Mikhail Pylyaev

Mikhail Ivanovich Pylyaev was born on November 1 (13), 1842, in the town of Gdov, into a merchant family; his father owned first an apothecary shop and later a perfume shop. He studied at a Reformed school in St. Petersburg, attended lectures at Kharkiv University, and traveled extensively, including to Siberia and the Caucasus, Turkey, and Egypt. Pylyaev’s literary activity began with publications in small journals; he contributed to Iskra, and in the St. Petersburg Gazette he published numerous articles on the history of theater and ballet, wrote reports on art exhibitions, and covered events in the cultural life of the capital, and so on. From 1879, Pylyaev collaborated with A. S. Suvorin’s Novoye Vremya, where his talent as a local historian became fully apparent. In Novoye Vremya, among other things, he published a series of feuilletons on old St. Petersburg. These stories were later included in separately published collections: Old St. Petersburg (1887), Forgotten Past of the Outskirts of St. Petersburg (1889), Old Moscow: Stories from the Former Life of the First-Throne Capital (1891), Old Ways of Life: Essays and Stories about Former Rites, Customs, and Practices in the Organization of Domestic and Public Life in Earlier Times (1892), and Remarkable Oddballs and Original Characters (1898). The book Precious Stones (1877) was also published separately. He died in 1899. He was buried at Mitrofanievskoye Cemetery in St. Petersburg; in the 1930s, the grave was moved to the Literatorskiye Mostki.