AKSAKOV, SERGEI TIMOFEYEVICH (1 Russian writer, grandson of Sergei Aksakov, a country squire who founded a colony in the Bashkir steppe, was born at Ufa, Orenburg, on Sept. 20, 1791, and died in Moscow on April 3o, 1859. He studied at the University of Kazan, and in 1808 en tered the civil service in St. Petersburg (Leningrad). In 1815 he married and returned to the Urals to cultivate his estate. He dis sipated his fortune after ten years of estate management, and found, through the influence of Shishkov, a place in the censor ship at Moscow. There his house became a centre of Slavophil ism. In 1832 he met Gogol, in whom he recognized a genius un spoiled, as he thought, by foreign influence. His friendship with Gogol led him to write himself, and, though that friendship was clouded in later years, it is to Gogol that Aksakov owed his in spiration. Aksakov draws on the history of his pioneer grand father, a great figure of the family autocrat in a primitive com munity, wonderfully depicted, with the marriage of his own father and mother, and with his own schooldays. All these books are Russian classics. They give a picture of Russian rural life be fore the liberation of the Serfs remarkable in itself, and beautiful because of the author's keen, sensuous appreciation of nature, but interesting from the purely literary point of view in the de velopment of the novel. Aksakov, to quote Prince Mirsky, "came nearer than any other Russian writer, even than Tolstoy in War and Peace, to a modern, evolutionary, continuous presentation of human life, as distinct from the dramatic and incidental presenta tion customary to the older novelists." His best known works are: Chronicles of a Russian Family (1856, trans. by M. C. Beverley, 1924) ; Recollections (1856), trans. by J. D. Duff under the title: Autobiography of a Russian Schoolboy (1917, repr. 1924) ; Years of Childhood (1858: trans. by J. D. Duff, 1916, repr. 1923). Aksakov's other important work is his Recollections of Gogol, which is the most important contemporary record of that great writer.
His elder son, KONSTANTIN SERGEYEVICH AKSAKOV (1817— 186o), Slavophil author, was born at Moscow on April io, 1817, and died in the Island of Zante in Greece on Dec. 19, 186o.
His younger son, IVAN SERGEYEVICH AKSAKOV (1823-1886), Russian Slavophil writer, was born at Nadezhdin in Ufa, on Sept. 26, 1823, and died at Moscow on Jan. 27, 1886. He studied law at St. Petersburg, and later entered the Moscow division of the Senate. At various periods he edited or established weekly and daily papers, the Moscow Sbornik, the Den (1861-65), the Moskva (1867), which was three times suppressed by the Gov ernment, and later, in 188o, the Rus, an organ of the Slavophil party. Between 184o and 186o Aksakov wrote numerous radical and political poems. His realistic poem The Tramp (1852), de picted the life of the Russian peasant. The height of Aksakov's activity as leader of the Panslavist movement was reached in 1876-78, when he warmly supported the cause of the liberation of the Balkan Slays. In 1878 he was exiled from Moscow for a violent attack on the Treaty of Berlin in a speech delivered at the Slavic committee; but he was soon allowed to return, and continued to publish the Rus until his death.