Aleksandr Kuprin - A Clump Of Lilacs
Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin (September 7, 1870) in the village of Narovchat in the Penza Governorate – August 25, 1938 in Leningrad) was a Russian writer best known for his novels The Duel (1905) and The Pit, as well as Moloch (1896), Olesya (1898), Junior Captain Rybnikov (1906), Emerald (1907), and The Garnet Bracelet (1911), the latter made into a 1965 movie.
In 1889 Alexander Kuprin met Liodor Palmin, an established poet who arranged for the publication in the Russian Satirical Leaflet of his debut short story The Last Debut, based on a real life incident, the suicide by poisoning on stage of the singer Yevlalya Kadmina in 1881, a tragedy which also inspired Ivan Turgenev's tale Clara Milich. Some three years passed between the appearance of The Last Debut and the publication of his second tale Psyche in December 1892. Like On a Moonlit Night which followed it, the piece showed the aberrations of a deranged mind, investigating the thin line between fantasy and reality.
Kuprin's few years of military service saw the publication of a short novel In the Dark (1893) and several short stories, mostly the artful studies of abnormal states of mind (A Slav Soul, Madness and The Forgotten Kiss, all 1894). Only The Inquiry (1894), his first publication to arouse critical comment, was concerned with the army, starting a series of Russian army-themes short stories: A Place to Sleep (1897), The Night-shift (1899), Praporshchik (1897), The Mission (1901) which finally resulted in his most famous work, The Duel. Apart from his growing dissatisfaction with army life, the publication of The Enquiry was probably the major reason for Kuprin's resignation in the summer of 1894. There can be no doubt that the appearance of such a work, written by an officer and signed with his full name, would have had unpleasant consequences for him, Luker argues.
After retiring from the service, without any definite plans for the future, or any knowledge, academic or practical (according to Autobiography), Kuprin embarked upon a five-year-long trip through the South-West of the country. He tried many types of job, including dental care, land surveying, acting, being a circus performer, psalm singer, doctor, hunter, fisher, etc., all of these subsequently reflected in his fiction. All the while he was engaged in self-education and read a lot, Gleb Uspensky with his sketches becoming his favorite author.
In summer 1894 Kuprin arrived in Kiev and by September had begun working for local newspapers Kievskoe Slovo (Kiev Word), Zhizn i Iskusstvo (Life and Art), and later Kievlianin. The qualities necessary for a good journalist, he believed, were mad courage, audacity, breadth of view, and amazing memory, gifts he himself possessed in full measure. While on frequent journeys to Russia's Southwest he contributed for newspapers in Novocherkassk, Rostov-on-Don, Tsaritsyn, Taganrog and Odessa.
Alongside feuilletons and chronicles Kuprin wrote small sketches, investigating particular environments, or portraying people of specific occupations or circumstances, gathered later into a collection. March 1896 saw the publication of eight such sketches in a small edition entitled Kiev Types, Kuprin's first book. In October 1897 his second collection Miniatures came out, one of his best known circus stories, Allez!, earning high praise from Leo Tolstoy. In 1905 Kuprin described Miniatures as his first childish steps along the road of literature; they definitely marked a further stage in his maturing as a writer, as well as his Industrial Sketches made in 1896–1899 after his visit to the Donbass region.
In 1896 Russkoye Bogatstvo published Moloch, Kuprin's first major work, a critique of the rapidly growing Russian capitalism and a reflection of the growing industrial unrest in the country. Since then only twice did he briefly returned to the theme, in A Muddle (1897) and In the Bowels of the Earth (1899). On this basis one is tempted to conclude that his concern for the industrial worker in Moloch was little more than a passing phase, Luker opines.
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