Lidiia Charskaia
Lidiia Alekseevna Charskaia (née Voronova) was a Russian author and performer born in 1875 in Caucasia. After losing her mother at a young age, she attended the prestigious Pavlovsk Institute for Women in St. Petersburg and later studied drama at the St. Petersburg Imperial Theater. Over her career, Charskaia became well-known for her work as a character actress at the Aleksandrinskii Theater and published nearly eighty books, primarily targeting children and young adults. Her narratives often explore themes of adversity, featuring characters who face societal rejection yet ultimately triumph, reflecting her pro-monarchist beliefs.
Despite her success and recognition by literary figures like Kornei Chukovskii, her career was severely impacted by the Bolshevik Revolution, leading to the banning of her works and her dismissal from the theater in 1924. Charskaia continued to write under pseudonyms and relied on the support of fellow writers and her devoted readers to keep her legacy alive. She passed away in relative obscurity in Leningrad in 1937, but her work experienced a resurgence of interest in the post-Soviet era, highlighting her importance in Russian children's literature.
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Lidiia Charskaia
Writer
- Born: 1875
- Birthplace: Caucasia, Russia
- Died: March 18, 1937
- Place of death: Leningrad, Soviet Union (now St. Petersburg, Russia)
Biography
Lidiia Alekseevna Charskaia (née Voronova) was born in Caucasia, Russia, in 1875, the daughter of a military officer. Her mother died early, and Charskaia was sent off to an exclusive boarding school, the Pavlovsk Institute for Women in St. Petersburg, from which she graduated in 1893. She was able to attend drama courses at the St. Petersburg Imperial Theater for two years, from 1896 to 1898, and for the next twenty-six years, until 1924, she performed regularly on the stage as a character actress at the Aleksandrinskii Theater.
In 1901 Charskaia published her first book, and she also contributed regularly to weekly magazines. She produced nearly eighty books, covering almost every type of children’s and young adult story, including the boarding school tale, adventures, and girls’ stories. Her characters suffer through terrible travails in the course of the story and often are subjected to vicious rejection by peers and authority figures, but in the end emerge triumphant. However, Charskaia was no rebel, and her world was unabashedly pro-monarchist, in favor of the traditional Russian autocracy and Orthodox Church. By 1912 her popularity had become so great that she was the subject of an article by the noted critic Kornei Chukovskii, although at the time women writers and children’s literature were both regarded as being “beneath the salt” in the literary world.
However, things turned rapidly against Charskaia after the Bolshevik Revolution. Her books were removed from libraries and not republished. By 1920, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment had banned all her works and she was no longer able to publish under her own name. By Chukovskii’s intervention and the support of other writers, she was able to struggle by, even after the Aleksandrinskii Theater dismissed her in 1924. Several of her stories appeared under pseudonyms, and young women carefully preserved and shared existing copies of her books.
Charskaia died in obscurity in Leningrad on March 18, 1937, although she does not appear to have been touched by the Great Terror which was in full swing at the time. During the era of relaxation which followed Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, and particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was renewed interest in her works.