Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (1855-1888) was born on the estate of Pleasant Valley, Bakhmut district, Yekaterinoslav province, into a noble family, his father was an officer in a cuirassier regiment, a participant in the Crimean War of 1853-1856, his mother was from the family of a naval officer. As a child, Garshin and his brothers had to endure severe mental trauma: their mother Ekaterina Stepanovna, being carried away by the older children’s teacher P.V. :Zavadsky, left her family in 1860.
Zavadsky, the organizer of a secret student political society, after Garshin’s father contacted the police, trying to get his wife back, was arrested and exiled to the Olonets province, where Garshin’s mother and her son Vsevolod traveled several times. The future writer’s communication with the revolutionary-democratic intelligentsia would subsequently become the basis of his closeness to the populists and the influence of their ideas on his work.
In his youth, Garshin was interested in natural sciences, but his desire to study them could not be realized: a graduate of a real school was deprived of the right to enter the university. Therefore, he chose the Mining Institute, although the profession of an engineer did not particularly attract him. Soon after Russia declared war on Turkey in 1877, Garshin, obsessed with the impulse to share the “common suffering,” left the institute and participated in hostilities in the Balkans.
In one of the battles, he was wounded in the leg and ended up in the hospital. The report stated that Garshin “led his comrades into the attack with an example of personal courage.” A year later, he was promoted to officer, but did not want to continue serving in order to be able to complete his studies and engage in literary activities.
The acuteness of his moral sense prompted Garshin to perform bright, selfless actions. In 1880, after the assassination attempt of revolutionary I.O. Mlodetsky to M.T., who was especially close to the emperor and endowed with extraordinary powers. Loris-Melikova, Garshin seeks an audience with the general to ask for pardon for the criminal, since, in his opinion, only mercy can stop government and revolutionary terror. Nevertheless, the execution took place, and it was a blow for the writer.
These experiences aggravated his hereditary mental illness (manic-depressive syndrome, due to which Garshin was in a psychiatric hospital in 1880, and eight years later he committed suicide by throwing himself down the flight of stairs of his house), he wrote little and, not counting on literary income, was forced to get a job in 1882 as an official in the office of the Congress of Railway Representatives. In addition, he collaborated with V.G. Chertkov in the publishing house "Posrednik", and also took an active part in the work of the Society's Committee for benefits to needy writers and scientists.
Garshin’s literary activity began in 1876 with a satirical essay “The True History of the Ensky Zemstvo Assembly” (the newspaper “Molva”), which reflected his impressions of Starobelsk, where he at one time lived with his father. Garshin wrote a little. But this little added a note to literature that was not there before, or that did not sound as strongly as his. Critic Yu. Aikhenvald rightly called Garshin “the voice of conscience and its martyr.” This is exactly how he was perceived by his contemporaries.
In Garshin's writings, a person is in a state of mental turmoil. In the first story, “Four Days,” written in a hospital and reflecting the writer’s own impressions, the hero is wounded in battle and awaits death, while the corpse of a Turk he killed is decomposing nearby. This scene was often compared to the scene from War and Peace, where Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, wounded in the Battle of Austerlitz, looks at the sky. Garshin’s hero also looks at the sky, but his questions are not abstractly philosophical, but completely earthly: why war? why was he forced to kill this man, towards whom he had no hostile feelings and, in fact, innocent of anything?
Garshin’s military theme is passed through the crucible of conscience, through the soul, confused before the incomprehensibility of this unknown, premeditated and unnecessary massacre. Meanwhile, the Russian-Turkish War of 1877 was started with the noble goal of helping our Slavic brothers get rid of the Turkish yoke. Garshin is not concerned about political motives, but about existential questions. The character does not want to kill other people, does not want to go to war (story "Coward"). Nevertheless, he, obeying the general impulse and considering it his duty, signs up as a volunteer and dies. The meaninglessness of this death haunts the author.
But what is significant is that this absurdity is not isolated in the general structure of existence. In the same story, "Coward" a medical student dies of gangrene that began with a toothache. These two events are parallel, and it is in their artistic conjunction that one of Garshin’s main questions is highlighted - about the nature of evil.
This question tormented the writer all his life. It is no coincidence that his hero, a reflective intellectual, protests against world injustice, embodied in certain faceless forces that lead a person to death and destruction, including self-destruction. Exactly a specific person. Personality. Face.
At the same time, the writer’s pain about one person, about one single life is inseparable from his desire, at least at the level of the name of the main character, to achieve an all-encompassing generalization. His hero bears the surname Ivanov and the name Ivan Ivanovich. This is the uniqueness of Garshin’s humanism: a person is himself and at the same time a part of the whole - a people, a country, a society. Garshin was associated with the populist “Russian Wealth” and collaborated with its leaders - N. Mikhailovsky and others. However, his anxiety and sadness about the people’s disasters went beyond the scope of traditional populism.
Beneath Garshin’s pain for the people lay suffering about the fate of man in general. About personality. And this distinguished his ideological and artistic position among writers of the 70s and 80s. He approached the drama of human life not so much from the position of social criticism, but from the position of existential confusion in the face of world evil and protest against it, which was usually unsuccessful and tragic.
His allegorical stories “The Red Flower” and “Attalea princeps” became textbook ones. In the first, a mentally ill person in a mental hospital fights the world's evil in the form of dazzling red poppies in the hospital flower bed. In the second, a greenhouse palm tree, rushing towards freedom, breaks through the roof. And - dies.
Characteristic of Garshin (and this is by no means only an autobiographical moment) is the depiction of a hero on the verge of madness. The point is not so much the illness, but the fact that the writer’s person is unable to cope with the inescapability of evil in the world.
Contemporaries appreciated the heroism of Garshin's characters: they try to resist evil, despite their own weakness. It is madness that turns out to be the beginning of rebellion, since, according to Garshin, it is impossible to rationally comprehend evil: the person himself is involved in it - and not only by social forces, but also, what is no less, and perhaps more important, by internal forces. He himself is partly a bearer of evil - sometimes contrary to his own ideas about himself. The irrational in a person’s soul makes him unpredictable; the outburst of this uncontrollable element is not only a rebellion against evil, but also evil itself.
Most of Garshin's stories are full of hopelessness and tragedy, for which he was more than once reproached by critics who saw in his prose a philosophy of despair and a denial of struggle. Two of them - about love - are built around the main character Nadezhda Nikolaevna. Coming from an intelligent family, who by force of circumstances found herself on the panel, she, a complex and contradictory nature, seems to be striving for death herself. And she rejects Ivan Nikitin’s love for her in the story “The Incident,” fearing moral enslavement, which leads him to suicide.
Her social status and her past do not allow her to trust the nobility and selflessness of another person. Self-love and pride, which is more than pride, lead to the fact that it is precisely these principles of her strong and complex nature that the possibility of another, purer life, and, the saddest thing, a living person are sacrificed. Life is sacrificed to certain abstractions.
In Garshin, the image of a fallen woman becomes a symbol of social ill-being and, more importantly, of world disorder. And the salvation of a fallen woman for the Garsha hero is tantamount to victory over world evil, at least in this particular case. But this victory ultimately turns into the death of the participants in the conflict. Evil still finds a loophole. One of the characters, the writer Bessonov, also once thought about saving Nadezhda Nikolaevna, but did not dare, and now he suddenly realized what she really meant to him. Analyzing the motives of his own actions, removing cover after cover, layer after layer, he suddenly discovers that he was deceiving himself, that he was drawn into some kind of game-intrigue of his pride, ambition, jealousy. And, unable to come to terms with the loss of his beloved, he kills her and himself.
All this brings to Garshin’s stories not only an expression of tragedy, but also a share of melodrama, a romantic escalation of passions and blood. The writer gravitates towards theatricality and even cinematography, although he has not yet reached the invention of the Lumiere brothers. His poetics are characterized by contrasts, sharp changes in light and shadow (L. Andreev will become Garshin’s follower). His stories are often structured like diaries or notes, but in some scenes the theatrical exaggeration is palpable, even some details in them have a fake eccentricity.
Garshin loved painting, wrote articles about it, supporting the Wanderers. He was closely acquainted with I. Repin, who used a sketch of Garshin (the writer’s pensive, affectionately sad eyes made a special impression on everyone) for the face of Tsarevich Ivan in the painting “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan”, and a portrait of Garshin he painted separately - one of the artist's best works in this genre.
He gravitated towards painting and prose - not only making artists his heroes ("Artists", "Nadezhda Nikolaevna"), but also masterfully mastering verbal plasticity. He contrasted pure art, which Garshin almost identified with handicraft, with realistic art, which was closer to him, rooting for the people. Art that can touch the soul and disturb it.
(1855-1888) Russian writer
Even during his lifetime, the name of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin among the Russian intelligentsia, the concept of “a man of the Garshin type” became widespread. What did it include? First of all, what was bright and attractive was what the contemporaries who knew the writer saw and what the readers guessed, recreating the image of the author from his stories. The beauty of his internal appearance was combined with external beauty. Garshin was alien to both asceticism and dull moralism. During a period of mental and physical health, he keenly felt the joy of life, loved society, nature, and knew the joy of simple physical labor.
The thirst for life, the ability to feel and understand everything beautiful in it was one of the reasons for that heightened rejection of evil and ugliness, which Garshin expressed in deep sadness and almost physical suffering. This deep sadness about the imperfection of the world and people, the ability to feel someone else’s pain, someone else’s suffering as if it were one’s own, was the second feature of the “Garshin type of person.”
Vsevolod Garshin was born on the estate of his maternal grandmother, which was called Pleasant Valley and was located in the Bakhmut district of the Yekaterinoslav province. His early years were spent in the small town of Starobelsk. Garshin's father, Mikhail Egorovich, was an officer. A humane, gentle man, he had a reputation as a kind and fair commander. True, in everyday life he was not without some oddities and was unable to establish his family life. Vsevolod Garshina's mother, Ekaterina Stepanovna, became infatuated with her sons' tutor P. Zavadsky and left her husband. But he managed to take revenge on her and his rival. According to his denunciation, P. Zavadsky, a member of the Kharkov revolutionary circle, was arrested and exiled. Searches were carried out at Ekaterina Stepanovna’s place several times. The situation in the house was very difficult. “Some scenes,” Garshin later recalled, “left an indelible memory in me and, perhaps, marks on my character. The sad expression that predominates on my face probably originated in that era.”
He was then in his fifth year. The mother and her eldest sons left for St. Petersburg, and Vsevolod remained in the village with his father. Much later, in the story “Night,” he wrote several autobiographical lines about this time, which his mother could never forgive him. In them, he lovingly addressed the memory of his father, writing that he wanted to be transported back to his childhood and caress this downtrodden man.
In the summer of 1863, my mother took Vsevolod to St. Petersburg. From a secluded, quiet environment, the boy ended up in a not at all rich, but noisy, never empty St. Petersburg apartment: Ekaterina Stepanovna loved people and knew how to gather them around her. Vsevolod Garshin entered the gymnasium. His mother soon left for Kharkov, leaving him first in the care of his older brothers, and then, after the gymnasium boarding school, in a family of friends.
Vsevolod Garshin spent ten years at the gymnasium, of which he was ill for two years (even then he began to show symptoms of mental illness) and once remained in the same class for another year.
As a high school student, Vsevolod Garshin began writing feuilletons and poems, and was published in high school publications. In the last year of the teenager’s stay at the gymnasium, it was transformed into a real school, and those who graduated from a real school, according to the laws of that time, could only study further in an engineering specialty. Garshin was fond of natural sciences and wanted to enter the Medical-Surgical Academy, but a new decree deprived him of this opportunity. In 1874 he became a student at the Mining Institute.
This was a time of social activity among student youth unprecedented in Russia. Almost all higher educational institutions were engulfed in revolutionary ferment, which was brutally suppressed. And yet, young people actively fought for their rights and responded sensitively to all the most important social and political problems.
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin was aloof from these events; for him it was a period of painful search for his path in life. In November 1874, shortly after the unrest at the Mining Institute, in connection with which two hundred students were expelled and one hundred and fifty exiled in stages, Vsevolod wrote to his mother: “On the one hand, the government, which seizes and exiles, looks at you as a beast, and not on a person, on the other - a society busy with its own affairs, treating it with contempt, almost with hatred... Where to go, what to do? The vile ones walk on their hind legs, the stupid ones crowd into the Nechaevites, etc. to Siberia, the smart ones are silent and suffer. They are the worst. Suffering from without and from within. I feel bad, my dear mother.”
However, Garshin's creative work became more intense during his student years. He writes poetry, and in 1876 his essay “The True History of the Ensky Zemstvo Assembly” appeared in print for the first time. It painted a caustic satirical picture of the morals of zemstvo liberals.
