Alexey Nikolayevich Plescheev was born in
Kostroma on 4 December, an heir to a noble family with ancient history and fine literary tradition. Among the future poet's ancestors were
St. Alexis of Moscow and the 18th century writer Sergey Ivanovich Plescheev. Alexey's father Nikolai Sergeevich Plescheev was a state official, employed by
Olonets,
Vologda and
Arkhangelsk governors. He received a good home education and at the age of 13 joined the military school in Saint Petersburg. He left in 1834 without graduating and enrolled at
Saint Petersburg University to study Oriental languages. Among his friends in Saint Petersburg were
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, brothers
Apollon and
Valerian Maykovs,
Andrey Krayevsky,
Ivan Goncharov,
Dmitry Grigorovich and
Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin. It was to one of his older friends, the rector of Saint Petersburg University
Pyotr Pletnyov, that Pleshcheev sent his first collection of verse, receiving warm support. In 1845, infatuated with Socialist ideas, Pleshcheev joined the
Petrashevsky Circle which included several writers – notably Dostoyevsky,
Sergey Durov and
Nikolay Speshnev, the latter exerting an especially strong influence upon the young man. Pleshcheev wrote agitators' poetry (he was perceived by others in the circle as "our very own
André Chénier") and delivered manuscripts of banned books to his comrades. In tandem with N.A.Mordvinov he translated the "Word of a Believer" by
F.-R. de Lamennais which the Circle was planning to print and publish illegally. In 1845 due to financial difficulties, Pleshcheev left the University. In 1846 his first collection of poetry was published, including "Step forward! Without fear or doubt..." (Vperyod! Bez strakha y somnenya...) which quickly gained the reputation of a Russian
La Marseillaise. The book resonated strongly with the Russian cultural elite's mood and Plescheev acquired the status of a revolutionary poet, whose mission was to "profess the inevitable triumph of truth, love and brotherhood." In 1847–1849 Pleshcheev's poems along with some prose, started to appear in magazines, notably,
Otechestvennye Zapiski. Full of
Aesopian language, some of them have still been credited as the first-ever reaction to the
French Revolution of 1848 in the Russian literature. In the late 1848 Plescheev started to invite members of the Petrashevsky Circle to his home. He belonged to the moderate flank of the organization, being skeptical about republican ideas and seeing Socialism as a continuation of the old humanist basics of Christianity. In the spring of 1849 Pleshcheev sent a copy of the officially banned
Vissarion Belinsky's letter to Gogol. The message was intercepted and on 8 April he was arrested in Moscow, then transported to Saint Petersburg. After spending nine months in the
Petropavlovskaya fortress Pleshcheev found himself among 21 people sentenced to death. On 22 December, with other convicts, he was brought to the Semyonov Platz where, after a mock execution ceremony (later described in full detail by Dostoyevsky in his novel
The Idiot), was given 4 years of hard labour. This verdict was softened and soon Pleshcheev went to the town of
Uralsk where he joined the Special Orenburg Corps as a soldier, starting the service that lasted eight years. Initially life in exile for him was hard and return to writing was out of question. In March 1853 Pleshcheev asked to be transferred to the 4th infantry battalion and took part in several
Turkestan expeditions endeavored by General Perovsky, participating in the siege of the
Ak-Mechet fortress in
Kokand. He was honoured for bravery and promoted to the rank of junior officer, then in 1856 was granted permission to become a civil servant. In May 1856 Pleshcheev retired from the Army, joined the Orenburg borderline Commission, then in September 1858 moved into the office of the Orenburg civil Governor's chancellery. That year he got a permission to visit Moscow and Saint Petersburg (making this 4 months trip with his wife Elikonda Rudneva whom he married a year later) and was returned all the privileges of hereditary
dvoryanin he was stripped of eight years earlier. Then there was another long pause. Not a single poem from the 1849–1851 period remained and in 1853 Pleshcheev conceded he felt like he "was now forgetting how to write." In the early 1860s, Pleshcheev started to criticise the 1861 reforms which he initially was enthusiastic about and severed all ties with
Mikhail Katkov's
The Russian Messenger. His poetry became more radical, its leitmotif being the high mission of a revolutionary suffering from the society's indifference. The secret police in its reports mentioned Pleshcheev as a 'political conspirator' and in 1863 searched his house hoping to find evidence of his links with
Zemlya i volya. There remained no documents supporting the case for Pleshcheev being Zemlya i volya member, but both
Pyotr Boborykin and Maria Sleptsova later insisted that not only was he the active member of the underground revolutionary circle but kept printing facilities in his Moscow home where the Young Russia manifest has been printed. In the 1870s and 1880s Pleshcheev made a lot of important translations from German, French and English and several Slavic languages. Among the works he translated were "Ratcliff" by
Heinrich Heine, "Magdalene" by
Hebbel, "Struenze" by Michael Behr.
