Biography Mikhail Prishvin


(1873-1954)

Prishvin Mikhail Mikhailovich (1873 – 1954), a prose writer.
He was born on January 23 (February 4 of the current year) in the Khrushchev estate of Yelets county, Orel province, in a merchant family whose fortune was squandered by his father, who left his family without means of subsistence. It took a lot of effort and labor of the future writer’s mother to educate the children.
In 1883 he entered the Yelets Gymnasium, from the 4th class of which he was expelled “for insolence to the teacher”, he completed his studies at the Tyumen Real School.
In 1893 he entered the Riga Polytechnic Institute, where he was fond of the ideas of Marxism. For his participation in the Marxist circles he was arrested in 1897, spent a year in the Mitava prison and was deported to a two-year exile in Yelets.
In 1900 – 02 he studied at the agronomic department of Leipzig University, after which he worked in Luga as a zemstvo agronomist,

published several articles and books on the specialty.
Prishvin’s first story “Sashok” was published in the journal “Spring” in 1906. Leaving his profession, he becomes a correspondent of various newspapers. Enthusiasm for ethnography and folklore leads to the decision to travel north (Olonets, Karelia, Norway), get acquainted with the life and speech of the northerners, record tales, passing them in a peculiar form of travel essays (books “In the Edge of the Scared Birds”, 1907, “Behind the Magic Ball “, 1908). Becomes famous in literary circles, approaches with A. Remizov and D. Merezhkovsky, as well as M. Gorky and A. Tolstoy.
In 1908, the result of a trip to the Trans-Volga region was the book “At the Walls of the City of the Invisible.” The essays “Adam and Eve” and “Black Arab” were written after a trip to the Crimea and Kazakhstan, Gorky contributed to the appearance of the first collection of works by Prishvin in 1912.
During the First World War he was a military correspondent, printing his essays in
various newspapers.
After the October Revolution, he spent some time teaching in the Smolensk region. A passion for hunting and local lore (lived in Yelets, in the Smolensk region, in the suburbs) was reflected in a series of hunting and children’s stories written in the 1920s, which later became part of the book “The Calendar of Nature” (1935), which made him famous as a narrator about the life of nature, singer of middle Russia. In those same years he wrote the autobiographical novel Kashcheev’s chain, which he started in 1923, and he worked on it until the last days.
In the early 1930s he visited the Far East, as a result of the book “Dear Beasts”, which served as the basis for the story “Zhen-shen” (“The Root of Life”, 1930). On the journey through the Kostroma and Yaroslavl lands, he wrote in the story “Unfinished Spring”. During the Patriotic War, the writer creates “Stories about the Leningrad children” (1943), “The Tale of Our Time” (1945), a fairy tale-the “Pantry of the Sun”. In the last years of his life he devoted much energy and time to diaries (the book “The Eyes of the Earth”, 1957).
At the age of 81, M. Prishvin died on January 16, 1954 in Moscow.


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Biography Mikhail Prishvin