In those same years, Vsevolod Garshin became close to a group of young artists. An ardent and interested attitude towards issues of art prompted him to write a number of articles on painting, in which he reflected on the essence of the artist’s activity and the purpose of art. One of the strongest artistic impressions of those years was the exhibition of paintings by the Russian battle painter Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin. Garshin was shocked by the depiction of war scenes. And soon he himself had to take part in what caused him such horror and disgust.
In April 1877, Russia declared war on Turkey, and Vsevolod Garshin volunteered to serve in the army. “I cannot,” he writes to his mother, “hide behind the walls of an institution when my peers expose their foreheads and chests to bullets.” He was enlisted as a private in an infantry regiment. Here, in the war, he deeply comprehended the character of the ordinary Russian man, his heroism and selfless service to the ideals of brotherhood. During the war, the social contradictions of Russian reality became even more clear to Garshin.
In the battle of Ayaslar, he was wounded in the leg, was treated for a long time, and upon recovery retired. This is what Garshin’s short military career looked like from the outside. But her internal result was much more significant. The war and the impressions it caused became one of the main themes of Garshin’s work. While still in the army, he begins to write the story “Four Days”, finishes it in Kharkov during his recovery and sends it to the magazine “Otechestvennye zapiski”. The story was a stunning success and immediately made the name of its author widely known.
A year later, Vsevolod Garshin publishes a new story called “A Very Short Novel.” Here, as in other works of the writer, the same motives are heard: pain for a person, grief over the hopelessness of this pain, endless compassion. Already in Garshin’s first stories, the heightened sense of humanity inherent in his work was revealed, and the peculiarity of his talent that was noted by Chekhov was revealed. In his short story “The Seizure” about the student Vasiliev, whose prototype was Garshin, we read: “He has talents for writing, acting, and art, but he has a special talent - human. He has a subtle, excellent sense of pain in general. Just as a good actor reflects someone else’s movements and voice, so Vasiliev knows how to reflect someone else’s pain in his soul. Seeing the tears, he cries; near a sick person, he himself becomes sick and groans; if he sees violence, then it seems to him that violence is being committed against him...” This property of Garshin’s talent forced him to turn to one of the most pressing social topics - prostitution.
The story “The Incident,” which appeared in print in 1878, was not the first in Russian literature to reflect this problem. Writers have already created a certain tradition in their approach to this “social ulcer.” Vsevolod Garshin generally remains in line with the same tradition. However, his heroine is not a typical product of her environment, she is much higher than her. The fate of this woman is the tragedy of an extraordinary person who found herself in more than ordinary circumstances. In essence, as Garshin shows and as the heroine herself thinks, there is not much difference between prostitution and many marriages that are not concluded for love.
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin does not give his heroes the opportunity to correct mistakes and be happy. He places the highest demands on them. The words of G. Uspensky about writing are applicable to Garshin: “I want to torment and torment the reader because this determination will give me over time the right to talk about the most urgent and greatest torments experienced by this very reader...” But Garshin himself suffered no less, as evidenced by his own confession: “The writer suffers for everyone he writes about.”
He published many of his works in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski, headed by M.E. in those years. Saltykov-Shchedrin. Garshin did not always share his ideas, but nevertheless felt his spiritual closeness to this magazine, on the pages of which the problems of modern social life were truthfully and honestly covered.
Meanwhile, the writer’s mental state deteriorated, and he experienced attacks of melancholy more and more often. In the winter of 1880, he wrote the story “Night,” in which he expresses the moods and feelings of many of his contemporaries.
By the beginning of the 80s, Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin became one of the most popular Russian writers. The younger generation considers him the ruler of thoughts. After every student evening, if Garshin was present, he was inevitably rocked in his arms. When he appeared at the theater or at a public lecture, murmurs of approval ran through the hall. Portraits of the writer could be found in the albums of students, students and high school students.
Vsevolod Garshin wrote difficultly and slowly. But each of his stories left an indelible mark on the minds of his readers. Meanwhile, his personal and creative life was already on the verge of a severe crisis, which was explained by both external and internal reasons.
The social situation in the country remained difficult, unrest among young people continued, and workers went on strike. In 1880, Count M. Loris-Melikov was appointed head of the Supreme Administrative Commission. A few days after his appointment, Narodnaya Volya member I. Mlodetsky shot at him. The count remained alive, but Mlodetsky was arrested and sentenced to death. Garshin was shocked by both the assassination attempt and the verdict. He writes a letter to Loris-Melikov asking him to “forgive” Mlodetsky and delivers it himself. Garshin came to Loris-Melikov’s house late at night, they didn’t want to let him in, then they searched him, but in the end the count still accepted him.
There is no exact information about the content of their conversation. It is only known that Loris-Melikov promised Garshin to reconsider the case and did not keep his word. Mlodetsky was hanged, after which Garshin finally lost his peace of mind and peace. He left for Moscow, then rushed to Rybinsk, then returned to Moscow again, visited Tula, Yasnaya Polyana with L.N. Tolstoy, with whom he spoke about the reconstruction of life, about saving people from injustice and evil, headed to Kharkov, but did not get there. Relatives, alarmed by Garshin’s disappearance, found him in the Oryol province, where the writer was already in a semi-insane state. Garshin's severe mental illness forced his relatives to place him first in a Kharkov hospital for the mentally ill, and then in a St. Petersburg private hospital. The patient's condition improved somewhat, and he settled on his uncle's estate, where he began to recover.
The life of Vsevolod Garshin in recent years has not been rich in external events. Literary work did not provide sufficient livelihood, and the writer was forced to serve.
The charm of his personality was so great that he easily made friends. One of them was the wonderful Russian artist Ilya Repin, who painted the son of Ivan the Terrible from Vsevolod Garshin for his famous painting “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan.” Repin said that he was always struck by the stamp of doom on Garshin’s face. And he was not wrong.
Mental illness attacked the writer again, he plunged into depression and experienced insurmountable melancholy. On March 19, 1888, Garshin threw himself down a flight of stairs, and a few days later, on March 24, he died. His death became a public event; thousands of people came to bury the writer.
The fate of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin seemed to personify the fate of an entire generation. After his tragic death, in order to honor the memory of the writer and create a fund for the construction of a monument to him, it was decided to publish a collection of his memory. At the request of A.N. Pleshcheev to write a story for this collection Anton Pavlovich Chekhov replied: “... I love people like the late Garshin with all my soul and consider it my duty to sign my sympathy for them.” Chekhov said that he had a theme for a story, the hero of which would be “a young man of Garshin origin, remarkable, honest and deeply sensitive.”
Russian writer, poet,
art critic.Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin
(1855-1888) Vsevolod Garshin is one of the most promising and underachieving Russian writers: his prose fits into one thin volume. Like Edgar Allan Poe, Garshin anticipated the prose of the 20th century in his stories of the 1870s and 1880s. “The Red Flower”, “Attalea princeps”, “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov” (1883) anticipate, if not Kafka, then certainly Leonid Andreev and symbolist prose.The surname Garshin comes from the Turkic-Persian garsha, Curonian “brave ruler, hero.”
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin was born on February 14, 1885 in the estate of Pleasant Dolina, Bakhmut district, Yekaterinoslav province. His father was an officer and took part in the Crimean War. Her mother, the daughter of a naval officer, took part in the revolutionary democratic movement of the 1860s. As a five-year-old child, Vsevolod Garshin experienced a family drama that influenced his character.
The mother fell in love with the teacher of the older children, Zavadsky, the organizer of a political society, and abandoned the family. The father complained to the police, after which Zavadsky was arrested and exiled to Petrozavodsk on political charges. Mother moved to St. Petersburg to visit the exile. Until 1864, Vsevolod lived with his father on an estate near Starobelsk, then his mother took him to St. Petersburg, where he graduated from high school.
In 1874 Garshin entered the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. Two years later, his literary debut took place. The first satirical essay, “The True History of the Ensky Zemstvo Assembly” (1876), was based on memories of provincial life. During his student years, Garshin appeared in print with articles about Peredvizhniki artists.
On the day Russia declared war on Turkey, April 12, 1877, Vsevolod Garshin volunteered to join the army. In August he was wounded in a battle near the Bulgarian village of Ayaslar. Personal impressions served as material for the first story about the war, “Four Days” (1877), which Garshin wrote in the hospital. After publication in the October issue of the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski, Garshin’s name became known throughout Russia.
Having received a year's leave due to injury, Garshin returned to St. Petersburg, where he was warmly received by the writers of the Otechestvennye Zapiski circle - Saltykov-Shchedrin, Uspensky. In 1878 Garshin was promoted to officer, retired for health reasons and continued his studies at St. Petersburg University, asvolunteer. The war left a deep imprint oncreationwriterand himreceptive psyche. Garshin’s stories, simple in plot and composition, amazed readers with the nakedness of the hero’s feelings. The first-person narration, using diary entries, and attention to painful emotional experiences created the effect of absolute identity between the author and the hero. In literary criticism of those years, the phrase was often found: “Garshin writes in blood.” The writer combined the extremes of manifestation of human feelings: a heroic, sacrificial impulse and awareness of the abomination of war (“Four Days”); a sense of duty, attempts to evade and awareness of the impossibility of this (Coward, 1879). Man's helplessness in the face of the elements of evil, emphasized by tragic endings, became the main theme not only of the military, but also of Garshin's later stories. For example, the story “The Incident” (1878), in which the writer shows the hypocrisy of society and the savagery of the crowd condemning a prostitute.
Vsevolod MikhailovichGarshin repeatedly posed for Ilya Efimovich Repin. The piercing and sad look of his large black-diamond eyes is reflected in the master’s paintings “They Didn’t Expect”, “Ivan the Terrible Kills His Son” and in the surprisingly soulful portrait of the writer himself. In one of his letters, Repin noted: “I have never encountered this meekness, this dovelike purity in a person in my life. Like a crystal, a pure soul!”
Garshin did not find a solution to his painful spiritual search. The story “Artists” (1879) is imbued with pessimistic reflections on the uselessness of real art. His hero, the talented artist Ryabinin, gives up painting and goes to the village to teach peasant children.
In the story “Attalea princeps” (1880), Garshin expressed his worldview in symbolic form. A freedom-loving palm tree, in an effort to escape from a glass greenhouse, breaks through the roof and dies. Having a romantic attitude towards reality, Vsevolod Mikhailovich tried to break the vicious circle, and his painful psyche and complex character returned the writer to a state of despair and hopelessness.In February 1880, the revolutionary terrorist Mlodetsky made an attempt on the life of the head of the Supreme Administrative Commission, Count Loris-Melikov. Garshin, as a famous writer, obtained an audience with the count to ask for pardon for the criminal in the name of mercy and civil peace. He convinced the high dignitary that the execution of the terrorist would lengthen the chain of useless deaths in the struggle between the government and the revolutionaries. After the execution of Mlodetskyaffective insanityGarshina worsened and he was placed in a psychiatric hospital. After a relative recovery, Garshin did not return to creativity for a long time.
In 1882, his collection “Stories” was published, which caused heated debate among critics. Garshin was condemned for the pessimism and gloomy tone of his works. The populists used the writer’s work to use his example to show how a modern intellectual is tormented and tormented by remorse. In August-September 1882, at the invitation of Turgenev, Garshin lived and worked on the story “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov” (1883) in Spassky-Lutovinovo.
In the winter of 1883, Garshin married medical student N. Zolotilova and entered the service as secretary of the office of the Congress of Railway Representatives.
Moral authorityVsevolod MikhailovichGarshina was high in society. The writer, with a heightened sensitivity to any injustice, was able to artistically express and condemn social evil. Including in the form of fairy tales: “Attalea princeps”, “That which did not exist”, “The Tale of the Toad and the Rose”. "Frog traveler"washis last tale.
The poet's gift is to caress and scribble,
Fatal stamp on him
White rose with black toad
I wanted to get married on earth
Let them not come true, let them not come true
These thoughts of pink days,
But since the devils were nesting in the soul
So angels lived in it!
Sergey Yesenin
The basis for the appearance of the image of a crowned rose and a toad, denoting the world of beauty and ugliness, white and black,Good and Evil, Hell and Heaveninspired by Garshin's fairy tale "About the Toad and the Rose"
Vsevolod Mikhailovich was visiting a friend of the poet Polonsky and listened tomusic performedRubinsteinA, opposite whom sat some unpleasant person. The contrast between a composer who created beautiful music and an unpleasant onefor Garshinman was so great that he was born with the image of the confrontation between a rose and a toad.In 1884He wrotefairy tale “About the Toad and the Rose”.
