died in torment five days later at a Red Cross hospital.

Work

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)).

Gallery

• 
  Garshin in 1877, during his service in the Russo-Turkish War
• 
  Garshin in 1885
• 
  1885 cover of The Red Flower by Garshin
• 
  Garshin at his funeral in 1888
• 
  Garshin's grave in Saint Petersburg
• 
  Vsevolod M. Garshin. Portrait by Ilya Repin (1883)

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

External links

• Works by Vsevolod Garshin at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Vsevolod Garshin at Internet Archive
• 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