Aleksandr Vasil'evich Druzhinin
Aleksandr Vasil'evich Druzhinin (1824-1864) was a notable Russian writer and civil servant, recognized for his critical contributions to 19th-century literature. Born into a noble family that rose through service to the imperial state, Druzhinin's early life was marked by the tensions of social mobility and the constraints of his upbringing. He attended the prestigious Corps of Pages but faced ridicule from peers due to his family's relatively recent elevation to nobility. Despite these challenges, he began publishing works that explored the complexities of Russian society, including his first novel, "Polin'ka Saks," which critiqued the limitations placed on women of his time.
Druzhinin's literary career was often fraught with difficulties, particularly during the oppressive reign of Czar Nicholas I, when many literary journals were shut down. His works increasingly delved into darker themes, leading to censorship and controversy, especially with the rejection of "Lola Montes." After the death of Nicholas I, he resumed writing and became associated with prominent literary figures such as Leo Tolstoy. However, as the literary climate shifted towards radicalism, Druzhinin's moderate stance drew criticism from both sides of the ideological spectrum. His life was cut short by tuberculosis, but his legacy as a writer who navigated the complexities of his society endures.
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Aleksandr Vasil'evich Druzhinin
Writer
- Born: October 8, 1824
- Birthplace: Russia
- Died: January 19, 1864
- Place of death:
Biography
Aleksandr Vasil’evich Druzhinin was born on October 8, 1824, the son of a civil servant who had risen to the nobility through the table of ranks established by Czar Peter the Great. The elder Druzhinin ultimately reached the rank of state councilor, equal to a general in the army. Four years before Druzhinin’s birth, the family had acquired an estate outside St. Petersburg, supposedly as a reward for his father, who had saved a chest of money when the French army burned Moscow in 1812. The money came from his wife, and the estate was named Mariinskoe in her honor.
This estate would become the younger Druzhinin’s retreat, and he remained very close to his mother throughout his life, although he deeply respected his father. His early writings suggest that his parents were not happily married, particularly as economic change made it more difficult for them to depend upon serf labor. All the same, young Druzhinin, born eight years after his two older brothers, received the education of a young nobleman at the hands of private tutors. In 1840, his parents enrolled him in the Corps of Pages, which was to be his entry into the civil service. However, he became the butt of continual humiliation by the scions of far older families, who considered his family parveneaus. He poured his resentment into stories, yet developed a personal bearing not dissimilar from the most prideful of those he disdained. Upon graduation, he entered the Finland Guards Regiment, where he encountered further strife for his literary interests.
In 1847, he published his first novel, Polin’ka Saks, in the literary journal Sovremennik. Its eponymous heroine breaks free of the constraints of her society to find her own way in life, and the novel is a vicious satire of the finishing schools of the time, which Druzhinin had come to consider a pernicious influence on Russian noblewomen. The next year he published Rasskaz Alekseia Dmitricha, a novella about the childhood traumas of a young man from the service gentry, a not-quite middle class that tried to mimic the manners of its betters. As Druzhinin’s career progressed, he moved steadily toward darker themes, to the point that his novel Lola Montes was rejected by the censors as “antifamily” and withdrawn from circulation after it was initially published in 1848.
Druzhinin encountered other difficulties in 1848. Czar Nicholas I had closed many of the leading literary journals, proclaiming them hotbeds of seditious thought in response to the popular revolutions taking place in Western Europe. Druzhinin temporarily ceased to produce original fiction and instead produced a series of critical biographies of great Western writers, a vehicle by which he could deliver oblique criticism of his own country. Only after the tsar’s death in 1855 did Druzhinin resume writing original fiction. He became a close friend of Leo Tolstoy, and they read and criticized one another’s works. However, as Russia’s literary and intellectual elite became increasingly radicalized in the following decades, Druzhinin’s determined evenhandedness earned him attacks from both radicals and conservatives. By 1860 his health was failing and he had to give up his editorships. He died of tuberculosis on January 19, 1864.