When a rose bloomed in an abandoned flower garden, a toad was nearby. The pleasant and enchanting scent of the rose confused the toad. Not being able to express admiration, and not knowing what admiration is, the toadI tried to speak as gently as possiblesaid to the object of his concern: “I will eat you!” And then, angry at the beautiful rose, so inaccessible and incomprehensible, the toadtwicetried to attack the rose bush, despite the thorns. Wounded, she crawled higher and higher until the boy's sister picked the rose. The toad was kicked away. Her further fate is unknown.
Rose was brought into the house. The boy sniffedherand fell asleep for the last time. At the funeral, the rose lay next to the deceased.“When the rose began to fade, they put it in an old thick book and dried it, and then many years later they gave it to me. That’s why I know this whole story,” writes V.M. Garshin.
In 1888, Vsevolod Mikhailovich’s health deteriorated sharply. On March 19, 1888, during another attack of mental illness, being in a state of severe melancholy, Garshin rushed into the flight of stairs of one of the gloomy St. Petersburg houses. On March 24, the writer passed away.
The poet Alexey Pleshcheev wrote a poem on the day of Garshin’s funeral:
There are not many who have purity of soul
He knew how to save in the midst of the muddy waves of life,
How you saved, and in whom you couldn’t
They put out the lamp of love...
Sleep peacefully, our dear brother!.. It will be a long time
Your bright image will live in people's hearts.
ABOUT! if we could, even just for a moment,
Your eyes will open... in our eyes
Would you read how limitless
Fills the soul with great sorrow
We think that you have left us forever!
Red flower
Garshin's most famous story. Not being strictly auto-bio-graphic, he nevertheless absorbed the personal experience of the writer, who suffered from manic-depressive psychosis and suffered an acute form of the disease in 1880
A new patient is brought to the provincial psychiatric hospital. He is violent, and the doctor is unable to relieve the severity of the attack. He constantly walks from corner to corner of the room, hardly sleeps and, despite the increased nutrition prescribed by the doctor, he is losing weight uncontrollably. He realizes that he is in a madhouse. An educated person, he largely retains his intellect and the properties of his soul. He is concerned about the amount of evil in the world. And now, in the hospital, it seems to him that somehow he is at the center of a gigantic undertaking aimed at destroying evil on earth, and that other outstanding people of all times who have gathered here are called upon to help him in this.
Meanwhile, summer comes, patients spend whole days in the garden, cultivating vegetable beds and caring for flower gardens.
Not far from the porch, the patient discovers three poppy bushes of an unusually bright scarlet color. The hero suddenly imagines that all the world’s evil is embodied in these flowers, that they are so red because they have absorbed the innocently shed blood of humanity, and that his purpose on earth is to destroy the flower and with it all the evil of the world...
He picks one flower, quickly hides it on his chest, and spends the entire evening begging others not to come near him.
The flower, it seems to him, is poisonous, and it would be better if this poison first goes into his chest than affects anyone else... He himself is ready to die, “like an honest fighter and as the first fighter of humanity, because until now no one has dared to fight all the evil of the world at once.”
In the morning, the paramedic finds him barely alive, the hero was so exhausted by the fight against the poisonous secretions of the red flower...
Three days later, he picks the second flower, despite the watchman’s protests, and again hides it on his chest, feeling as if evil were wriggling out of the flower “in long, snake-like creeping streams.”
This struggle further weakens the patient. The doctor, seeing the critical condition of the patient, the severity of which is aggravated by incessant walking, orders him to be put in a straitjacket and tied to the bed.
The patient resists - after all, he needs to pick the last flower and destroy evil. He is trying to explain to his guards what danger threatens them all if they do not let him go - after all, only he in the whole world can defeat the insidious flower - they themselves will die from one touch. but to him. The watchmen sympathize with him, but do not pay attention to the patient’s warnings. Then he decides to deceive the vigilance of his watchmen. Pretending to have calmed down, he waits until night and then shows miracles of dexterity and intelligence. He frees himself from the straitjacket and shackles, with a desperate effort he bends the iron bar of the window grille and climbs the stone fence. With torn nails and bloody hands, he finally gets to the last flower.
In the morning he is found dead. The face is calm, bright and filled with proud happiness. In his numb hand there is a red flower, which the fighter against evil takes with him to the grave.
Life story
“Every letter cost me a drop of blood”
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin was born on February 2, 1855 in the Bakhmut district of the Yekaterinoslav province, into a poor noble family. His father was an officer in a cuirassier regiment. His colleagues who took part in the recently ended Crimean War often gathered in their house, so the boy grew up under the impression of their stories about the heroic defense of Sevastopol.
Raised young Garshin P.V. Zavadsky, who was a member of a secret society that maintained connections with Herzen. The future writer grew up under the influence of advanced democratic ideas. He even learned to read from one of Sovremennik’s books. In his biography, Garshin noted that at the age of 8 he had already read the novel by N.G. Chernyshevsky “What to do.”
In 1864, Garshin entered one of the St. Petersburg real gymnasiums. He read a lot and was interested in social problems. The boy spent hours watching nature, plants and animals. He carried his interest in natural science throughout his life. Contemporaries who communicated with Garshin, a high school student, spoke of him as an inquisitive and thoughtful young man who very early began to experience vague aspirations to fight “world evil.” One of Garshin’s comrades at the gymnasium subsequently wrote about this: “It often happened that this cheerful-looking, carefree high school student would suddenly become subdued, fall silent, as if he was dissatisfied with himself and those around him, as if he was bitter that there were not enough smart and good people around him. Sometimes, at the same time, remarks would come from his lips about the need to fight evil, and sometimes very strange views were expressed on how to create the happiness of all mankind.”
The painful impression that the social life of that time had on Garshin often led to an exacerbation of mental illness, to which he was susceptible from an early age. Her seizures occurred infrequently. In his normal state, Vsevolod Mikhailovich was a cheerful and purposeful young man.
In 1874, Garshin graduated from high school. The dream of entering a university was not destined to come true, because graduates of real gymnasiums were not accepted there. Therefore, Vsevolod Mikhailovich decided to enter the Mining Institute, although he never felt any particular zeal for mastering engineering skills.
Studies at the institute were interrupted in April 1877, when the war with Turkey began for the liberation of the Balkan Slavs. Garshin greeted the day of Russia’s declaration of war on Turkey like this: “On April 12, 1877, my friend (Afanasyev) and I were preparing for an exam in chemistry. They brought a manifesto about the war. Our notes remained open. We submitted a letter of resignation and left for Chisinau, where we joined the 138th Bolkhov Regiment as privates and set out on a campaign the next day...” Later, Garshin would dedicate the story “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov” to a description of this campaign.
Vsevolod wrote to his mother about his decision to volunteer for the active army: “I cannot hide behind the walls of an institution when my peers expose their foreheads and chests to bullets. Bless me." In response, he received a short telegram “Godspeed, dear.”
On August 11, Garshin was wounded in the battle of Ayaslar (Bulgaria). The report about him said that he “with an example of personal courage carried his comrades forward into the attack, during which he was wounded in the leg.” At the same time, while being treated in a military hospital, he wrote his first story, “Four Days,” which was regarded by critics and contemporaries as a brilliant literary debut. This small work was put on a par with such outstanding creations as “Sevastopol Stories” by L.N. Tolstoy and battle paintings by V. Vereshchagin. In May 1878, at the end of the war, Garshin was promoted to officer, but less than a year later he retired for health reasons and devoted himself entirely to literary creativity.
Garshin's works began to be published back in the years when he was a student. In 1876, his first newspaper essay, “The True History of the Ensky Zemstvo Assembly,” was published. In it, Garshin addressed such acute social problems of his time as hunger in the countryside and the complete indifference of the zemstvo authorities to the situation of the people. This satire on zemstvo institutions appeared precisely at a time when the zemstvo was considered the basis of popular self-government and was considered one of the most important achievements of the era of “great reforms.”
Garshin's skeptical attitude towards reforms ran counter to public opinion. Indicative in this sense is the poem written by Vsevolod Mikhailovich on February 19, 1876 for the 15th anniversary of the abolition of serfdom, in which the poet says that the fall of the “rusty shackles” of serfdom did not in the least ease the situation of the peasantry
"...Shameless crowd
Doesn't sleep; soon the nets will curl
The wounded body is entangled,
And the old torment began!..”
In 1877, the story “Four Days” was published in Otechestvennye zapiski. It reflected Garshin’s own attitude to war, which, according to the author, is unnatural and hostile to man. However, despite the fact that the hero of the story is not able to explain why people fight wars and kill each other, he goes into battle again and again, obeying duty and a natural sense of justice.
In the story “The Coward,” written in 1879, the main character again appears as a man shocked by the awareness of the incalculable suffering that war brings to people. The story begins with the words “The war absolutely haunts me.” Garshin put his own opinion into the hero’s mouth. He also cannot accept the legality of deliberately organized bloodshed. “I don’t talk about war,” he writes, “and I approach it with a direct feeling, outraged by the mass of blood spilled.” However, rejection of the war did not become a reason for the hero to avoid participating in it, which he would consider dishonorable.
The special tone of narration, unique to Garshin, gives his works an extremely modern sound even today. Vsevolod Mikhailovich was one of the first to comprehend the philosophy of war. This is how he describes the movement of the army to the site of future battles in his last war story, “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov” “We walked around the cemetery, leaving it to the right. And it seemed to me that it was looking at us through the fog in a misunderstanding. “Why should you, thousands of you, go thousands of miles away to die in foreign fields, when you can die here too, die peacefully and lie under my wooden crosses and stone slabs... Stay!”
But we didn't stay. We were attracted by an unknown secret force; there is no greater force in human life. Each individual would have gone home, but the whole mass walked, obeying not discipline, not the consciousness of the rightness of the cause, not the feeling of hatred for an unknown enemy, not the fear of punishment, but that unknown and unconscious that for a long time will lead humanity to a bloody slaughter - the biggest reason all kinds of human troubles and suffering..."
In the same story, Garshin gives a description of the battle in which, as if looking ahead, he refutes the accusation of the Russian army of mythical bloodthirstiness, which was repeatedly heard during the war in Chechnya “They say that there is no one who is not afraid in battle; Every non-boastful and straightforward person, when asked if he is scared, will answer scared. But there was not that physical fear that takes over a person at night, in a back alley, when meeting a robber; there was a complete, clear consciousness of the inevitability and proximity of death. And - these words sound wild and strange - this consciousness did not stop people, did not force them to think about escape, but led them forward. Bloodthirsty instincts did not awaken, I did not want to go forward to kill someone, but there was an inevitable urge to go forward at all costs, and the thought of what to do during the battle would not be expressed in the words need to kill, but rather must die."
In works devoted to peaceful life, Garshin, as well as in military prose, is a master of socio-psychological storytelling. His hero - “a meek, good-natured young man, who until now knew only his books, his audience, and his family, who thought in a year or two to begin another work, a work of love and truth” - suddenly faces some glaring fact filled with deep tragedy and radically changing his attitude towards life. Such a collision leads to a serious moral crisis, which is resolved either by immersion “there, in this grief,” as happens in the story “Artists,” or by the suicide of the main character, who could not cope with mental discord (“The Incident”). Usually, it is according to this scheme that the action in Garshin’s works develops.
The writer examines social contradictions in their everyday appearance, but the everyday in his stories ceases to be so and takes on the character of an oppressive nightmare. In order to see the tragedies of everyday life hidden from ordinary view, it is necessary to experience a sudden mental shock that takes a person out of passive participation in everyday evil. Faced with the fact of injustice or untruth, the hero of Garshin's stories begins to reflect on his situation and painfully search for a way out of the current situation. Often these thoughts lead to a tragic outcome.
For the writer, there were no single expressions of life’s untruth; in each specific image he saw “all the innocently shed blood, all the tears, all the bile of humanity.” Therefore, along with psychological stories, Vsevolod Mikhailovich turned to the genre of allegorical fairy tales. Among his indisputable masterpieces is the story “The Red Flower,” which combines the features of these two genres. Showing social evil in all its nakedness, Garshin, like many of his contemporaries, strives to awaken in the reader the intense work of thought, “to kill his calm,” to disturb his conscience, to force him to rebel against the evil and injustice of the cruel world of people.
Professor Sikorsky, a famous psychiatrist in the 19th century, believed that in the story “The Red Flower,” which takes place in a psychiatric hospital, Garshin gave a classic depiction of mental illness. Unfortunately, many episodes of this story were autobiographical in nature. Its main character, a poor madman, saw three red flowers in the hospital garden and, imagining that they contained all the world’s evil, destroyed them at the cost of his own life.
Garshin ended his story with the words “In the morning he was found dead. His face was calm and bright; emaciated features with thin lips and deeply sunken, closed eyes expressed a kind of proud happiness. When they laid him on the stretcher, they tried to unclench his hand and take out the red flower. But his hand became numb, and he took his trophy to the grave.”
