Vladimir Korolenko

Vladimir Korolenko was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine (Volhynian Governorate), then part of the Russian Empire.[1] His Ukrainian Cossack father, Poltava-born Galaktion Afanasyevich Korolenko (1810-1868), was a district judge who, "amongst the people of his profession looked like a Don Quixote with his defiant honesty and refusal to take bribes", as his son later remembered.[2][3] His mother Evelina Skórewicz (1833-1903) was of Polish origin. In his early childhood Korolenko "did not very well know to which nationality he belonged and learned to read Polish before he did Russian," according to D.S. Mirsky. It was only after the 1863 January Uprising that the family did have to 'choose' its nationality and decided to 'become' Russians.[4] After the sudden death of her husband in Rovno in 1866, Evelina Iosifovna, suffering enormous hardships, somehow managed to raise her five children, three sons and two daughters, on a meagre income.[5]

Korolenko started his education in a Polish Rykhlinsky boarding school to continue it in the Zhitomir and later Rovno gymnasiums, graduating the latter with silver medal.[3] In his final year, he discovered the works of Nikolai Nekrasov and Ivan Turgenev. "It was then that I found my true 'native land' and that was the world of, first and foremost, Russian literature," he later wrote. He also cited Taras Shevchenko and Ukrainian folklore as major influences.[2]

In 1871 Korolenko enrolled into Saint Petersburg Technological Institute but after a year spent in utmost poverty had to leave in early 1873 due to financial problems.[3] In 1874 he moved to Moscow and joined the Moscow College of Agriculture and Forestry. He was expelled from it in 1876 for having signed a collective letter protesting against the arrest of a fellow student, and was exiled to the Vologda region, then Kronstadt, where the authorities agreed to transfer him, answering his mother's plea.[2] In August 1877 Korolenko enrolled in the Saint Petersburg Mineral Resources Institute where he became an active member of a Narodnik group. Eight months later was reported on by a 3rd Section spy (whom he had exposed to friends), arrested and sent into exile, first to Vyatka, then Vyshnevolotsky District (where he spent six months in jail) and later Tomsk. He was finally allowed to settle in Perm.[2]

Korolenko in 1885

Throughout his writing career Korolenko advocated for human rights and against injustices and persecutions. Considering himself 'only a part-time-writer', as he put it, he became famous as a publicist who, never restricting himself to mere journalistic work, was continually and most effectively engaged in the practical issues he saw as demanding immediate public attention.

In 1891-1892, when famine struck several regions of Central Russia, he went to work on the ground, taking part in the relief missions, collecting donations, supervising the process of delivering and distributing food, opening free canteens (forty five, in all), all the while sending to Moskovskiye Vedomosti regular reports which would be later compiled in the book V golodny god (В голодный год, In the Year of Famine, 1893) in which he provided the full account of the horrors that he witnessed, as well as the political analysis of the reasons of the crisis.[13]

In 1895-1896 he spent enormous amount of time supervising the court case of the group of the Udmurt peasants from Stary Multan village who were falsely accused of committing ritual murders. Writing continuously for numerous Russian papers (and in 1896 summarizing his experiences in "The Multanskoye Affair", Мултанское дело) Korolenko made sure the whole country became aware of the trial, exposed the fabrications, himself performed as barrister in court and almost single-handedly brought about the acquittal, thus "practically saving the whole little nation from the horrible stain which would have remained for years should the guilty verdict have been passed," according to the biographer.[2] Stary Multan has been subsequently renamed Korolenko village, in his honour and memory.[14]

"The House No.13", his historic description of the Chișinău pogrom of 1903, was banned by the Russian censorship and appeared in print in 1905 for the first time. It was also published in English.[14] As the 1905 Revolution started, Korolenko made a stand against the Black Hundred in Poltava. Numerous death threats he received by post have warranted the workers' picket guard to be put by his flat.[2]

In 1905 Russkoye Bogatstvo (which he had started editing a year earlier) published the Manifest by the Petersburg Soviet of the Workers' deputies. As its editor-in-chief, Korolenko was repeatedly sued by the authorities, had his flat raided by the police and the materials deemed subversive confiscated.[3]

Starting in 1906, he headed the campaign against military law and capital punishment and in the late 1900s sharply criticised the governments' punitive actions ("Everyday Phenomenon", 1910, "Features of Military Justice", 1910, "In the Pacified Village", 1911).[4] Of "Everyday Phenomenon" Leo Tolstoy wrote: "It ought to be re-printed and published in million copies. None of the speeches in Duma, or treatises, or dramas or novels would have one thousandth of the benign effect this article should have". [15] Foreworded by Tolstoy, it was published abroad in Russian, Bulgarian, German, French and Italian languages.[14]

In 1913 he took strong public stand against the anti-Semitic Beilis trial and wrote the powerful essay "Call to the Russian People in regard to the blood libel of the Jews" (1911–13).[7][14] Korolenko never belonged to any political party, but ideologically was close to the Popular Socialists. None of the two extremes of the famous 'Stolypin dylemma' attracted him, "he fancied neither 'great tribulations' in terms of 1918, nor the 'Great Russia' as of its 1914 model," according to Mark Aldanov.[16]

Vladimir Korolenko, who was a lifetime opponent of Tsarism and described himself as a "party-less Socialist", reservedly welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1917 which he considered to be a logical result of the whole historical course of things. However, he soon started to criticize the Bolsheviks as the despotic nature of their rule became evident. During the Russian Civil War that ensued, he condemned both Red Terror and White Terror.[7] While in Poltava in the years of the Civil War, risking his life, Korolenko pleaded against atrocities, of which there were many from all sides of the conflict. While trying to save from death the Bolsheviks arrested by the 'whites', he appealed for the 'reds' against reciprocating with terror, arguing (in his letters to Anatoly Lunacharsky) that the process of "moving towards Socialism should be based upon the better sides of the human nature."[2] Up until his dying day, suffering from a progressive heart disorder, he was busy collecting food packages for children in famine-stricken Moscow and Petrograd, took part in organizing orphanages and shelters for the homeless. He was elected the honourable member of the Save the Children League, and the All-Russia Committee for Helping the Famine Victims.[2]

