Sasha Chorny

Sasha Chyorny (real name Aleksandr Mikhailovich Glikberg) was a Russian poet of the Silver Age, prose writer, and journalist. He became widely known as the author of popular lyrical-satirical verse feuilletons.

He was born on 3 October (Old Style) 1880 in Odessa into a prosperous Jewish family. His father, Odessa burgher Mendel Davydovich Glikberg (1852 — 6 September 1911), was a pharmacist and traveling representative of a chemical firm that produced triple cologne on Izmailovsky Prospekt (Mendel Glikberg received the qualification of pharmacy assistant on 16 April 1871 at the medical faculty of Imperial St. Vladimir University in Kiev; from 1907 he lived in St. Petersburg). His mother, Maryem Meerovna (also née Glikberg, 1857—?), came from a merchant family: her brother, second-guild merchant Yankel Meerovich (Yakov Markovich) Glikberg, was engaged in the ironmongery trade. His parents married in Odessa on 8 July 1877, and six children were born in this marriage. The family lived in the Semashko House (apartment 18) on Rishelievskaya Street.

In 1890, in order to give the child a chance to enter the Bila Tserkva gymnasium (for which he had taken the entrance examination a year earlier but had not passed because of the quota for Jews), his parents baptized him. At the gymnasium he studied together with his elder sister Lidiya, then ran away from home, became a beggar, and lived by asking for alms. In 1895 his father placed him in the Second St. Petersburg Progymnasium, where in 1897 he was held back in the fifth form for poor performance in algebra, after which he was left without his father’s financial support. On 18 September 1898 feuilletonist Aleksandr Yablonovsky published the article “Failed in Algebra” in the newspaper Son Otechestva (“Son of the Fatherland”) about Sasha Chyorny’s suffering, and the Zhytomyr official Konstantin Konstantinovich Roshe (a member of the board of the Volhynian provincial presence for peasant affairs and an honorary justice of the peace of