Background
Mikhail Nikolaevich Volkonsky was born on May 7, 1860, in Saint Petersburg City, Russian Federation.
Mikhail Nikolaevich Volkonsky was born on May 7, 1860, in Saint Petersburg City, Russian Federation.
Mikhail Nikolaevich graduated from the Imperial College of Law (1882).
After graduating from the Law School in 1882 (with the rank of Governor's Secretary), Mikhail Nikolaevich served as an assistant clerk in the Main Directorate of State Horse Breeding (1884-1889), an official of special assignments at the Ministry of public education (1890-1891). But the prospects for a public career, apparently, did not correspond to the literary and theatrical interests of Mikhail Nikolaevich, and after his first sustained achievements as a writer, he retired (with the rank of court adviser).
Works signed with Volkonsky's full name or easily identifiable pseudonyms have appeared in print since 1885, but the question of their authorship remains open since his wife Maria Volkonskaya also used it as a pen name.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, in the years of the worsening political situation in Russia, Mikhail Nikolaevich got closer to monarchist circles and collaborated with magazines and newspapers from a moderately conservative Novoye vremya to the far-right Russkoye znamya.
After 1907, Mikhail Nikolaevich retired from active political activity, remaining primarily a man of art.
National-conservative political views were only indirectly reflected in his artistic work and, apparently, did not affect his aesthetic opinions and literary relations.
Two lines are clearly traced in Volkonsky's prose work. The first is represented by works from modern life that analyze the behavior and psychology of an individual in a situation of choosing between materialism and amoralism ("dead"), rooted in society, and religious and moral tradition ("living»).
The other line, quantitatively predominant, but artistically weaker mainly relates to the development of Russian historical themes that was largely caused by the youthful passions of the writer that grew under the strong influence of his great-maternal uncle - of the historian and writer E. P. Karnovich, whose scientific research in Russian history of the 18th century was repeatedly used by Mikhail Nikolaevich in the plots of his works.
Mikhail Nikolaevich was married to Maria Volonskaya. Since the early 1900s, he had been in civil marriage with Natalia Viktorovna Degen-Arabazhina.