Vladimir Korolenko died in Poltava, Ukraine, of the complications of pneumonia on 25 December 1921.[3]

Korolenko's grave in Poltava

The majority of the critics, regardless of which political camp they belonged to, saw Korolenko the social activist at least as important and influential as Korolenko the writer. In his 1922 tribute Lev Gumilevsky, lauding the writer's style for "striking simplicity which added to the power of his word," called him Russia's "social... and literary conscience."[23] Mark Aldanov also considered him "the symbol of civil consciousness and lofty ideals in literature."[16]

The Soviet biographer F. Kuleshov praised Korolenko as "the defender of the oppressed" and a "truth-seeker, ardent and riotous, who with the fervency of a true revolutionary fought the centuries-long traditions of lawlessness."[24] According to this critic, the writer's unique persona united in itself "a brilliant story-teller..., astute psychologist, great publicist, energetic, tireless social activist, a true patriot and very simple, open and modest man with crystal clear, honest soul."[24] Maxim Gorky, while crediting Korolenko with being a "huge master and fine stylist," also opined that he did a lot to "awaken the sleeping social self-awareness of the majority of Russian nation".[24]

S. Poltavsky, calling his 1922 essay the "Quiet Hurricane", defined Korolenko as "the knight of the high image of Justice" who conducted his 'tournaments' with 'quiet humaine gentleness'.[25] Semyon Vengerov called Korolenko "a humanist in the most straightforward sense of the word" whose sincerity was so overwhelming as to "win [people] over no matter which political camp they belonged." "The high position Korolenko occupies in our contemporary literature is in equal degree the result of his fine, both humane and elegant literary gift, and the fact that he was "the 'knight of quill' in the best sense of the word," Vengerov wrote in 1911.[5]

"His life was the continuation of his literature and vice versa. Korolenko was honest. Things that he wrote and things that he did have merged into harmonic oneness for a Russian reader," the Modernist critic Yuly Aykhenvald wrote, looking for an answer as to why was Korolenko so "deeply, so profoundly loved in his lifetime by people belonging to different classes and groups."[26] Lauding Korolenko for being "Russia's pre-1905 one-man constitution," and the one who "just could not pass by without responding to any serious wrong-doing or social injustice," the critic noted: "He meddled with lots of things and those who disliked that were tempted to liken him to Don Quixote, but valiance was not just one single virtue of our Russian knight, for he was also highly reasonable and never spared his fighting powers for naught."[26]

The early Soviet critic Pavel Kogan argued that Korolenko was in a way contradicting himself by denouncing the revolutionary terror for it was him who had collected "the immense set of documents damning the Tsarist regime" which completely justified the cruelties of the Bolsheviks.[27] According to Kogan, there is hardly anything more powerful [in Russian journalism] than Korolenko's articles denouncing the political and religious violence of the old regime. "His works on the Beilis and the Multan affairs, the Pogroms of the Jews amounted to the journalistic heroism," the critic argued.[27] Korolenko, much in the way of Rousseau, whom Kogan saw him as being an heir to, "refused to follow the revolution, but he's been always within it, and this way, the part of it."[27]

All the while, many Russian authors in emigration expressed disgust at what they saw as the hypocrisy of the Bolsheviks who hastened to appropriate Korolenko's legacy for their propagandistic purposes. Mark Aldanov, for one, declared the excessive flow of official 'tributes', including the Lunacharsky's obituary, Demyan Bedny's poetic dedication and Grigory Zinoviev's speech a collective act of abuse, "desecrating his pure grave."[16]

The 1953 Soviet postal stamp

Mark Aldanov, who considered Korolenko the founder of his own new school of literature, a 'fine landscape painter' and in this respect a precursor to Ivan Bunin, was still ambivalent about Korolenko's literary legacy as a whole, describing him as an "uneven writer who authored some true masterpieces alongside dismally weak stories, one of his most famous ones, 'Chyudnaya', among them."[16]

While praising his style of writing, "devoid of modernist ornamentations," as well as "very simple, seemingly ordinary spoken language almost completely free from the hackneyed jargon of intelligentsia," Aldanov argued: "He was too gentle a man, who admired and respected the people too much to grow into a great writer," noting: "his stories are full of thieves, gamblers and murderers, with not a single evil man among them."[16]

Aykhenvald who lauded Korolenko's role as a purveyor of humanism in Russia, was less complimentary to his stories which he found, 'overcrowded', lacking in space. "There is no cosmos, no air, in fact, almost nothing except for lots and lots of people, all worried by their worldly problems, totally foreign to the notion of their mysterious unity with the great Universe," argued the critic, who described Korolenko's literary world as 'confined quartes' where 'horizons [were] narrow and well outlined' and everything was "portrayed in vague and simple lines."[26]

In fact, the author's humanism as such is "overbearing and in the end feels as if [the author] tries to exert some kind of violence over the reader's free will," according to the biographer. For Aychenvald, Korolenko is too "rational when observing human suffering; apparently seeing rational reasons behind it, he is invariably convinced that there must be some panacea for it, which will bring all pain to the end." For all his shortcomings, though, Korolenko, according to Aykhenvald, "remains one of the most attractive figures in the contemporary Russian literature," quick to enchant the reader with "his touchingly soft romanticism and tender melancholy gently lightening a dim world where misguided, orphaned souls and charming images of children roam."[26]