Vsevolod Garshin
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Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (Все́волод Миха́йлович Гаршин) (1855–1888) was a Russian author of short stories.
Garshin's father was an army officer, who committed suicide in his presence, when Vsevolod was seven. He served in the army during the Russo-Turkish War, and his first stories were about the war, including the very first, "Four Days" (Russian: "Четыре дня"). This story is a powerful anti-war statement, based on a real incident during the war. The narrative is constructed as the interior monologue of a wounded soldier left for dead at the battlefield for four days, face to face with the corpse of a Turkish soldier he had killed. Garshin's literary success was short-lived: at the age of 33, the writer committed suicide by jumping from the fifth floor of his apartment house.
Garshin's work is not voluminous: it consists of some twenty stories, all of them contained in a single volume. His stories are permeated with the spirit of compassion and pity as intense as Dostoevsky's. In A Very Short Novel he examines the infidelity of the woman to the crippled hero. The story displays Garshin's talent for concentration and lyrical irony. That Which Was Not and Attalea Princeps are fables with animals and plants in human situations. The second of these stories is saturated with a spirit of tragic irony. In Officer and Servant he is a forerunner of Chekhov; it is an excellently constructed story conveying an atmosphere of drab gloom and meaningless boredom.
His best-known and most characteristic story is The Red Flower, the first in a long row of lunatic-asylum stories in Russian literature (the next in time was Chekhov's Ward No. 6). In it Garshin's morbid and high-strung moral sensitiveness reaches its highest pitch. It is the history of a madman who is obsessed by the desire to challenge and defeat the evil of the world. He discovers that all evil is contained in three poppies growing in the middle of the hospital garden, and with infinite astuteness and cunning he succeeds in defeating the vigilance of his warders and picking the flowers. He dies from nervous exhaustion, but dies happy and certain of having attained his end. The oppressive atmosphere of the asylum is conveyed with effective skill. The end comes as a relief, like death to a martyr, but there is in it also a pang of bitter irony.
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This article incorporates text from D.S. Mirsky's "A History of Russian Literature" (1926-27), a publication now in the public domain.
