Early life Aleksey Pisemsky was born at his father's Ramenye estate in the
Chukhloma province of
Kostroma. His parents were retired colonel Feofilakt Gavrilovich Pisemsky and his wife Yevdokiya Shipova. In his autobiography, Pisemsky described his family as belonging to the ancient Russian nobility, although his more immediate progenitors were all very poor and unable to read or write: Pisemsky spent the first ten years of his life in the small regional town of
Vetluga where his father served as Mayor. Later he moved with his parents to the countryside. Pisemsky described the years he spent there in Chapter 2 of
People of the Forties, an autobiographical novel in which he figured under the name of Pasha. Fond of hunting and horseback riding, the boy received scant education: his tutors were a local deacon, a
defrocked drunkard, and a strange old man who was known to have toured the area for decades, giving lessons. Aleksey learned reading, writing,
arithmetics,
Russian and
Latin from them. His first novella
Is She to Blame? Pisemsky wrote while still a university student. He gave it to professor Stepan Shevyryov and the latter, being an opponent of the "natural school", recommended to the author "to soften up everything and make it more gentlemanly." Pisemsky agreed to do so, but didn't hurry to follow this advice. What he did instead was send the professor
Nina, a naive story about a fresh-looking, beautiful girl who turns into a dull matron. Shevyryov made some editorial cuts and then published the story in the July 1848 issue of the
Syn Otechestva magazine. So curtailed and disfigured was this version, that the author never even thought of re-issuing it. The story made its way into the posthumous Wolf's Publishing House 1884 collection of Pisemsky's works (Volume 4). Even in this curtailed form it bore, according to Skabichevsky, every mark of misanthropy and pessimism, seeds of which were sown in
Boyarschina. In Pisemsky's second play,
The Divide (Раздел, 1853), a typical
natural school piece, parallels have been found with Turgenev's comedy ''Breakfast at the Chief's''. Then came his dramatic fall from grace, for which there were several reasons. One was that, as Skabichevsky noted, Pisemsky had never repudiated his 'troglodyte' mindset of a 'provincial obscurantist'; exotic in the early 1850s, it became scandalous at the end of the decade. Another had to do with the fact that people he regarded as "crooks, whores and demagogues" had suddenly reinvented themselves as the "progressives". Gradually
Biblioteka Dlya Chtenya, the journal he was now leading, came into a direct opposition with
Sovremennik. First, as
Pyotr Boborykin remembered, this opposition was of a moderate character, "at home, in his cabinet, Pisemsky spoke about this with sorrow and regret, rather than aggression". Later biographers conceded that there had been some logic to his chagrin. "People who came to herald such radical principles, in his eyes, should have been impeccable in every respect, which wasn't the case," Skabichevsky remarked. was so outright in its critique of higher spheres it was banned by censors. Others were staged, but enjoyed only short-lived success, having to do mostly with the sensationalist aspect, for the public could recognize in certain characters real life officials and financiers. Artistically they were flawed, and even
The Russian Messenger, which traditionally had supported the author, refused to publish
The Financial Genius. After the stage production of the play flopped, Pisemsky returned to the form of the novel and in his last 4 years produced two of them:
The Philistines, and
Masons, the later being notable for its picturesque historical background created with the help of
Vladimir Solovyov. Skabichevsky described both as "anemic and dull", and even
Ivan Turgenev, who made great efforts to cheer Pisemsky up, still noted a streak of "tiredness" in the author's latest prose. "You were absolutely right: I am really tired of writing, and even more – of living. Of course old age is no fun for anybody, but for me it's especially bad and full of dark torment I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy," Pisemsky wrote back in a letter. Losing popularity was one of the reasons for such misery. He scolded his critics, calling them "vipers", but was aware that his golden days were over.
Vasily Avseenko, describing Pisemsky's visit to Saint Petersburg in 1869 after the publication of
People of the Forties, recalled how old and tired he looked. "I am beginning to feel like a victim of my own spleen," Pisemsky confessed in an August 1875 letter to Annenkov. "I am all right physically, but cannot say the same of my mental and moral state; hypochondria torments me. I am unable to write and any mental effort makes me feel sick. Thank God the religious feeling, which is now blossoming in me, gives some respite to my suffering soul," Pisemsky wrote to Turgenev in the early 1870s. In these difficult times the one person who continuously provided moral support to Pisemsky was Ivan Turgenev. In 1869 he informed Pisemsky that his
One Thousand Souls had been translated into German and enjoyed "great success in Berlin". "So now the time has come for you to step outside the borders of your motherland and for Aleksey Pisemsky to become a European name," Turgenev wrote on 9 October 1869. "The best Berlin critic, Frenzel, in
National Zeitung devoted a whole article to you where he calls your novel 'a rare phenomenon', and I tell you, now you are well known in Germany," wrote Turgenev in another letter, enclosing clips from other papers, too. "The success of
One Thousand Souls encourages [the translator] to start upon the novel
Troubled Seas and I am so happy both for you and for Russian literature in general… Critical reviews of
One Thousand Souls here in Germany are most favourable, your characters are being compared to those of
Dickens,
Thackeray, etc, etc", he continued. Julian Schmidt’s large article in
Zeitgenossensche Bilder, part of the series devoted to first class European authors, provided for Pisemsky another cause to celebrate, and following Turgenev's advice, in 1875 he visited Schmidt to thank him personally. Another joyful event of these final years of Pisemsky's life was the commemoration, on 19 January 1875, of the 25th anniversary of his literary career. One of the speakers, the
Beseda editor Sergey Yuryev, said: "My 25 years in literature have not been easy. While fully aware of how weak and inadequate my efforts have been, I still feel like I've every reason to continue: I never came under somebody else's flag, and my writing, good or bad, it's not for me to judge, contained only what I myself felt and thought. I remained true to my own understanding of things, never violating for any fleeting reason the modest talent nature gave me. One of my guiding lights has always been my desire to tell my country the truth about itself. Whether or not I succeeded, is not for me to tell," Pisemsky said in reply. In the late 1870s Pisemsky's beloved younger son Nikolai, a talented mathematician, committed suicide for reasons which were unexplained. This was a heavy blow for his father who sunk into a deep depression. In 1880 his second son Pavel, the Moscow University Law faculty
docent, became fatally ill, and this finished Pisemsky off. As Annenkov remembered, he "became bed-ridden, crushed by the weight of fits of pessimism and hypochondria which became more frequent after his family's catastrophe. His widow said later she never suspected that the end was near and thought the bout would pass, dissolving as it used to into physical weakness and melancholy. But this one proved to be the last for the tormented Pisemsky, who lost all willingness to resist." On 21 January 1881 Pisemsky died, only a week before the death of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Whereas the latter's funeral in Saint Petersburg became a grandiose event, Pisemsky's burial went unnoticed. Of well-known authors only Alexander Ostrovsky was present. In 1885 the Wolf Publishing House issued an edition of the
Complete Pisemsky in 24 volumes. Pisemsky's personal archive was destroyed by fire. His house was later demolished. Borisoglebsky Lane, where he spent his last years, was renamed Pisemsky Street in the Soviet times. ==Private life==