Many critics wrote that Garshin depicted the struggle not with evil, but with an illusion or metaphor of evil, showing the heroic madness of his character. However, in contrast to those who build illusions that he is the ruler of the world, who has the right to decide the destinies of others, the hero of the story died with the belief that evil can be defeated. Garshin himself belonged to this category. This is evidenced, perhaps somewhat childishly naive, by the writer’s fairy tales “Attalea princeps”, “That which did not exist”, “The Tale of the Toad and the Rose” and, of course, the last literary work he wrote - “The Frog -traveler".
In the mid-1880s, Garshin was experiencing a creative crisis. The genre of psychological story ceased to satisfy the writer, since it focused on the spiritual drama of the main character, and the outside world around him remained on the sidelines. “I feel,” wrote Vsevolod Mikhailovich in 1885, “that I need to relearn first. For me, the time of terrible, fragmentary screams, some kind of “poems in prose”, which I have been studying so far, has passed; I have enough material, and I need to depict not my “I”, but the big outside world.”
In the last years of his life, Garshin felt the need to create a large epic work. However, this did not mean that he was going to abandon his previous principles. Vsevolod Mikhailovich set himself the task of combining the image of the inner world of people who have a heightened sense of responsibility for the untruth reigning in society, with broad everyday pictures of the “big outside world”.
Garshin had far-reaching creative plans. He collected historical materials dating back to the time of Peter the Great, conceived a semi-philosophical, semi-scientific novel with elements of spiritualism, and was also preparing to work on the novel “People and War.” But Garshin failed to fully reveal himself in the new style. His creative quest was cut short by sudden death. In the new manner, the writer created only a few works, in particular the stories “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” and “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov.”
In 1888, Vsevolod Mikhailovich’s health deteriorated sharply. As G. Uspensky, who was a friend of Garshin, wrote, his illness was “nourished by the impressions of real life,” which were painful even for healthy people, but turned out to be disastrous for the writer’s sick psyche. In his article “The Death of V.M. Garshin” G. Uspensky characterizes these impressions of the “reactionary era” as follows: “The same daily “rumor” - and always gloomy and alarming; one and the same blow to the same sore spot, and certainly to a sick place, and certainly to a place that needs to “heal,” get better, take a break from suffering; a blow to the heart, which asks for a good feeling, a blow to the thought, yearning for the right to live, a blow to the conscience, which wants to feel itself... - this is what life gave Garshin after he had already suffered bitterly from her grief.”
Vsevolod Mikhailovich could not bear all these blows. On March 19, 1888, during another attack of mental illness, being in a state of severe melancholy, Garshin rushed into the flight of stairs of one of the gloomy St. Petersburg houses. On March 24, the writer passed away.
V.M. Garshin was called “a modern Hamlet”, “Hamlet of the heart”. According to contemporaries, the writer was brought closer to this Shakespearean hero by a painfully acute rejection of any injustice, the imperfection of human relationships, which caused him constant, almost physical pangs of conscience and compassion. Garshin himself, shortly before his tragic death, admitted: “Whether what was written came out well or not is an extraneous question; but that I actually wrote with my nerves alone and that every letter cost me a drop of blood, then this, really, will not be an exaggeration.”
Once, talking with A.P. Chekhov, V.G. Korolenko suggested that if Vsevolod Mikhailovich during his lifetime could be protected “from the painful impressions of our reality, removed for a time from literature and politics, and most importantly, removed from the tired soul that consciousness of social responsibility, which so oppresses a Russian person with a sensitive conscience. ..”, then his sick soul could find peace. But Anton Pavlovich responded to this remark: “No, this is an irreparable matter, some molecular particles in the brain have moved apart, and nothing can move them...”
The drama of the situation lies in the fact that in his own work Garshin sought with all the strength of his kind and vulnerable heart, “with his own nerves,” to connect the disintegrated “molecular particles” of the world in which he lived. It can be stated with absolute certainty that the impetus for writing each work was the shock experienced by the author himself. Not excitement or grief, but shock, which is why every letter cost the writer “a drop of blood.” At the same time, Garshin, according to Yu. Aikhenvald, “did not breathe anything sick or disturbing into his works, did not frighten anyone, did not show neurasthenia in himself, did not infect others with it...”.
Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich
one of the most prominent writers of the 70s and 80s of the 19th century; born February 2, 1855, died March 24, 1888, buried at the Volkov cemetery in St. Petersburg. The Garshin family is an old noble family, descended, according to legend, from Murza Gorsha or Garsha, a native of the Golden Horde under Ivan III. V. M. Garshin’s grandfather on his father’s side was a tough, cruel and domineering man; by the end of his life, he greatly upset his large fortune, so that Mikhail Yegorovich, Garshin’s father, one of eleven children, inherited only 70 souls in the Starobelsky district. Mikhail Yegorovich was “the complete opposite of his father”: he was an extremely kind and gentle man; serving in the cuirassiers in the Glukhovsky regiment, in Nicholas's time, he never beat a soldier; “unless he gets really angry and hits him with his cap.” He completed a course at the 1st Moscow Gymnasium and spent two years at Moscow University at the Faculty of Law, but then, in his own words, “he became interested in military service.” During the liberation of the peasants, he worked in the Kharkov Committee as a member from the Starobelsky district, where he settled after his resignation in 1858. In 1848, he married Ekaterina Stepanovna Akimova. “Her father,” says G. in his autobiography, “a landowner of the Bakhmut district of the Yekaterinoslav province, a retired naval officer, was a very educated and rarely good man. His relationship with the peasants was so unusual at that time that the surrounding landowners glorified him as a dangerous freethinker, and then as a madman. His “madness,” by the way, consisted in the fact that during the famine of 1843, when almost half the population in those places died out from starvation typhus and scurvy, he mortgaged his estate, borrowed money and himself brought “from Russia” a large amount of bread, which he distributed to the starving men, his own and others.” He died very early, leaving five children, of whom the eldest, Catherine, was still a girl; but his efforts to educate her bore fruit, and after his death teachers and books continued to be subscribed to, so that by the time she got married she had become a well-educated girl. Garshin was born the third child in the family, on the estate of his grandmother A. S. Akimova “Pleasant Valley” in Bakhmut district. The external conditions of Garshin’s childhood life were far from favorable: “while still a child, Vsevolod Mikhailovich had to experience a lot of things that only a few people experience,” writes Y. Abramov in his memoirs about G. In any case, there is no doubt that childhood had a great influence on the character of the deceased. At least, he himself explained many details of his character precisely by the influence of facts from his childhood life.” In the very first years of his childhood, when his father was still serving in the regiment, G. had to travel a lot and visit various places in Russia; Despite such a young age, many travel scenes and experiences left a deep mark and indelible memories in the receptive soul and lively, impressionable mind of the child. For five years now, the inquisitive child had learned to read from home teacher P.V. Zavadovsky, who then lived with the Garshins. The primer was an old Sovremennik book. From then on, G. became addicted to reading, and he could rarely be seen without a book. In his memoirs about little G., his uncle V. S. Akimov writes: “At the beginning of 1860, he, i.e. G., came with his mother to me in Odessa, where I had just returned from a London voyage on the steamer "Vesta" (later famous). He was already a five-year-old boy, very meek, serious and handsome, constantly running around with Razin’s “The World of God,” which he left only for the sake of his favorite drawing.” About the subsequent period of his life, from five to eight years old, G. writes the following: “The older brothers were sent to St. Petersburg; Mother went with them, and I stayed with my father. We lived with him either in the village, in the steppe, or in the city, or with one of my uncles in Starobelsky district. It seems that I have never re-read such a mass of books as I did when I was 3 years old with my father, from the age of five to eight. In addition to various children's books (of which I especially remember the excellent "World of God" by Razin), I re-read everything that I could barely understand from Sovremennik, Vremya and other magazines over several years. Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin and Negro Lives) had a strong influence on me. The extent to which I was free in reading can be shown by the fact that I read Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris” at the age of seven and, having re-read it at twenty-five, did not find anything new, and “What should I do?” I was reading from books at the very time when Chernyshevsky was sitting in the fortress. This early reading was, without a doubt, very harmful. At the same time, I read Pushkin, Lermontov (“Hero of Our Time” remained completely incomprehensible, except for Bela, about whom I cried bitterly), Gogol and Zhukovsky.”
In August 1863, his mother came for little Vsevolod to Starobelsk and took him to St. Petersburg, which made a huge impression on the future writer, whom he loved so much and where, with relatively short breaks, he lived almost his entire life. In 1864 G. entered the 7th St. Petersburg. gymnasium (later transformed into the first real school). G. himself says that he studied rather poorly, “although he was not particularly lazy,” but he spent a lot of time on extraneous reading, and adds that during the course he was sick twice and once “stayed in class out of laziness,” so the seven-year course turned into a ten-year course for him. His friend Ya. V. Abramov, in his collection of materials for biographies of V. M. G., says that G. studied well and “left the most pleasant memories in his teachers and educators.” This contradiction probably arose because G.’s ability to quickly grasp the subject being studied and delve into its essence did not require from him such perseverance in his studies as from most of his comrades, and his conscientiousness required him to devote himself entirely to the work of learning and not devote so much time to outsiders reading. G. treated the study of Russian literature and natural sciences with great interest and love; in these subjects he always received good marks; By the way, one of his essays, “Death,” which he submitted to a literature teacher in 1872, has survived; This work already reveals signs of the emergence of an extraordinary talent. G. “sincerely hated” mathematics classes and, if possible, avoided them, although mathematics was not particularly difficult for him. “Already at that age,” says Ya. V. Abramov, “all those charming traits of his character were clearly manifested in him, which later involuntarily charmed and conquered everyone who had anything to do with him; his extraordinary gentleness in his relations with people, deep justice, easy-going attitude, strict attitude towards himself, modesty, responsiveness to grief and joy of his neighbor” all these qualities attracted to him the sympathy of his superiors and teachers and the love of his comrades, many of whom remained his friends for life life. “At the same age,” says M. Malyshev, “those mental qualities that amazed everyone who knew his thoughtful attitude to everything seen, heard and read, the ability to quickly grasp the essence of the matter and find a solution to the problem began to be revealed in V.M. “, to see in a subject those aspects that usually escape the attention of others, the originality of conclusions and generalizations, the ability to quickly and easily find reasons and arguments to support one’s views, the ability to find connections and dependencies between objects, no matter how obscure they may be.” And in these young years, when other children are a true reflection of their environment, G. showed amazing independence and independence of his views and judgments: he retreated entirely into his own little world, created by himself, which consisted of books, drawings, herbariums and collections, compiled by himself, or was engaged in some kind of manual labor, for the love of which his loved ones jokingly called him Gogol’s governor; while doing manual labor, he subsequently often thought about his works. His love for nature, his passion for observing its phenomena, conducting experiments, and especially compiling various collections and herbariums remained with him throughout his life.
During his stay at the gymnasium, G. took a very active part in “gymnasium literature”; from the fourth grade, he was an active contributor to the Evening Newspaper, published weekly by students; in this newspaper he wrote feuilletons signed “Ahasfer”, and these feuilletons enjoyed great success among young readers. In addition, G. composed another long poem in hexameter, where he described gymnasium life. Being a passionate lover of reading, G. founded a society with his comrades to compile a library. The capital required to purchase books from second-hand booksellers was made up of membership fees and voluntary donations; money received here came from the sale of old notebooks to a small shop and often money received for breakfast.
