Vsevolod Garshin
Encyclopedia
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin ; (14 February 1855 – 5 April 1888) was a Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n author of short stories
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

.

Life

When Garshin was seven years old, he witnessed his father commit suicide.

During the Russo-Turkish War, Garshin,
a pacifist, was conscripted and served as an infantry private.
He was well liked in his unit, by fellow soldiers and officers alike, and was wounded during a battle in Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...

.

His experiences as a soldier provide the basis for his first stories, including the very first, "Four Days" (Russian: "Четыре дня"), based on a real incident. The narrative is organized as the interior monologue of a wounded soldier left for dead at the battlefield for four days, face to face with the corpse of a Turkish soldier he had killed. Garshin's empathy for all beings is already evident in this first story.

Despite early literary success, he had periodical bouts of mental illness. At the age of 33, Garshin committed suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...

 by jumping from the fifth floor of his apartment building and died five days later at a Red Cross hospital.

Work

Garshin's work is not voluminous: it consists of some twenty stories, all of them included in a single volume. His stories are characterized by a spirit of compassion and pity that some have compared to Dostoevsky's. In A Very Short Novel he examines the infidelity of a woman to a crippled hero. The story displays Garshin's talent for concentration and lyrical irony. That Which Was Not and Attalea Princeps are fables with animals and plants in human situations. The second of these stories has a sense of tragic irony. In Officer and Servant he is a forerunner of Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...

; it is an excellently constructed story conveying an atmosphere of drab gloom and meaningless boredom. "From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov"—the title story in the most recent English language collection of Garshin's work—has the same Russo-Turkish War setting of "Four Days", and includes as minor players the characters from "Officer and Servant".

His best-known and most characteristic story is The Red Flower; it continues the series of lunatic-asylum stories in Russian literature (including Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" (1835), Leskov's Hare Remise (1894) and Chekhov's Ward No. 6). It is the history of a madman who is obsessed by the desire to challenge and defeat the evil of the world. He discovers that all evil is contained in three poppies growing in the middle of the hospital garden, and with infinite astuteness and cunning he succeeds in defeating the vigilance of his warders and picking the flowers. He dies from nervous exhaustion, but dies happy and certain of having attained his end. The oppressive atmosphere of the asylum is conveyed with effective skill. The end is a relief, like death to a martyr, but it is also ironical.

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