Vikentiy Veresaev

Vikenty Vikentyevich Veresaev (real surname Smidovich) was a Russian prose writer, literary scholar, and poet-translator.

He was born on 4 (16) January 1867 into a family of well-known social activists from Tula. His father, physician V.I. Smidovich, the son of a Polish landowner who took part in the 1830–1831 uprising, was the founder of the Tula City Hospital and the Sanitary Commission, one of the founders of the Tula Physicians’ Society, and a member of the City Duma. His mother opened the first kindergarten in Tula in their home.

In 1884 Veresaev graduated from the Tula Classical Gymnasium with a silver medal and entered the History and Philology Faculty of St. Petersburg University, from which he graduated with the degree of candidate. The family atmosphere in which the future writer was brought up was imbued with the spirit of Orthodoxy and active service to one’s neighbors. This explains Veresaev’s youthful fascination with the ideas of populism and the works of N.K. Mikhailovsky and D.I. Pisarev. Under the influence of these ideas, Veresaev entered the medical faculty of Dorpat University in 1888, regarding medical practice as the best way to learn about the life of the people and medicine as a source of knowledge about human beings. In 1894 he practiced for several months in his native Tula, and that same year, as one of the university’s best graduates, he was hired by the Botkin Hospital in St. Petersburg.

Veresaev began writing at the age of fourteen (poems and translations). He himself considered the publication of the story The Riddle (in the journal World Illustration, 1887, no. 9) to be the beginning of his literary career.

In 1895 Veresaev was attracted to more radical political views: the writer established close contacts with revolutionary workers’ groups. He worked in Marxist circles, and meetings of Social Democrats were held in his apartment. Participation in political life determined the themes of his work. Veresaev used fiction to express social, political, and ideological views, showing in his novellas and stories a retrospective of the development of his own spiritual