Kushchevskii, Ivan Afanasevich

Kushchevskii, Ivan Afanas’evich 

Born 1847 in Barnaul; died Aug. 12 (24), 1876, in St. Petersburg. Russian writer. Son of a minor civil servant.

After graduating from the Tomsk Gymnasium in 1866, Kushchevskii came to St. Petersburg and for many years lived in the slums of the city. The life of the urban lower classes was the material for his first sketches and short stories, published in Iskra and other periodicals. His best work, the novel-chronicle Nikolai Negorev, or the Successful Russian (Otechestvennye zapiski, 1871, nos. 1–4), written in a hospital for the poor, was highly praised by the democratic critics of his day. Its theme is the upbringing of the new generation and the search for ways to struggle for a just social order. The influence of N. G. Chernyshevskil’s novel What Is To Be Done? may be seen in the portrayal of the positive heroes.

WORKS

Izbrannoe. Afterword by G. Rappoport. Barnaul, 1957.
Nikolai Negorev, ili Blagopoluchnyi rossiianin. Afterword by M. S. Goriachkina. Moscow, 1958.

REFERENCES

Nikitin, P. (P. N. Tkachev). “Belletristy-empiriki i belletristy-metafiziki.” Delo, 1875, no. 3.
“Novoe iz biografii I. A. Kushchevskogo.” Sibirskie ogni, 1952, no. 5, p. 189.
Blinchevskaia, M. “Novoe ob I. A. Kushchevskom.” Ibid., 1970, no. 7.
Istoriia russkoi literatury XIX v.: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’. Moscow-Leningrad, 1962.

M. S. GORIACHKINA