Boborykin

BOBORYKIN, Piotr Drni trievich, Russian man of letters (novelist, playwright, scientist, actor, etc.) : b. Nizhni Novgorod, 15 Aug. 1836. After having received in his grandfather's home a most careful pre liminary education under competent instructors, he attended the courses in chemistry, medicine and law at the University of Kazan. After having compiled and translated several books on chemistry and physiology he left Kazan and came to Saint Petersburg (1861) with the inten tion of dedicating his efforts to belles-lettres. While still a student he wrote three dramas: (Rabyonole (Odnodo retz) ; the last of which was published in the Biblioteka dlya chteniya (i.e., The Library for Readings). But Boborykin tried many other fields, and when, after having inherited from his grandfather a vast fortune, he bought and edited the Biblioteka dlya chteniya, published a great number of novels, short stones, etc., so that his collected works form a library of some 80 volumes compactly printed on pages each. It was in this periodical that appeared his novels (Put DorogtO ('On the Way') and 'Zemskiya Sily> ((Earthly Powers)). When the magazine ceased to exist (in 1865) Boborykin went abroad and spent about 10 years in Vienna, Paris, Lon don and Italy, from where he sent to the periodicals at home a great number of critical studies, theatrical reviews, etc. His love for

dramatic art prompted him to publish (1872) his (Teatralnoe Iskustvo' ((Theatrical Art)), which earned him a great fame. But his prin cipal field was the contemporary novel. En dowed with unusual leisure and enriched with an enormous encyclopaedic knowledge, he wrote more than 30 novels, amongst which the fol lowing were popular with his contemporaries: (Zhertva Vechernaya) ((Evening Sacrifice)), (Solidnyia DobrodyetelP ((Solid (Doctor Tzibulka>, Novikh) ((From Amongst the etc. All his novels excel in keen observation and have a fluid style. He has often drawn the portraits of his friends and acquaintances in Petrograd, Moscow, Nov gorod and foreign towns with such an accuracy that one could easily recognize them if one had ever met them. But it would be exacting too much from a writer like Boborykin if one ex pected to find in his numerous works any depth of perception such as one encounters in Tolstoy or Dostoyevski. He is a photographer of char acters rather than a master painter.