BARANTZBVICH, Kazimir
vich, Russian man of letters: b. Saint Peters burg 1851. His father was a descendant of a noble Polish family and his mother was French. At the time of the Polish insurrection (1831), Barantzevich's grandfather was hung in the presence of his wife and two sons, but the tradition of revenge was not maintained by either the father of the author or any member of the family. Barantzevich's taste for books was created in him by his own father, who taught him to read and write at the age of five. When the author was eight years old he read eagerly Pushkin's (Syn Otechestva) ((The Son of the Country') and under the inspira tion received from that classic wrote, a year later, his first essay,
glorifying the deeds of a Polish hero who opposed the aggression of the Russian armies. Before he entered the gymnasium he had read a great number of good books in various languages. But the subjects taught in the school inter ested hint in a very small degree and he left the classroom in the fourth year. At that time appeared his poem,
his mother died he saw no obstacle in marry ing his lowly but beautiful fiancee, Dara Nilco laevna Aleksyeva. This marriage and the birth of a child increased the author's burden and the family was obliged to live in the house of a drunken train conductor. It was here that he wrote iz nashih starih znako myh) of our old But fame came to him from his novel, Struny) Strings)), and almost all first-class magazines urged him to contribute to their columns, which he did most success fully. In a series of remarkable short stories Oppression,) (The Old and the New,) Stories') and his separately published novels, (Raba) ((Bondtnaid)) and he has'given powerful sketches of the life of the lowly plebeians which bear the seal of his own struggle in life. The society of Petrograd has not been known to him in timately enough to describe its life with exactitude and his cardinal errors are uni formity of types and absence of intrigue. Man and his soul form the principal subject of his work, and, while his elaboration could be, and often is, surpassed from the artistic point of view, his stories have thrilled and elevated the souls of his readers as much as anything that has been written in Russian in the course of the last century.