For the first three years after entering the gymnasium, G. lived with his family, and after they moved to the south, he lived at one time in an apartment with his older brothers (who were already 16 and 17 years old at that time). Since 1868, he settled down in the family of one of his gymnasium comrades, V.N. Afanasyev, who was very nice to him. Around the same time, G., thanks to another of his gymnasium comrades, B. M. Latkin, entered the family of A. Ya. Gerd, to whom, as G. himself said, he was indebted more than to anyone else in matters of mental and moral of its development. From the sixth grade, G. was accepted into a boarding school at public expense. During his entire stay at the gymnasium, as well as subsequently at the mining institute, right up to entering the army, i.e., until 1877, G. always came to his relatives in Kharkov or Starobelsk for the summer holidays. At the end of 1872, when G. had already entered the last grade, for the first time that severe mental illness appeared in him, which periodically affected him subsequently, poisoned his life and led to an early grave. The first signs of the disease were expressed in strong agitation and increased feverish activity. He turned the apartment of his brother Victor G. into a real laboratory, attached almost world-wide importance to his experiments and tried to attract as many people as possible to his studies. Finally, his attacks of nervous excitement worsened so much that he had to be admitted to St. Nicholas Hospital, where by the beginning of 1873 his condition had deteriorated so much that people who wanted to visit him were not always allowed to see him. In the intervals between such severe attacks he had moments of lucidity, and in these moments everything that he had done during the period of madness became painfully clear to him. This was the whole horror of his situation, since in his painfully sensitive consciousness he considered himself responsible for these actions, and no convictions could calm him down and make him think otherwise. All subsequent attacks of the disease occurred in G. with approximately the same phenomena, sensations and experiences. When G. felt a little better, he was transported from the hospital of St. Nicholas to the hospital of Dr. Frey, where, thanks to attentive, skillful care and reasonable treatment, he completely recovered by the summer of 1873, so that in 1874 he successfully completed his college course . The years of his stay at the school left him with the best memories; With special warmth and gratitude he always remembered the director of the school V. O. Evald, the literature teacher V. P. Genning and the natural history teacher M. M. Fedorov. “Not having the opportunity to enter the university,” writes G. in his autobiography, “I thought of becoming a doctor. Many of my comrades (previous graduates) entered the medical academy, and are now doctors. But just at the time of my completion of the course, D-v submitted a note to the sovereign that, they say, realists enter the medical academy, and then penetrate from the academy to the university. Then it was ordered that realists should not be allowed into doctors. I had to choose one of the technical institutions: I chose the one with less mathematics, the Mining Institute. G. again devotes only as much time to his studies at the institute as is necessary to keep up with the course; he uses the rest for reading and, most importantly, preparing himself for literary activity, in which he sees his true calling. In 1876, G. first appeared in print with a short story: “The True History of the Ensky Zemstvo Assembly,” published in the weekly newspaper “Molva” (No. 15) signed by R.L., but the author himself did not attach much importance to this first debut and did not like to talk about him, as well as about his articles about art exhibitions, published in “News” for 1877. These articles were written by him under the influence of rapprochement with a circle of young artists. G. was an indispensable participant in all the “Fridays” of this circle, here he read some of his works for the first time, here he argued hotly, hotter than many artists, about art, which he looked at as serving the highest ideals of goodness and truth and from which, on this basis , demanded not satisfaction of the need to enjoy the beautiful, but high service to the cause of moral improvement of humanity. The same view of art is clearly expressed by G. in his poem, written on the occasion of the exhibition of military paintings by Vereshchagin that took place in St. Petersburg in 1874, which made a huge, stunning impression on V. M. Here, perhaps for the first time, his sensitive conscience clearly told him, that war is a common disaster, a common grief and that all people are responsible for the blood that is shed on the battlefield, and he felt all the horror and all the depth of the tragedy of the war. These deep experiences forced him to take part in the Russian-Turkish War. Since the spring of 1876, when rumors began to reach Russia about the unprecedented atrocities of the Turks in Bulgaria and when Russian society, which warmly responded to this disaster, began to send donations and volunteers to help the suffering brothers, G. with all his soul sought to join their ranks, but he was of military age, and they didn’t let him in. By the way, his poem dates back to this time: “Friends, we gathered before separation!” News from the theater of war had a stunning effect on G.’s sensitive soul; he, like the hero of the story “Coward,” could not calmly, like other people , read reports that say that “our losses are insignificant,” so many were killed, so many were wounded, “and be glad that it’s not enough,” no, when reading each such report, a whole bloody picture immediately appears before his eyes “, and he seems to experience the suffering of each individual victim. The thought of the obligation to “take on the share of the disaster that has befallen the people” grows and strengthens in G.’s soul, and when on April 12, 1877, while V.M. Together with his friend Afanasyev, he was preparing for the transition exams from the 2nd to the 3rd year of the Mining Institute, a manifesto about the Eastern War arrived, G. dropped everything and rushed to where his conscience and duty called him, dragging along his comrades Afanasyev and the artist M. E. Malyshev. .
As a volunteer, G. was enlisted in the 138th Bolkhov Infantry Regiment, in the company Iv. Name Afanasyev, the elder brother of his comrade V.N. Afanasyev. On May 4, G. already arrived in Chisinau, joined his regiment and, setting out from here on May 6, made the entire difficult transition on foot from Chisinau to Sistov. He writes about this from Banias (a suburb of Bucharest) to Malyshev: “The campaign we made was not easy. The crossings reached 48 versts. This is in terrible heat, in cloth uniforms, backpacks, with greatcoats over their shoulders. One day, up to 100 people from our battalion fell on the road; By this fact you can judge the difficulties of the campaign. But V. (Afanasyev) and I are holding on and not making mistakes.” G. later described this entire transition in detail in his story “Notes of Private Ivanov.” “Live by nature, restless, extremely sociable, simple and affectionate, G. was very fond of the soldiers, who were accustomed to seeing a volunteer officer candidate, and not their comrade,” writes Malyshev, who somewhat later G. entered the regiment. G. became close friends with them, taught them to read and write, wrote letters, read newspapers and talked with them for hours.” The soldiers treated G. very carefully, with restraint and affection, and long after, when the wounded G. had already left for Russia, they remembered him: “He knew everything, he could tell everything, and how many different stories he told us in hike! We're starving, we're sticking out our tongues, we're barely dragging our feet, but even the grief isn't enough for him, he's scurrying between us, squawking with this one, with that one. We’ll come to a rest stop, just to poke around somewhere, and he’ll collect the pots and fetch water. So wonderful, so alive! Nice gentleman, soul!” He especially, probably, attracted the sympathy of the soldiers by the fact that he did not tolerate any differences and served on an equal basis with them, not allowing any benefits or indulgences. On August 11, in the battle of Ayaslar, G. was wounded in the leg by a bullet right through. In the report on the Ayaslar case it was said that “an ordinary volunteer, Vsevolod Garshin, carried his comrades into the attack with an example of personal courage and thereby contributed to the success of the case. He was “introduced to Georgy,” but for some reason. then he did not receive it; having learned about the latter circumstance, the soldiers of his company were very sorry that they had hoped that he would receive this insignia and did not award him “company George”. For treatment, V. M. went to his relatives in Kharkov and from here to. At the end of 1877, he sent his story “Four Days” to “Otechestvennye Zapiski” (“Otech. Zap.”, 1877, No. 10, separate publication in Moscow in 1886), which immediately drew attention to the young author, composed a literary name for him and placed him alongside the outstanding artists of the time. G. began to write this story in fits and starts at rest stops during the war, and his theme was the actual fact when, after the battle of Ezerdzhi, soldiers sent to clean up the corpses found among the last alive a soldier of the Bolkhov regiment, who had lain on the battlefield for 4 days without food and drinking with broken legs.
Since this success in the literary field, G. decides to devote himself entirely to literary activity; he is concerned about retirement (although at one time he had the idea of remaining a military man for ideological service in this service) and, barely recovering, hurries to St. Petersburg. Here, soon after his arrival, he wrote two short stories: “A Very Short Novel,” published in Dragonfly, and “The Incident” (“Otechestvennye Zapiski”, 1878, No. 3). In the spring of 1878, G. was promoted to officer, and at the end of the same year he received his resignation, having previously spent quite a long time in the Nikolaev military land hospital “on probation.” In St. Petersburg, G. became seriously involved in his scientific and artistic education; he read a lot (albeit without any system), in the fall of 1878 he entered the university as a volunteer student at the Faculty of History and Philology to better familiarize himself with history, which he was especially interested in, and again became close to the circle of artists. During the winter of 187879. G. wrote the following stories: “Coward” (“Patriotic Zap.”, 1879, No. 3), “Meeting” (ibid., No. 4), “Artists” (ibid., No. 9), “Attalea princeps "(Russian Wealth, 1879, No. 10). G. spent the summer of 1879 with his relatives in Kharkov, where, among other things, he went with fifth-year medical students to a psychiatric hospital to “analyze patients.” Moreover, G. traveled a lot this summer, visiting his friends. In this increased desire to move, perhaps, that increased nervousness, a companion of spiritual melancholy, appeared in him at times before and resulted this time in the autumn of 1879. ., in severe and prolonged attacks of melancholy. It can be assumed that the story “Night” (“Otechestv. Zap.”, 1880, No. 6), written by G. in this winter, partly reflected his difficult internal state, which turned into at the beginning of 1880 into an acute manic illness, which again expressed itself in increased activity and a desire to move: V.M., after an attempt on gr. Loris-Melikova goes to see him at night and passionately convinces him of the need for “reconciliation and forgiveness,” then ends up in Moscow, where she also talks with Chief Police Chief Kozlov and wanders through some slums; from Moscow he goes to Rybinsk, then to Tula, where he abandons his belongings and wanders either on horseback or on foot through the Tula and Oryol provinces, preaching something to the peasants; lives for some time with the mother of the famous critic Pisarev, finally appears in Yasnaya Polyana and “puts” L.N. Tolstoy questions that torment his sick soul. At the same time, he is also occupied with broad plans for literary work: he intends to publish his stories under the title “The Suffering of Humanity”, he wants to write a large novel from Bulgarian life and publish a large work “People and War”, which was supposed to be a clear protest against the war. The story “The Batman and the Officer,” published around this time in Russian Wealth (1880, No. 8), was apparently a small part of this work. Finally, the wandering G. was found by his elder brother Evgeniy and taken to Kharkov, where V.M. had to be placed in Saburov’s dacha after he fled from his relatives and ended up in Orel, in a mental hospital. After four months of treatment at Saburova's dacha and a two-month stay in Dr. Frey's hospital in St. Petersburg, G. finally returned to full consciousness at the end of 1880, but the feeling of pointless melancholy and depression did not leave him. In this state, his uncle V.S. Akimov took him to the village of Efimovka (Kherson province), on the shore of the Dnieper-Bug estuary, and created for him there the most ideal life and environment for recovery. During his stay in Akimovka, i.e. from the end of 1880 to the spring of 1882, G. wrote only a short fairy tale “That which did not exist,” intended first for a handwritten children's magazine, which the children of A. Ya planned to publish .Gerda; but the fairy tale was not a children’s fairy tale, but a “skaldyrnic” one, as V.M. himself put it about it, that is, too pessimistic, and was published in the magazine “Foundations” in 1882 (NoNo 34). This fairy tale, by the way, aroused various rumors among the public, which G. vehemently protested against, who generally always rejected any allegorical interpretation of his works. During his stay in Akimovka, G. translated “Colomba” by Merimee; this translation was published in “Fine Literature” for 1883. How V.M. generally looked at his literary studies at that time can be seen from his letter to Afanasyev dated December 31, 1881. “I can’t write (should be), but Even if I can, I don’t want to. You know what I wrote, and you can have an idea of how this writing came to me. Whether what was written came out well or not well is an extraneous question: but that I actually wrote with my poor nerves alone and that every letter cost me a drop of blood, then this, really, will not be an exaggeration. Writing for me now means starting an old fairy tale again and in 3-4 years, perhaps, ending up in a mental hospital again. God be with it, with literature, if it leads to something worse than death, much worse, believe me. Of course, I'm not giving it up forever; in a few years, maybe I’ll write something. But I resolutely refuse to make literary pursuits the only occupation in life.”
