KOROLENKO, 1:45'roden'ko, VLADIMIR GA LAKTIONOVITCH ( 1853—). A Russian writer of fiction, born at Zhitomir. Government of Volhy nia, in 1853. Ile lost his father in 1868, but managed to finish his studies, thanks to a pen sion. On graduating from the real-school he spent a year in the Technological Institute of Saint Petersburg; but need compelled him to leave in 1872 for Moscow. where he entered the Forestry Institute. After two years he was expelled with many others for present ing a petition to the director, was sent to Vologin, but returned and settled with his family at Kronstaclt. He made his literary (Wait in 1879. but was soon after exiled for six to Siberia. On his return in 1885 he at tracted general attention with his Makar's Dream, depicting the psychic world of a half-savage, though Christian. Yakut. Memoirs of a. Siberian Tourist followed shortly, and a few months later came In Bad Soeirty. The Forest Whispers still further increased his fame, hut it was The Blind Musician (1886) that put him in the front rank of the younger Russian writers. It is the story
of the life of a boy blind from birth, who becomes a musician under the tender care of his mother and uncle, a Garihaldian, and later marries the companion of his childhood. The whole is a psychological study of absorbing interest. The long novel Prokhor and the Students was inter rupted by the censor at the beginning of its publication in Russian Thought (1887, Nos. 1 and 2). In 1893 he paid a visit to the United States during the Chicago Fair. In 1895 he became one of the proprietor-editors of the monthly Russkayc Boyatstro. His language is the best used since the days of Turgenieff (q.v.), of whom Korolenko made a careful study. llis selected works, in two volumes, have run into many editions. and most of them have been trans lated into English, French, and German.