Background
Peter Vasilievich Bykov was born on November 11, 1844, in Sevastopol, Russian Empire (now Sevastopol', Ukraine). He came from the nobility, he was the son of a captain of the second rank.
bibliographer literary historian prose writer poet
Peter Vasilievich Bykov was born on November 11, 1844, in Sevastopol, Russian Empire (now Sevastopol', Ukraine). He came from the nobility, he was the son of a captain of the second rank.
After graduating from the Yekaterinoslav Gymnasium in 1860, Pyotr Vasilyevich studied at the Kharkov University (firstly at the Faculty of Medicine, then at the Department of Natural Sciences of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics). He graduated in the year of 1864. In 1868, he was an auditor at the Petrovsky Agricultural and Forestry Academy in Moscow.
Pyotr Vasilyevich did not have a pronounced poetic personality, but he was extremely fertile: he wrote humorous and satirical poems, landscape lyrics. He wrote Poetry of civil grief. In the 1900s, cycles of poems were published in various magazines, including From the notebook of an old romantic, Near the Dnieper. Bykov's poems were included in various anthologies but were not published in separate collections. In the Vestnik inostrannoy literatury (1900-1903) and other journals of the 1870-1900s he published translations of W. Shakespeare, V. Hugo, G. Heine, T. Gauthier, T. Moore, Syrocomli and others. His stories about animals are of great interest: for example, cycles From the memoirs of an old naturalist were partially collected in the book My Pets and Friends.
Pyotr Vasilyevich published many critical, historical, and literary articles and biographical essays about the writers of the 18 - early 20 century, mainly of a popular character. Moreover, he published under his editorship the tales and stories of A.N. Plescheev (1896-1897), and his poems (1898). In contrast to the lifetime criticism, which, as a rule, approved the editions of literary work published by Bykov, modern scholars noted the textual inconsistency of Bykov’s publications of Tyutchev and Mikhailov. Articles by foreign writers (Beranger, Krashevsky, Erkman-Shatrian) also belonged to Bykov.
Numerous publications of Bykov’s literary memoirs culminated in the posthumous release of Silhouettes of the Far Past (1930). It belongs to the number of widely used memoirs on the history of the literary and social movement of the 60-70s. However, the facts of Bykov’s biography and the fact that numerous episodes of the book do not have documentary evidence give reason to believe that in a large part it is the fruit of Bykov’s fiction. Apparently, he met neither with F.M. Dostoevsky nor with N.A. Nekrasov (although their answers to Bykov’s letters are known), nor with F.I. Tyutchev. It is known that Pyotr Vasilyevich worked with Blagosvetlov for about a year; however, he expanded their joint activities to 20 years. He also described A. N. Volgin as a close acquaintance (calling him mistakenly Ivolgin), although according to a letter from I.F. Vasilevsky to Bykov of June 24, 1876, it was clear that they were not familiar. Obviously, Pyotr Vasilyevich wrote the imaginary quatrain to I.A. Goncharov addressed to A.Y. Panayeva, Nekrasov’s note to Ivolgin, and Blagosvetlov’s letter to A.K. Sceller-Mikhailov. Among the trustworthy messages, there are Bykov’s recollections of V.N. Elagin and M.M. Stopanovsky.