Pavel Vladimirovich Zasodimsky

Writer

• Born: November 1, 1843
• Birthplace: Veliky Ustyug, Vologda, Russia
• Died: May 4, 1912

Biography

Russian populist Pavel Vladimirovich Zasodimsky was born November 1, 1843, in Veliky Ustyug, a city in Russia’s Vologda province, to Vladimir Mikhailovich Zasodimsky, a government official, and Ekaterina Pavlovna Zasetskaia Zasodimsky. When Pavel was just a few months old, the family returned to their original home, the neighboring small town of Nikolsk. This isolated community, surrounded by the forest, was a formative influence and a source of fond childhood memories. Despite the aloofness his father, Pavel later wrote of his childhood as “light and happy,” his main occupations being the absorption of nature, voracious and indiscriminate reading, and periodic travels with his mother to her country home along the Arkhangelsk road.

The highway gave Pavel a first glimpse of the world outside, including drifters, religious pilgrims, prisoners under guard, and even performing animals. The boy and his mother also frequently visited the estate of her father, Pavel Mikhailovich Zasetsky, a nobleman with vast land holdings, who had served in the navy under Czar Paul I. Thus, the boy’s upbringing combined an idyllic home life with a broad exposure to other modes of existence, further rounded out by French and German lessons from an aunt.

Zasodimsky developed a lifelong sympathy for characters regarded as “marginal” by society. In adulthood, this propensity was reinforced through friendships with several of the leading populist and radical writers of his time, and through correspondence with Leo Tolstoy. After false starts in legal studies and private tutoring, Zasodimsky set out to write about the lives of downtrodden people. His first published story, “Greshnitsa” (1867; the sinner), describes a young woman alone with a child born out of wedlock; she dies in isolation after an attempt to survive through prostitution.

In 1870, Zasodimsky married Aleksandra Nikolaevna Bogdanova. For forty-two years until his death in 1912, she not only wrote her own children’s tales but also acted as a sounding board for Zasodimsky, who published more than thirty works, including novels, memoirs, and children’s tales. In his most influential novel, Khronika sela Smurina (1874; chronicle of the village of Smurino), kulaks—wealthy peasants who hire contract labor and who control the local crafts markets—are pitted against the poorer members of their own class whom they exploit by monopolizing the means of production. Critics charged that Zasodimsky lacked knowledge of his subject and derived his material from other populist authors; but he rebutted them by demonstrating that he had in fact drawn from his own experience and direct observation.

After the Communist revolution, the new regime liquidated kulaks as a class. For his pioneering attacks on kulaks, and for his general protests against economic injustice, Zasodimsky was remembered as an early revolutionary thinker and champion of common people. After his death on May 4, 1912—near the end of the czarist era—one obituary referred to him as “the last populist.” His widow, Aleksandra Nikolaevna Bogdanova Zasodimsky, lived until 1920, long enough to receive a pension from the Soviet government. His Khronika sela Smurina was reprinted several times in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

After the Soviet era, critical focus shifted from Zasodimsky’s populist writings for adults to his books for children and writings about rural Russia. His children’s story “Zagovor sov” (1870; the owls’ conspiracy) typifies his avoidance of the syrupy, patronizing tone that often cloys children’s literature.