Stendhal's
Le Rouge et le Noir and
Émile Zola's
Le Ventre de Paris were first published in Pleshcheev's translations. In 1887
The Complete A.N.Pleshcheev was published, re-issued in posthumously, in 1894 by the poet's son. Pleshcheev has been deeply engaged with the Russian theatre, was a friend of
Alexander Ostrovsky and a one time the administrator of the Artistic Circle, an active member of the Russian Dramatist Society. He wrote thirteen original plays, most of them satirical miniatures dealing with the everyday life of a Russian rural gentry. Some of them (
The Good Turn,
Every Cloud Has Its Silver Lining, both 1860;
The Happy Couple,
The Woman Commander, both 1862;
As It Often Happens,
Brothers, both 1864) were produced by major Russian theatres. He adapted for stage productions more than thirty comedies of foreign authors. Pleshcheev's poetry for children, compiled in collections
Snowdrop (1878) and ''Grandpa's Songs
(1891), became immensely popular and for decades was featured in Russian textbooks. In 1861 with Fyodor Berg he compiled and published the Book for Children'', then in 1873 (with N.A.Alekseev) another children's literary anthology,
A Holiday Reading. He initiated the project involving the publication of seven textbooks in the Geography Sketches and Pictures. Many of Pleshcheev's poems were set to music by composers like
Rimsky-Korsakov,
Musorgsky,
César Cui,
Grechaninov,
Rakhmaninov and Tchaikovsky. The latter praised his children's cycle and cited it as a major source of inspiration. Among romances composed by Thaikovsky based on Pleshcheev's verses were "Oh, Not a Word, My Friend" (1869), "Sing Me the Same Song" (1872), "Only You" (1884), "If Only You'd Knew and Meekly Stars Were Shining Upon Us" (1886). Of Tchaikovsky's
16 Songs for Children (1883) 14 had Pleshcheev's lyrics.
Last years Not long before his death, in 1890, Pleshcheev inherited a fortune from his Penza relative Aleksey Pavlovich Pleshchhev. He's settled in the Parisian "Mirabeau" hotel with two of his daughters and started to invite his literary friends to guest with him, organising sight-seeing and restaurant tours around the city. According to
Zinaida Gippius, he's never changed (except for losing weight due to the progressing illness), "received this manna with noble indifference and remained the same cordial host we've known him for being when he lived in a tiny flat on Preobrazhenskaya square..." "What use wealth could be for me? Thankfully, now my children are saved from poverty and I myself can have a breath of air before I die," he was saying, according to Gippius. Pleshcheev has donated money to the Russian Literary Fund, himself organized two funds, naming them after Belinsky and Chernyshevsky. He supported financially the families of
Gleb Uspensky and
Semyon Nadson and started to finance
Russkoye Slovo, a magazine edited by
Nikolai Mikhaylovsky and
Vladimir Korolenko. One of his best friends in the later years
Anton Chekhov was not a fan of Pleshcheev the poet but admired him as a person, viewing him as a "relic of the Old Russia". In July 1892 Pleshcheev informed Chekhov that his left arm and leg were now paralyzed. In Autumn 1893, severely ill, Pleshcheev attempted to make a travel to
Nice, France, and died on the road, from a stroke. His body was taken to Moscow and he was buried in the
Novodevichye Cemetery. The Russian authorities prohibited all kinds of obituaries, but huge a crowd, mainly of young people, gathered at the funeral, some of them (like
Konstantin Balmont who pronounced a farewell speech) were to become well known years later. == References ==