(His best-known and most characteristic story is The Red F...)
His best-known and most characteristic story is The Red Flower; it fits in the series of lunatic-asylum stories in Russian literature (including Gogol's Diary of a Madman (1835), Leskov's Hare Remise (1894)[specify] and Chekhov's Ward No. 6 (1892)).
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin was a Russian author of short stories.
Background
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin was born on February 2, 1855, in Dnipro, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukraine. He was the son of an officer - Mikhail Egorovich. Garshin’s mother, Ekaterina Stepanovna (born Akimova; 1828-1897), a "typical woman of the sixties", who was interested in literature and politics, was fluent in German and French, had a great influence on her son.
In 1860, a family drama occurred in the Garshins' house, which had a significant impact on the formation of the writer’s personality. Mother left the family with the teacher P.V. Zavadsky - a participant in the revolutionary movement of the 1860s. Vsevolod became the subject of a fierce struggle between parents.
In 1860-1863 he lived with his father near Starobelik and in the city itself. In 1863 Ekaterina Stepanovna succeeds in persuading her husband to let her son live with her, and she takes Vsevolod to Saint Petersburg. This family drama affected the health and world outlook of Vsevolod. He was an extremely nervous and impressionable child, which was facilitated by too early mental development. Subsequently, he suffered from bouts of nervous breakdown anв mental illness.
Education
Having moved to Saint Petersburg with his mother, Vsevolod Mikhailovich entered the 7th Gymnasium in 1864 (which was later transformed into the 1st Real School. In the Gymnasium, he was seriously interested in natural sciences (especially botany), which remain interesting to him throughout life (among his closest friends was a zoological scientist V.A. Fausek, naturalist A. Ya. Gerd). In 1874 he entered the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute, which he didn't finish.
Vsevolod Mikhailovich volunteered to serve in the army at the start of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877. He participated in the Balkans Campaign as a private and was wounded in action. He was promoted to the rank of an officer at the end of the war. Vsevolod Mikhailovich resigned his commission soon after in order to devote his time to literary efforts. He had previously published a number of articles in newspapers, mostly reviews of art exhibitions.
In the beginning of March 1880, Vsevolod Mikhailovich left for Moscow, then wanders around Tula and Oryol provinces, but soon Garshin's painful condition leads him to isolation in a psychiatric hospital (first in Orel, then in Kharkiv and Saint Petersburg).
In February 1882 Vsevolod Mikhailovich received an invitation to spend the summer in Spassky-Lutovinov from I.S. Turgenev, who highly valued an "undoubted original talent" of Vsevolod Mikhailovich, in May he returned to Saint Petersburg. In July published the volume Stories. In August-September 1882 Vsevolod Mikhailovich lived in Spassky-Lutovinov while Turgenev was away who he didn't have an opportunity to meet in person. There he worked on a story From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov. A year later he published one of his most famous stories - The Red Flower.
In 1882 Vsevolod Mikhailovich met I.E.Repin. In 1883 he was the model for the younger in Ilya Repin's painting Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. In 1884 Repin draw a portrait of Vsevolod Garshin.In 1886-1887, a lot of effort devoted to activities as a member of the Society Committee for the benefit of needy writers and scientists. The last work is a fairy tale for children to Frog the Traveler.
Despite the early literary success, he had periodical bouts of mental illness. He attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself down the stone stairs leading to his apartment building. Although not immediately fatal, he died as a result of his injuries in a hospital in April 1888, at the age of 33.
Gleb Uspensky: "... in his small stories and tales, sometimes in several pages, the whole content of our life was positively exhausted, in the conditions of which both Garshin and all his readers had to live."
Anton Chekhov: "He has a special talent - human. He had a subtle, wonderful sense of pain in general."
Connections
In the winter of 1883, Vsevolod Mikhailovich married a student of medical courses N.M. Zolotilova.