In May 1882, G. came to St. Petersburg and published the first book of his stories, and spent the summer, taking advantage of the invitation of I. S. Turgenev, who had great sympathy for him, in Spassky-Lutovinovo together with the poet Ya. P. Polonsky and his family . In a quiet, cozy village environment conducive to work, he wrote “Notes from the Memoirs of Private Ivanov” (“Otechestv. Zap.”, 1883, No. 1, published separately in 1887). Returning to St. Petersburg in the fall, G. became At first, he became an assistant to the manager of the Anopovskaya paper factory for a salary of 50 rubles, but the classes here took a lot of time and greatly tired V.M. The next year (1883) G. received the position of secretary of the general congress of representatives. Russian railways, which he occupied for almost five years, leaving him only 3 months before his tragic death, this place gave him good financial support, and required intensive training only 12 months a year, when the congress was meeting the rest of the time; there was very little to do. In his service, G. established the most sympathetic and good relations with both his superiors and his colleagues, the latter were always willing to replace him during subsequent attacks of illness. In the same year, on February 11, V. M. married a student of medical courses, Nadezhda Mikhailovna Zolotilova. They had no children. This marriage was very happy; In addition to love and compatibility of characters, G., in the person of his wife, acquired a caring doctor-friend, who constantly surrounded him with caring and skillful care, which was so necessary for the sick writer. And G. highly appreciated this tender care and infinitely patient care with which his wife surrounded him until her death. On October 5, 1883, G. was elected as a full member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature in Moscow. In 1883, G. wrote the stories: “Red Flower” (“Otechestv. Zap.”, No. 10) and “Bears” (“Otechestv. Zap.”, No. 11, separately published in 1887 and 1890). In the same year, he translated two of Uyd’s fairy tales from English: “The Ambitious Rose” and “The Nuremberg Furnace” and from German several fairy tales by Carmen Silva (in the edition “The Kingdom of Fairy Tales”, St. Petersburg, 1883). From that time on, G. wrote little: in 1884, “The Tale of the Toad and the Rose” (“For twenty-five years, a collection of the Society for benefits to needy writers and scientists”), in 1885, the story “Nadezhda Nikolaevna,” (“ Russian Thought", NoNo 2 and 3), in 1886 "The Tale of the Proud Haggai" ("Russkaya Mysl", No. 4), in 1887 story "Signal" ("Northern Messenger", No. 1, separately in 1887 and 1891 ), the fairy tale “The Frog Traveler” (“Spring”, 1887) and an article about the traveling exhibition in the “Northern Bulletin”. In 1885, his “Second Book of Stories” was published. In the same 1885, G., together with A. Ya. Gerd, edited issues of the bibliographic sheet “Review of Children's Literature.” In addition, he again intensively studied Russian history of the 18th century. and cherished the idea of writing a great historical story depicting the struggle between old and new Russia; The representatives of the latter were to be Peter the Great and the “pie-maker” Prince Menshikov, and the representative of the first was the clerk Dokukin, who decided to present Peter with the famous “letter”, in which he boldly pointed out to the Tsar all the dark sides of his reform activities. But this story was not destined to come out from G.’s pen and see the light, just as his fantastic story, written on the topic of “defense of heresies in science and which was supposed to be a protest against scientific intolerance,” did not see the light of day. G. spoke about this story to his friend V.A. Fausek in 1887 and even described its contents in detail, but probably then burned it during an attack of his illness, which since 1884 was repeated every spring, prevented him from working and poisoned him his existence. Every year these attacks became longer and longer, starting earlier in the spring and ending later in the fall; but for the last time, in 1887, the illness appeared only late in the summer, when the writer himself and all his relatives were already hoping that it would not appear again. The persistent nature of this last disease was partly facilitated by some troubles that befell the unfortunate V.M. during the winter of 1887-88, from which his relatives were unable to protect him. In the early spring of 1888, G. finally felt a little better and, at the insistence of doctors and at the request of close friends, decided to go to the Caucasus. But this trip was not destined to come true: on March 19, on the eve of the appointed departure, at nine o’clock in the morning, the sick G., going out unnoticed onto the stairs from his apartment and descending from the 4th floor to the second, rushed down the flight of stairs, crashed badly and broke yourself a leg. At first G. was fully conscious and, apparently, suffered greatly; in the evening he was transported to the Red Cross hospital, where by 5 o'clock the next morning he fell asleep and never woke up again until his death, which followed at 4 o'clock in the morning on March 24, 1888. On March 26, he was buried at the Volkov cemetery. A huge crowd of people followed the white glazed coffin of the dear deceased writer; The coffin was carried in the arms of students and writers all the way. At the autopsy of the skull, no painful changes were found in the brain.
After G.’s death, his “Third Book of Stories” was published (St. Petersburg, 1888). The collection “In Memory of V. M. Garshin” (St. Petersburg, 1889) contains three poems by G.: “Captive”, “No, power has not been given to me” and “Candle” (pp. 6567). One of his poems in prose was published in the collection “Hello” (St. Petersburg, 1898); S. A. Vengerov published in “Russian Word” on the day of the 25th anniversary of the writer’s death his poem, written under the impression of Turgenev’s funeral, and also reprinted the above-mentioned poem in prose. A bibliographic list of G.’s works is given by D. D. Yazykov in “Review of the Works of Late Russian Writers,” no. 8, and P.V. Bykov in the collected works of G. in the edition of Marx. G.'s stories have gone through many editions; they have been translated into various foreign languages and enjoy great success abroad.
G.'s creativity is extremely subjective. The inner appearance of Garshin the man is so closely connected and in such harmony with the personality of the writer that it is less possible to write about his work without touching on his personality, his character and views than about any other writer. Almost each of his few stories is, as it were, a particle of his autobiography, a part of his thoughts and experiences, which is why they so vividly capture the reader with their life truth and excite him so much. G. himself created his works, experiencing them “like a disease,” and became so familiar with his heroes that he experienced their suffering deeply and realistically; That is why literary work, deeply captivating him, so tired and tormented his nerves.
Not only the writer’s friends and his colleagues, but also people who only fleetingly came into contact with him unanimously testify to the charmingly sympathetic impression that the personality of V. M. Garshin made on them. A. I. Ertel writes: “At your first acquaintance, you were unusually attracted to him. The sad and thoughtful look of his large “radiant” eyes (eyes that remained sad even when G. laughed), the “childish” smile on his lips, sometimes shy, sometimes clear and good-natured, the “sincere” sound of his voice, something unusual simple and sweet in his movements - everything about him seduced... And behind all that, everything he said, everything he thought did not contradict his external circumstances, did not introduce dissonance into this amazingly harmonious nature. It was difficult to find greater modesty, greater simplicity, greater sincerity; in the slightest shades of thought, as in the slightest gesture, one could notice the same inherent gentleness and truthfulness.” “I often thought,” said V. A. Fausek, “that if one can imagine a state of the world when complete harmony would come to humanity, then it would be if all people had the same character as V. M. He was not capable of any bad mental movement. His main feature was an extraordinary respect for the rights and feelings of other people, an extraordinary recognition of human dignity in every person, not rational, not arising from developed convictions, but unconscious, instinctive, characteristic of his nature. A sense of human equality was inherent in him to the highest degree; He always behaved equally with all people, without exception.” But for all his delicacy and gentleness, his truthful and direct nature did not allow not only lies, but even omissions, and when, for example, aspiring writers asked his opinion about their works, he expressed it directly, without softening. Envy had no place in his crystal-clear soul, and he always welcomed with sincere delight the emergence of new talents, which he was able to discern with his subtle artistic instinct. So he guessed and greeted A.P. Chekhov. But the most striking feature of his character was his humanity and his painful sensitivity to evil. “His whole being,” says Ertel, “was a protest against violence and that false beauty that so often accompanies evil. At the same time, this organic denial of evil and untruth made him a deeply unhappy and suffering person. Treating everything that was abused and offended with a feeling of passionate and almost painful pity, perceiving with burning pain the impressions of evil and cruel deeds, he could not calm these impressions and this pity with explosions of anger or indignation or a feeling of satisfied revenge, because neither “explosions” I was not capable of “feelings of revenge.” Pondering the causes of evil, he only came to the conclusion that “revenge” would not heal him, anger would not disarm him, and cruel impressions lay deep, like unhealed wounds, in his soul, serving as sources of that inexplicable sadness that invariably colors his works and which gave his face such a characteristic and touching expression.” Especially, however, it must be borne in mind that “hating evil, G. loved people, and fighting evil, he spared people.” But despite all this, despite the fits of boundless melancholy that captured him at times, G. was not and did not become a pessimist; on the contrary, he had “an enormous ability to understand and feel the happiness of life,” and in his sad stories sometimes sparkles of genuine good-natured humor slip through ; but since sadness could never completely freeze in his heart and “damned questions never ceased to torment his soul,” he could not completely surrender to the joy of life even at the happiest time of his life and was as happy as “as happy as a person can be.” who, by his nature, is inclined to mistake sweets, if not for bitter, then for not very sweet,” as he wrote about himself. Painfully sensitive to all the phenomena of life, striving not only theoretically, but also actually to take on his shoulders part of human suffering and grief, G. could not, of course, be undemanding about his talent; talent imposed on him a heavy burden of responsibility, and the words sound like a heavy groan in the mouth of a man who wrote with his blood: “no work can be as hard as the work of a writer, the writer suffers for everyone he writes about.” Protesting with his whole being against violence and evil, G., naturally, had to depict them in his works, and sometimes it seems fatal that the works of this “quiest” writer are full of horror and drenched in blood. In his war stories, G., like Vereshchagin in his paintings, showed all the madness, all the unvarnished horror of war, which are usually obscured by the bright shine of loud victories and glorious exploits. Drawing a close-knit mass of people who are not aware of “why they go thousands of miles to die in other people’s fields,” a mass drawn by “an unknown secret force, greater than which there is no one in human life,” a mass “obeying that unknown and unconscious that has long will still lead humanity to a bloody slaughter, the biggest cause of all kinds of troubles and suffering,” G., at the same time, shows that this mass consists of individual “unknown and inglorious” little people dying, each with a special world of internal experiences and suffering . In these same stories, G. pursues the idea that a sensitive conscience can never find satisfaction and peace. From G.’s point of view, there are no rights: all people are to blame for the evil that reigns on earth; there are not and should not be people who would stand aloof from life; everyone must participate “in the mutual responsibility of humanity.” To live already means to be involved in evil. And people go to war, like G. himself, who have nothing to do with war, and stands before them, for whom to take the life of even the most insignificant creature, not only deliberately, but also accidentally, seems incredible, the formidable demand of life to kill others, The whole horror of the tragedy is revealed not of Cain, but of “Abel the Killer,” as Yu. I. Aikhenvald says. But these people have no thoughts of murder; they, like Ivanov in the story “Four Days,” do not want harm to anyone when they go to fight. The thought that they too will have to kill people somehow escapes them. They only imagine how they will expose “their chest to bullets.” And with bewilderment and horror, Ivanov exclaims at the sight of the fellah he killed: “Murder, murderer... And who? “I!” But the thinking, suffering “I” must be erased and destroyed in war. Perhaps what makes a thinking person go to war is that, by surrendering to this tiring movement, he will freeze the painful thought that “with movement he will tire out evil.” He who has given himself entirely has little grief... he is no longer responsible for anything. It’s not what I want... it’s what he wants.” supports the life of his killer with a bottle of water. In this deep, sincere humanity and in the fact that in the days of anger the author “loved people and man” lies the reason for the success of G.’s war stories, and not in the fact that they were written at a time when there was no more burning and more affecting topic, that is, during the Turkish campaign.
Based on the same idea that a person will never be justified before his conscience and that he must take an active part in the fight against evil, the story “Artists” arose, although, on the other hand, in this story one can hear an echo of the dispute that divided the 70s. In the 1960s, artists fell into two camps: some argued that art should please life, and others that it should please only itself. Both heroes of this story, the artists Dedov and Ryabinin, seem to live and fight in the soul of the author himself. The first, as a pure esthete, completely surrendered to the contemplation of the beauty of nature, transferred it to the canvas and believed that this artistic activity was of great importance, like art itself. The morally sensitive Ryabinin cannot so carefreely retreat into his own, also dearly beloved, art; he cannot give himself up to pleasure when there is so much suffering around him; he needs, at least first, to make sure that all his life he will not serve only the stupid curiosity of the crowd and the vanity of some “rich stomach on legs.” He needs to see that with his art he really ennobled people, made them think seriously about the dark sides of life; he challenges the crowd with his “Capercaillie”, and he himself almost loses his mind at the sight of this terrible image of human suffering, embodied with artistic truth in his creation. But even after the embodiment of this image, Ryabinin did not find peace, just as G. did not find it either, whose sensitive soul was painfully tormented by what barely affects ordinary people. In his painful delirium, it seemed to Ryabinin that all the evil of the world was embodied in that terrible hammer, which mercilessly struck the chest of the “grouse” sitting in the cauldron; That’s how it seemed to another madman, the hero of the story “The Red Flower,” that all the evil and all the untruth in the world was concentrated in a red poppy flower growing in the hospital garden. In the consciousness darkened by illness, however, love for all humanity shines brightly and the high, bright idea burns - to sacrifice oneself for the good of people, to buy the happiness of humanity with one’s death. And the madman (only a madman can come up with such a thought!) decides to uproot all evil from life, decides not only to pluck this flower of evil, but also to put it on his tormented chest in order to take all the poison into his heart. The trophy of this martyr's self-sacrifice - a red flower - he, in his quest for the bright stars, took with him to the grave: the watchmen could not remove the red flower from his stiff, tightly clenched hand. This story is certainly autobiographical; G. writes about him: “It dates back to the time of my stay at Saburova’s dacha; something fantastic comes out, although in fact it is strictly real.” If we remember the fact that G. perfectly remembered what he experienced and did during his painful attacks, it becomes clear that outstanding psychiatrists recognize this story as an amazingly correct, even scientifically correct, psychological study. But the desire to wash away the crime of other people with one’s blood is born not only in great heroes and not only in the dreams of madmen: a small man, the humble railway watchman Semyon Ivanov, in the story “Signal”, with his blood prevented the evil planned by Vasily, and thereby forced the latter to reconcile, just as “Proud Haggai” humbled himself when he came down to people from his proud loneliness and came into close contact with human misfortunes and misfortunes. “Night” depicts the suffering of the human conscience, which reached its extreme limits because man “lived alone, as if standing on a high tower, and his heart hardened, and his love for people disappeared.” But at the last minute, when the hero was completely ready to commit suicide, the ringing of a bell burst through the open window and reminded that, in addition to his narrow little world, there is also “a huge human mass, where you need to go, where you need to love”; reminded him of that book where the great words were written: “be like children,” and children do not separate themselves from those around them, reflection does not force them to break away from the flow of life, and they, finally, have no “debts.” Alexey Petrovich, the hero of the story “Night,” realized “that he owes himself his whole life” and that now, when “the time for payment has come, he is bankrupt, malicious, deliberate... He remembered the grief and suffering that he had seen in life, real everyday grief, before which all his torment by oneself meant nothing, and he realized that he could no longer live at his own expense, he realized that he needed to go there, into this grief, take a part of it for himself, and only then would peace come in his soul. And this bright thought filled the man’s heart with such delight that this sick heart could not stand it, and the beginning of the day was illuminated by “a loaded weapon on the table, and in the middle of the room a human corpse with a peaceful and happy expression on a pale face.”
