Background

Anastasiya Alekseyevna Verbitskaya was born February 11, 1861, Voronezh, Russian Federation, where her father was a professional military serviceman, and her mother was an amateur actress. Her father was a hereditary nobleman, and her mother was related to the Mochalov family, who were artists. Verbitskaya's sister, Alexandra Sorneva, was also a writer.

Education

In the mid-1870s, Anastasiya Alekseyevna attended a boarding school, the Elizavetinsky Women's Institute in Moscow. After graduating, she served as a governess.

In 1879, Anastasiya Alekseyevna entered the Moscow Conservatory to study singing, leaving after two years to take a job as a music teacher at her former boarding school.

Career

After her marriage, Anastasiya Alekseyevna worked at various jobs, obtaining her first position at a newspaper in 1883. She was an editor of the Russkiy Kurier newspaper. Later she became a writer of Zhizn newspaper.

Her first work of fiction, a novella entitled Discord, appeared in 1887 in the Russkaya Mysl magazine. The work espoused the theme of women's liberation, independence, and personal fulfillment. She was extensively involved as a writer since 1894. Her works were published in many magazines, namely Zhizn, Nachalo, Obrazovaniye, Russkoye Bogatstvo, Mir Bozhiy, and others, as well as in the newspapers Russkiye Vedomosti and Kurier. Her early works are collected in the book Dreams of Life (Moscow, 1899).

Since 1899, Anastasiya Alekseyevna issued her own works and also helped women translators with editing and publishing novels of Western European writers about the status of women in the modern world. She continued to demonstrate her commitment to the liberation of women through extra-literary activities. She was a member of various charitable and civic organizations.

Anastasiya Alekseyevna produced her first novel Vavochka in 1898. She also wrote plays, including the comedy Mirages (1895), which was staged at the Maly Theater. Her other works include the novel Freed (1899), the novel Evil Dew (1903), The Story of a Life (1903), and the play The Volgin family. The strength of Verbitskaya’s works was the image of the psychology of heroines, whose fate reflected the facts of the biography of Verbitskaya herself, the exposure of the philistine existence, and a fascinating plot. Her early works, in general, were critically acclaimed.

Anastasiya Alekseyevna herself considered her own work in line with the democratic direction of Russian literature and close in spirit to V.G. Korolenko’s works; she also admired the talent of M. Gorky. In 1899-1901, she became a member of the Moscow Society for Mutual Benefit of Intellectual Professionals, closed "for extremely anti-government activities". In 1905, she was chairman of the Society for the Betterment of Women's Welfare.

Anastasiya Alekseyevna met the revolution of 1905-1907 with enthusiasm, and on December 7, 1905, she provided her apartment for a meeting of the committee of the RSDLP (b). Impressed by the events of January 9, she wrote the novels Around Sunrise (Moscow, 1906) and Spread Wings (Moscow, 1907). After the 1905 revolution, with the censorship greatly reduced, she wrote the first of her popular novels, Spirit of the Time (1907-1908). This and her next novel, The Keys to Happiness, in six volumes (1908-1913), were bestsellers. She combined political, philosophical, and aesthetic concerns with frequent scenes of sexual seduction. Both of these novels sold in numbers that were unequaled in Verbitskaya's day. She also wrote her two-volume autobiography To My Reader (1908 and 1911) while she was writing The Keys to Happiness.

Since 1906, Anastasiya Alekseyevn becomes an active member of the Russian Literature Society. In the second half of the 1910s, she worked on the romantic trilogy Yoke of Love, which reflects the romantic moments of the biography of her mother and grandmother. In 1913, she was invited to write the screenplay for a full-length film based on the novel The Keys to Happiness. The film was a great box-office success, leading her into a movie career. In the early 1920s, the pre-revolutionary works of Verbitskaya and especially "The Keys of Happiness" were perceived as a symbol of vulgarity, pulp with elements of pornography. The very name of Verbitskaya became odious.

In the 1920s, Anastasiya Alekseyevn writes works for children under the pseudonym Igor Olgovich, A. Alekseeva, Rumshevich, O. Devich. In 1926, such authors as A.V. Lunacharsky, M.S. Olminsky, S.I. Mitskevich defended her works against accusations of pornography, as they saw in her a limited, but progressive writer for her time.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Verbitskaya's career suffered because of official scorn for her "bourgeois" novels. Anastasiya Alekseyevn died in Moscow in 1928. Three of her popular novels were reprinted in Russia in 1992 and 1993. An abridged version of her novel The Keys to Happiness was published in English in 1999.

Achievements

• During her career, Anastasiya Alekseyevna wrote many materials for magazines and newspapers, as well as 8 novels, some of which were adapted into films.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Keys to Happiness : A Novel

    (Translated by Beth Holmgren, Helena Goscilo. Keys to Hap...)

    1999
  • Yoke of love

    (Book 1, Russian edition)

  • Yoke of Love

    (Book 2, Russian edition)

  • Spirit of the Time

    (Russian Edition))

  • Vavochka

    (Russian Edition)

  • The Story of a Life

    (Russian Edition)

Membership

Anastasiya Alekseyevna was known for holding feminist views. She was a member of various charitable and civic organizations that helped women, becoming the chair of the Society for the Betterment of Women's Welfare in 1905. In 1899-1901, she also became a member of the Moscow Society for Mutual Benefit of Intellectual Professionals, closed "for extremely anti-government activities." Since 1906, she became an active member of the Russian Literature Society.

• Moscow Society for Mutual Benefit of Intellectual Professionals

  1899 - 1901

• Society for the Betterment of Women's Welfare

  1905

• Russian Literature Society

  1906

Connections

In 1882, Anastasiya Alekseyevna married Alexey Verbitsky, an engineer, with whom she had three sons. One of the three sons of Verbitskaya, Vsevolod Alekseyevich Verbitsky, who later became the People's Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, participated in the organization of the 2nd studio of Moscow Art Theatre. Verbitskaya’s grandson, actor Anatoly Vsevolodovich Verbitsky, who also served at the Moscow Art Theater since 1947, was known for his role as Pechorin in the film "Princess Mary" (1955).

Spouse:

Alexey Verbitsky

Sister:

Alexandra Sorneva

Son:

Vsevolod Alekseyevich Verbitsky

Grandson:

Anatoly Vsevolodovich Verbitsky

References

• Russian writers. 1800-1917. Biographical Dictionary. Volume 1
  1989