Background
Nikolai Bushmakin was born in the late 1820s in the family of a civil servant. He apparently lived in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire. Unfortunately, other biographical information has not been preserved.
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Nikolai Bushmakin
Edit ProfileEducation
Nikolai Bushmakin studied at the Saint Petersburg Provincial Gymnasium, graduated from the Saint Petersburg Specialized School.
Career
Nikolai Bushmakin was actively published in Petersburg almanacs and magazines, especially in the Well-intentioned by A.E. Izmailov and the Slavs by A.F. Voeikov. The first identified publications date back to 1825 (the novel Friends! soften your reproach!). The interest in folk themes typical of Bushmakin’s works was manifested in the Russian story, Alexey and Olga, or Whatever is to be will be, in which the tragic forebodings, accidental death of lovers testifies to the inevitable predetermination of fate. A significant place in the novel is occupied by the description of the spring holiday - feast of seventh Thursday after Easter.
Nikolai Bushmakin was more productive in the genre of the song - the literary stylization of folk poetry, which became widespread in the late 1920s and the first half of the 1930s. In his songs Oh, my beloved sun, Russian Song and others, that resemble Delvig’s songs, there are noticeable motives of longing, presentiment of grief, separation, the death of a loved one. Similar motives are also found in the traditionally elegiac poems of Bumashkin: Son over the grave of his father, Violet, To a friend. Frequent appeal to role-playing narration, including on behalf of a woman, is characteristic of many songs and, in part, poems by Bumashkin (Daughter above the tomb of the mother, Clear month, do not shine).
Nikolai Bushmakin also wrote fables, mainly in the journal Northern Minerva (Mosquito, Sun and Clouds, etc.). The poem Skates (1832), in which a certain boy Kolya, a bouncer and a liar, is exposed, is possibly a disguised literary polemical attack. In 1829-1831, he was an employee of the New Children's Library, where he posted prose translations from the French language, moralizing poems, and sentimental instructive novels, e.g. Don't laugh at rags and decrepitude (1831).