Pity for fallen humanity, suffering and shame for all the “humiliated and insulted” led G. to the idea, so clearly expressed by Maeterlinck, “that the soul is always innocent”; G. managed to find a particle of this pure innocent soul and show it to the reader at the extreme stage of a person’s moral decline in the stories “The Incident” and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”; the latter, however, ends with the same sad chord that “for the human conscience there are no written laws, no doctrine of insanity,” and a person acquitted by a human court must still be executed for the crime committed.
In the elegant, enchanting poetic fairy tale “Attalea princeps,” which was originally written by G. in the form of a poem, the writer depicts the desire of a sensitive and tender soul for freedom and the light of moral perfection. This is the longing of a soul chained to the earth, “for a homeland unattainably distant,” and nowhere can one be happy except one’s native land. But tender dreams and high ideals perish from the cold touch of life, they perish and fade. Having achieved its goal at the cost of incredible efforts and suffering, having broken the iron frames of the greenhouse, the palm tree exclaims in disappointment: “Just that?”. In addition, she should have already died for the fact that “everyone was together, and she was alone.” But not As soon as she died, she took with her the little grass that loved her so dearly. Life sometimes demands that we kill the one we love, this idea is expressed even more clearly in the story “Bears.”
All of G.’s stories are imbued with quiet sadness and have a sad ending: the rose left the nasty toad, who wanted to “eat it up,” but bought it at the cost of being cut and placed in the baby’s coffin; a joyful meeting of two comrades in a distant foreign city ends with a sad recognition of the unsuitability of the ideal, pure views on life of one of them; and even a cheerful company of small animals, gathered on the lawn to talk about the goals of life, is crushed under the heavy boot of the coachman Anton. But G.’s sadness and even death itself are so enlightened, so pacifying, that one involuntarily recalls Mikhailovsky’s lines about G.: “In general, it seems to me that G. writes not with a steel pen, but with some other, soft, gentle, caressing, steel is too rough and hard a material.” V. M. possessed to the highest degree that “human talent” that Chekhov speaks of, and he attracts the reader with his subtle and elegant simplicity, warmth of feeling, artistic form of presentation, making him forget his small shortcomings, such as the abuse of the diary form and the often encountered him by the method of opposition. G. wrote not many stories, and they are not large in volume, “but in his small stories,” in the words of Ch. Uspensky, “the entire content of our life was positively gleaned,” and with his works he left an indelible bright mark on our literature.
Collection “In Memory of V. M. Garshin”, 1889 Collection “Red Flower”, 1889 “Volzhsky Bulletin”, 1888, No. 101. “Spring”, 1888, No. 6. “ News", 1888, March 25th. "Petersburg newspaper", 1888, No. 83, 84 and 85. "New Time", 1888, No. 4336 and No. 4338. "Women's Education", 1886, No. 67, p. 465. “Bulletin of Clinical and Forensic Psychiatry and Neuropathology”, 1884 (article by Prof. Sikorsky). In N. N. Bazhenov’s book “Psychiatric Conversations on Literary and Social Topics”, article “Garshin’s Mental Drama”. Volzhsky, “Garshin as a religious type.” Andreevsky, “Literary readings”. Mikhailovsky, vol. V². K. Arsenyev, “Critical Studies”, vol. ²², p. 226. “The Path-Road”, Literary collection, ed. K. M. Sibiryakova, St. Petersburg, 1893 Skabichevsky, “History of modern literature.” Article by Chukovsky in “Russian Thought” for 1909, book. XII. Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary. Y. Aikhenvald, “Silhouettes of Russian Writers,” vol. I. D. D. Yazykov, “Review of the Life and Works of Russian Writers,” vol. 8, pp. 2831. S. A. Vengerov, “Something new from Garshin’s literary heritage” (“Russian Word”, March 24, 1913). S. Durylin, “The lost works of V. M. Garshin” (“Russian Vedomosti”, March 24, 1913). For a review of articles prompted by the 25th anniversary of Garshin’s death, see “The Voice of the Past,” 1913, May, pp. 233, 244 (“New about Garshin” by H. L. Brodsky).
O. Davydova.
Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich
one of the most outstanding writers of the literary generation of the seventies. Genus. February 2, 1855 in Bakhmut district, in an old noble family. His childhood was not rich in pleasant impressions; In his receptive soul, on the basis of heredity, a hopelessly gloomy outlook on life began to develop very early. This was greatly facilitated by his unusually early mental development. At the age of seven he read “Notre Dame de Paris” by Victor Hugo and, re-reading it 20 years later, did not find anything new in it. For 8 and 9 years he was reading Sovremennik. In 1864 G. entered 7 St. Petersburg. gymnasium (now the first real school) and after completing a course there, in 1874, he entered the Mining Institute. In 1876, he was just about to go as a volunteer to Serbia, but he was not allowed in because he was of military age. On April 12, 1877, G. was sitting with a friend and preparing for a chemistry exam when they brought a manifesto about the war. At that very moment the notes were thrown, G. ran to the institute to submit a request for dismissal, and a few weeks later he was already in Chisinau as a volunteer in the Volkhov Regiment. In the battle of August 11 near Ayaslar, as the official report stated, “private soldier V. Garshin, with an example of personal courage, carried his comrades forward into the attack, during which he was wounded in the leg.” The wound was not dangerous, but G. no longer took part in further military actions. Promoted to officer, he soon retired, spent six months as a volunteer student at the philological faculty of St. Petersburg University, and then devoted himself entirely to literary activity, which he had recently begun with brilliant success. Even before his wound, he wrote a war story “Four Days”, published in the October book of “Notes of the Fatherland” in 1877 and immediately attracted everyone’s attention. The short stories that followed “Four Days”, “Incident”, “Coward”, “Meeting”, “Artists” (also in Otech. Zap.) strengthened the fame of the young writer and promised him a bright future. His soul, however, became increasingly and became more and more darkened, and at the beginning of 1880 serious signs of mental disorder appeared, to which he was subjected even before the end of the gymnasium course. At first it was expressed in such manifestations that it was difficult to determine where the high structure of the soul ends and where madness begins. After Count Loris-Melikov was appointed head of the Supreme Administrative Commission, Garshin went to see him late in the evening and, not without difficulty, obtained a meeting with him. During a conversation that lasted more than an hour, Garshin made very dangerous confessions and gave very bold advice to have mercy and forgive everyone. Loris-Melikov treated him extremely kindly. With the same projects of forgiveness, G. went to Moscow to see Chief Police Chief Kozlov, then went to Tula and walked on foot to Yasnaya Polyana to see Leo Tolstoy, with whom he spent the whole night in enthusiastic dreams of how to arrange the happiness of all mankind. But then his mental disorder took such forms that his relatives had to place him in the Kharkov psychiatric clinic. After staying there for some time, G. went to the Kherson village of his maternal uncle, stayed there for 1 1/2 years and, completely recovered, at the end of 1882 he arrived in St. Petersburg. In order to have a certain non-literary income, he entered the office of the Anolovskaya paper mill, and then received a place in the general congress of Russian railways. Then he got married and generally felt well, although from time to time he had periods of deep, causeless melancholy. At the beginning of 1887, threatening symptoms appeared, the disease developed quickly, and on March 19, 1888, G. threw himself from the 4th floor landing into the opening of the stairs and died on March 24. An expression of the deep grief caused by G.'s untimely death were two collections dedicated to his memory: “Red Flower” (St. Petersburg, 1889, edited by M. N. Albov, K. S. Barantsevich and V. S. Likhachev) and “In Memory of V. M. Garshin” (St. Petersburg, 1889, edited by Ya. V. Abramov, P. O. Morozov and A. N. Pleshcheev), in the compilation and illustration of which our best literary and artistic forces took part.
In G.'s extremely subjective work, with extraordinary brightness, that deep spiritual discord was reflected, which constitutes the most characteristic feature of the literary generation of the 70s and distinguishes it both from the straightforward generation of the 60s, and from the newest generation, which cares little about ideals and guiding principles. principles of life. According to the basic make-up of his soul, Garshin was of an unusually humane nature, and his very first artistic creation, “Four Days,” reflected precisely this side of his spiritual being. If he himself went to war, it was solely because it seemed shameful to him not to take part in the liberation of his brothers, who were languishing under the Turkish yoke. But for him, the very first acquaintance with the actual situation of the war was enough to understand the full horror of man’s extermination of man. Adjacent to “Four Days”
“Coward” is the same deeply felt protest against the war. The fact that this protest had nothing in common with stereotyped humanity, that it was a cry from the soul, and not a tendency to please the camp to which G. joined, can be seen from G.’s largest “military” thing. “From the notes of a private Ivanov" (excellent review scene). Everything that G. wrote was, as it were, excerpts from his own diary; he did not want to sacrifice for the sake of anything a single feeling that freely arose in his soul. Sincere humanity was also reflected in G.’s story “The Incident,” where, without any sentimentality, he managed to find the human soul at the extreme stage of moral decline.
Along with the all-pervading sense of humanity in Garshin’s work, as well as in himself, there lived a deep need for an active struggle against evil. It was against this backdrop that one of his most famous stories was created: “The Artists.” Himself an elegant artist of words and a subtle connoisseur of art, G., in the person of the artist Ryabinin, showed that a morally sensitive person cannot calmly indulge in the aesthetic delight of creativity when there is so much suffering around. The desire to destroy the untruths of the world was expressed most poetically in the surprisingly harmonious fairy tale “The Red Flower,” a half-biographical fairy tale, because G., in a fit of madness, dreamed of immediately destroying all the evil that exists on earth. But a hopeless melancholic throughout his spiritual and physical being, G. did not believe either in the triumph of good, or in the fact that victory over evil could bring peace of mind, much less happiness. Even in the almost humorous fairy tale “That Which Wasn’t”, the reasoning of a cheerful company of insects who have gathered on the lawn to talk about the goals and aspirations of life ends with the coachman coming and crushing all the participants in the conversation with his boot. Ryabinin from “Artists”, who abandoned art, “did not prosper” and became a public teacher. And this is not because of the so-called “independent circumstances”, but because the interests of the individual are also sacred in the end. In the charmingly poetic fairy tale “Attalea princeps”, the palm tree, having achieved the goal of its aspirations and emerged into “freedom”, asks with mournful surprise: “and that’s all”?
G.'s artistic powers and his ability to paint vividly and expressively are very significant. He wrote a little - about a dozen short stories, but they give him a place among the masters of Russian prose. His best pages are at the same time full of heartbreaking poetry and such deep realism that, for example, in psychiatry “The Red Flower” is considered clinical picture, down to the smallest details of the corresponding reality. What G. wrote was collected in three small “books” (St. Petersburg, 1882 and later). All of them went through several editions. G.'s stories enjoy great success in numerous translations into German, French, English and other languages.
S. Vengerov.
Big Encyclopedic Dictionary, ed. F.A. Brockhaus and I.A. Efron (1890-1907, 82+4 volumes [more precisely, half-volumes, but most often the half-volume number is indicated as volume, for example volume 54; more correctly, volumes 43, of which 2 additional .])
Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich
Izv. rus. writer, author of a number of military works. stories: “Four Days”, “Coward”, “The Orderly and the Officer”, “From the Notes of Private Ivanov”. Genus. 2 Feb. 1855 G.'s father served in the Glukhovsky cuirass. etc., and from the childhood impressions of the future writer the post was firmly preserved in his memory. migration with a regiment, campaign. regiments setting: “huge red horses and huge people in armor, white and blue coats and hairy helmets.” The Garshin family was military: both the father and maternal grandfather, and her brothers were military. Their stories had a strong effect on the boy, but the impressions from them paled in comparison with the stories of the elders. a disabled hussar who served in the Garshins' house. Little G. became friends with this old servant and decided to “go to war.” This desire took possession of him so strongly that his parents had to forbid him to starve. hussar to maintain the heroic spirit in the child; his parents sent him to 7th St. Petersburg. gymnasium (now the 1st real school), but the frail and weak boy was full and heroic there. dreams. Just before the end of the gymnasium course, in 1873, G. fell ill with acute mental illness. illness and spent almost 1/2 of a year in the hospital. Having recovered from it, G. not only survived graduation. exams, but also successfully passed and will enter. exams at the Mining Institute (1874). He was already in his 2nd year when the war between Serbia and Turkey began, and he decided to go to the war as a volunteer, which, however, failed. By this time he was already a principal. pro-com war, he was, however, deeply convinced that if war is a nationwide grief, a nationwide one. suffering, then everyone should share it equally with others. And when on April 12, 1877 Vysoch. manifesto about the war between Russia and Turkey, G. hastily left for Chisinau. Enlisted as a private in the 138th Infantry. Volkhovskaya village, he went with him through the whole of Romania. “Never,” G. later recalled, “was there such completeness in me. soulful calmness, peace with myself and the same attitude towards life as when I experienced these adversities and walked under bullets to kill people” (“From Memoirs Series. Ivanova”). The first battle in which G. took part directly. participation took place near the village of Ezerdzhi (it was described by G. in the story “From the Memoirs of Ivanov’s Row”; it also served as the background for his story “Four Days on the Battlefield”). Next battle, near Ayaslyar (described in the article “About the Ayaslyar Case”), G. was wounded by a bullet right through to the lion. leg, and in the order for the regiment it was noted that “private volunteer Vsevolod G. is a personal example. courage, he carried his comrades into the attack and thereby contributed to the success of the cause.” For the Ayaslyar case G. was nominated for promotion to officer and sent for treatment to his homeland, to Kharkov. Here in the church he sketched his first story (“Four Days”), conceived in Bulgaria and published in October. book “Father. Notes" 1878. He drew general attention to the young. writer. The stories that followed (“Coward”, “Incident”, “Meeting”, “Artists”, “Night”, etc.) strengthened G.’s fame. He wrote slowly, creatively. the work cost him a lot. nervous tension and ended with the return of souls. illness. During the period 18831888. he wrote: “Red Flower”, “Notes of Private Ivanov”, “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”, “Signal” and “The Tale of Proud Ageya”. The last works were written by G. already in a depressed state. Melancholy, insomnia and the consciousness of the impossibility of continuing such a life did not leave him. On the eve of leaving abroad, after a tedious night spent without sleep, G. left his apartment and walked for several hours. steps up the stairs and threw himself over the railing down. 24 mrt. In 1888 he died. An outstanding place in G.'s work is occupied by his military. stories, and in them the predominant importance is the war, its events and its psyche. Theoretical the attitude of the “Garsha hero” to the war is directly negative: war, in his opinion, is evil, and he treats it with “directness.” a feeling outraged by the mass of spilled blood” (“Coward”); war “murder” (“Four Days”), “wild inhuman dump” (“From the notes of a row. Ivanova”). But at the same time, “the war absolutely haunts” the Garsha hero (“Coward”). Military telegrams have a much stronger effect on him than on those around him. His thoughts do not find support in his feelings. “Something that defies definition sits inside me, discusses my situation and forbids me to shy away from war as a common grief, a common suffering.” This sharp split in the feelings and thoughts of Garsha’s hero and his heroes in general must be kept in mind, for it is the cornerstone. the stone of their entire worldview and the source of many that seem to be at first. a look of irreconcilable contradictions. Feeling in them is always more active than thought, and vital creativity comes out of it, and reflective thought beats in the snares of feeling, always deeply sincere, although somewhat affected. It is only out of a feeling of solidarity with the suffering that Garsha’s hero goes to war, into its very heat, and it also draws him directly to it. participation in what his mind had recently called “human slaughter.” In battle, he was also possessed by a new, hitherto unknown, untested feeling that did not correspond to his previous theoretical ideas. reasoning: “There was no physical the fear that seizes a person at night, in a back alley, when meeting a robber; there was a complete clear consciousness of the inevitability and proximity of death. And this consciousness did not stop people, did not force them to think about escape, but led them forward. Bloodthirsty instincts did not awaken, I did not want to go forward to kill someone, but there was an inevitable urge to go forward at all costs, and the thought of what needs to be done during the battle could not be expressed in words: you need to kill, but rather: you need to die.” (“From the recollection series. Ivanov”). In the words of the oath “not sparing the belly”, at the sight of the rows of “gloomy people ready for battle”, the Garsha hero himself felt that these were “not empty words”, “and disappeared without a trace before the ghost of death, looking straight into the eyes, and caustic , reflective thought about fear, and fear. The terrible has recently become inevitable, inescapable and not scary.” So the “personal” dissolves in the war in general, and the big external world absorbs the small individual “I”, and this psychological. the process is beautifully and subtly revealed in the military. G.'s stories, of which the first two appeared during the writer's lifetime (T. I. St. Petersburg, 1882. T. 2. St. Petersburg, 1887), went through a number of editions. G.'s letters to his mother from the theater of war from Bulgaria were published in the journal. "Rus. Review", 1895, No. 24. Two letters are dedicated to G.'s memory. arts. collection: “In Memory of V. M. Garshin” and “Red Flower”. St. Petersburg, 1889 (about G. as a military writer, see the article by V. A. Apushkin in “Military Collection” for 1902 “The War of 1877-78 in correspondence and novel”; “About G. regarding the war" see "Priaz. Edge" 1895 No. 93. About G. as a person and writer: TO.TO.Arsenyev. Critical sketches; A.M.Skabichevsky. Essays. T.VI. T.I. H.TO.Mikhailovsky. Essays. T. VI; WITH.A.Andreevsky. Literary essays; M.P.Protopopov. Liter. crit. characteristics; G.AND.Uspensky. Essays. T. XI. Ed. Fuchs).
"Military Encyclopedia" edited by K. I. Velichko, V. F. Novitsky, A. V. Schwartz and others (edition by I. V. Sytin, vol. 1-18, P., 1911-1915, unfinished)
Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich
fiction writer; R. February 2, 1855; took his own life in a fit of mental illness (threw himself down a flight of stairs) on March 19, 1888.
Russian Biographical Dictionary (1896-1918, ed. of the Russian Historical Society, 25 vols., unfinished; publication was initially carried out under the supervision of A. A. Polovtsov [Polovtsev; 1832-1909], who had been the chairman of the Society since 1978)
Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich
Rod. in an old noble family. He spent his childhood in a military environment (his father was an officer). Already as a child, Garshin was extremely nervous and impressionable, which was facilitated by too early mental development (he subsequently suffered from attacks of nervous breakdown). He studied at the Mining Institute, but did not complete the course. The war with the Turks interrupted his studies: he volunteered for active duty in the army and was wounded in the leg; Having retired, he devoted himself to literary activities. In 1880, shocked by the death penalty of the young revolutionary, G. became mentally ill and was placed in a mental hospital. In the eighties, seizures began to become more frequent, and during one of the attacks he threw himself down a flight of stairs from the fourth floor and fell to his death.
G. entered the literary field in 1876 with the story “Four Days,” which immediately made him famous. This work clearly expresses a protest against war, against the extermination of man by man. A whole series of stories is dedicated to this same motif: “Officer’s Orderlies”, “The Ayaslyar Case”, “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov” and “Coward”; the hero of the latter suffers from severe reflection and oscillations between the desire to “sacrifice himself for the people” and the fear of unnecessary and meaningless death. G. also wrote a number of essays where social evil and injustice are depicted against the backdrop of peaceful life. “Incident” and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” touch on the theme of a “fallen” woman. In “Attalea Princeps”, in the fate of the palm tree, striving for freedom and dying under the cold sky, G. symbolized the fate of the terrorists. In 1883, one of his most remarkable stories appeared, “The Red Flower.” His hero, a mentally ill person, fights the world's evil, which, as it seems to him, is embodied in a red flower in the garden: it is enough to pick it and all the evil of the world will be destroyed. In “Artists,” Garshin, exposing the cruelty of capitalist exploitation, raises the question of the role of art in bourgeois society and fights against the theory of pure art. The essence of the capitalist system with its dominant personal egoism is clearly expressed in the story “Meeting”. G. wrote a number of fairy tales: “That Which Didn’t Happen”, “The Frog Traveler”, etc., where the same Garsha theme of evil and injustice is developed in the form of a fairy tale full of sad humor.
G. legitimized a special artistic form in literature, the short story, which was later fully developed by Chekhov. The plots of G.'s short story are simple. It is always built on one main motive, developed according to a strictly logical plan. The composition of his stories, surprisingly complete, achieves almost geometric certainty. The absence of action and complex collisions is characteristic of G. Most of his works are written in the form of diaries, letters, confessions (for example, “Incident”, “Artists”, “Coward”, “Nadezhda Nikolaevna”, etc.). The number of characters is very limited.
The drama of action is replaced in Garshin by the drama of thought, revolving in the vicious circle of “damned questions”, the drama of experiences, which are the main material for G.
It is necessary to note the deep realism of Garshin’s manner. His work is characterized by precision of observation and definite expression of thought. He has few metaphors and comparisons, instead a simple designation of objects and facts. A short, polished phrase, without subordinate clauses in descriptions. "Hot. The sun is burning. The wounded man opens his eyes and sees bushes and a high sky” (“Four Days”). A wide coverage of social phenomena was not possible for G., just as the writer of the generation for whom the main need was to “endure” was not able to have a calmer life. He could not depict the big outside world, but the narrow “his own.” And this determined all the features of his artistic style. “Own” for the generation of advanced intelligentsia of the 70s. these are damned questions of social untruth. The sick conscience of the repentant nobleman, not finding an effective way out, always hit one point: the consciousness of responsibility for the evil that reigns in the field of human relations, for the oppression of man by man - the main theme of G. The evil of the old serfdom and the evil of the emerging capitalist system equally fill the pages of Garshin’s books with pain stories. From the consciousness of social injustice, from the consciousness of responsibility for it, G.’s heroes are saved, just as he himself did when he went to war, so that there, if not to help the people, then at least to share their difficult fate with them... This was temporary salvation from the pangs of conscience, the atonement of a repentant nobleman (“They all went to their deaths calm and free from responsibility...” “Memoirs of Private Ivanov”). But this was not a solution to the social problem. The writer did not know the way out. And therefore all his work is permeated with deep pessimism. The significance of G. is that he knew how to acutely feel and artistically embody social evil.
Bibliography: I. First book. stories, St. Petersburg, 1885; Second book. stories, St. Petersburg, 1888; Third book. stories, St. Petersburg, 1891; Sochin. Garshin in I volume, 12th ed. Literary fund, St. Petersburg, 1909; The same, in app. to the journal "Niva" for 1910; Stories with biogr., written. A. M. Skabichevsky, ed. Literary fund, P., 1919; Collection works, ed. Ladyzhnikova, Berlin, 1920; Selected stories, Guise, M., 1920; Stories, ed. Yu. G. Oksman (ready for publication in the Giza edition).
II. Collections about Garshin: “Red Flower”, St. Petersburg, 1889; "In Memory of Garshin", ed. magazine “Pantheon of Literature”, St. Petersburg, 1889; In app. to collection composition Garshin (ed. “Niva”) memoirs of V. Akimov, V. Bibikov, A. Vasiliev, E. Garshin, M. Malyshev, N. Reinhardt, G. Uspensky, V. Fausek and autobiographer, note by Garshin; Arsenyev K. K., Critical studies, vol. II, St. Petersburg, 1888; Mikhailovsky N.K., Sochin., vol. VI; Skabichevsky A.M., Sochin., vol. II; Protopopov M., Literary criticism. character., St. Petersburg, 1896; 2nd ed., St. Petersburg, 1898; Zlatovratsky N., From literary memoirs, Sat. “Brotherly Help”, M., 1898; Andreevsky S. A., Literary essays, St. Petersburg, 1902; Bazhenov, Psychiatric conversations, M., 1903; Volzhsky, Garshin as a religious type; Essays on a realistic worldview, 1904, art. Shulyatikov “Restoration of destroyed aesthetics”; Korobka N.I., Garshin, “Education”, 1905; XI XII; Aikhenvald Yu. I., Silhouettes of Russian writers, v. I, M., 1906; Chukovsky K.I., O Vsev. Garshine, “Russian. thought”, 1909, XII and in the book. "Critical stories. V. G. Korolenko, Garshin, History of Russian. Literature", ed. "World"
