Kamran Nazirli

Kamran Nazirli (born June 19, 1958) is an Azerbaijani writer, dramatist and
translator. He is a member of the Azerbaijani and Belarus Writers' Union and
Journalists' Union of Azerbaijan. He was awarded with the Prize of H.B. Zardabi, the
founder of the Azerbaijani National Press, Rasul Rza Prize for literature.

Life

Nazirli was born in Astara in 1958 and moved to Baku in 1975, where he studied in
the English faculty at the Azerbaijani Institute of Foreign Languages. He received his
PhD with a thesis in Linguistics. He also graduated from the Baku Institute of Social
Management and Politics and worked as a correspondent in various newspapers
and State Information Agencies (Azerinform) as a translator in various international
companies and projects financed by the World Bank. He is a Member of the
Azerbaijani Writers' Union and the author of several books such as Love Story,
Among the Natives, The Devil's Light, Selected Stories, The White House, and A
Man in Coma.

He received the "Gold Word" prize from the Azerbaijani Ministry of Culture and
Tourism in 2011 for his translation of the book entitled Nobody Ever Dies and was
awarded a special prize from the USA Embassy in Azerbaijan for his translation book
Moby Dick by Herman Melville and international Prize named after Rasul Rza for
literature.

Kamran Nazirli has translated works by English and American novelists and poets
into Azeri such as Jack London, Oscar Wilde, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway,
Margaret Mitchell, Edgar Allan Poe, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, Harold
Pinter, etc. He also translates works by Azerbaijani writers and poets into English.
Works
Love Story (Baku, 1991)
Among The Natives (Baku, 1995)
The Old Baby (Baku, 2002)
The Devil"s Light (Baku, 2004)
Araz- My Life (Baku, 2004)
A Man in Coma (Baku, 2007)
Selected Stories (Baku, 2010)
The White House (Baku, 2011)
Tokay and Manana (Baku, 2012)
Society Is the Mirror of Policy (Baku, 1999)
Tell Me A Tale, Grandma!(Baku, 2003)
The Moments of Noble Man"s Life (Baku,
2005)
Plays
The Devil"Light, The play was staged
by Lankaran State Theatre in 2011.
The Drug-addict, The play was staged
by Sumgait State Theatre in 2014
Translated Books
Jack London, Novels and stories,
Baku, 1987
Nobody Ever Dies, Selection novels
and stories of the World Literature,
Baku, 2010
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Baku,
2011
The Patrimony. Stories. Plays. Baku. 2014.
432 p.
"19+1". Stories. Play. İn Russian. Baku,
2014. 360 p.
The Book about Sohrab Tahir, Baku,
Mutarjim, 2015
The Book about Rashad Mahmudov, Baku,
Mutarjim, 2015
The Fourth Seal, Novel. Baku, Mutarjim,
2015. 464 p.
The Happy Birds, Short Stories. Baku,
Mutarjim, 2018. 196 p.
When the Gull Build Nests. Short stories,
Mutarjim, Baku, 2018, 248 p.
The Grandparents Don"t Say Fairytale,
Short Stories. Baku, Mutarjim, 2018. 198
p.
Oscar Wilde, Selected Works, Baku,
2012
Novruz Najafoglu. Nijat, Tural and
Humay: Stories. (Baku, 2013)
Husseinbala Miralamov, Gates of
Ganja, Historical novel with two parts,
(Baku, 2013)
Vaqif Bahmanli, Muslim (Baku, 2013)
Mirafsal Tabib, Sonnets, Mutajim
(Baku, 2012)
Jabir Novruz, Selected poems,
Mutajim (Baku, 2014)
Candles (Anthology of the Azerbaijani
poetry-101 verses of Azerbaijani
poets), Baku, 2015, in English
Punishment (novel by Azerbaijani
writer H. Miralamov), Baku, 2015, in
English
English. Mutarjim Publishing House,
Baku, 2017
The Woman. A Collection of poems.
Aysel A. Alizada. Contemporary
Azerbaijani poetry in English. Mutarjim
Publishing House, Baku, 2017

Ales Karlyukevich. The adventures of The Smell of Snow. A Collection of

Maksimka in homeland and other poems. Sona Valiyeva. Contemporary
countries. Novel-story, Baku, Mutarjim, Azerbaijani poetry in English. Zardabi
2015. p. 116 LTD MMC Publishing House, Baku,
2018
Svetlana Aleksievich. U voyni ne
jenskoe licho. Novel on War. Baku,
2015

Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind,

Novel, Baku, 2015

Dawn. A Collection of poems. Gulu

Aghsas. Contemporary Azerbaijani
poetry in English. Mutarjim Publishing
House, 2016

The Song of Spring. A Collection of

poems. Nigar Rafibayli. Contemporary
Azerbaijani poetry in English. Mutarjim
Publishing House, 2016

The Unforgettable Letter. A Collection

of poems. Baloglan Jalil.
Contemporary Azerbaijani poetry in
English. Mutarjim Publishing House,
2016

Nikolay Cherqinech. Sons. Novel,

Baku, 2016

You Love Me. A Collection of poems.

Rashad Majid. Contemporary
Azerbaijani poetry in English. Mutarjim
Publishing House, 2017

A Light in the Darkness. A Collection

of poems. Mehmet Nuri Parmaksiz
Contemporary Turkish poetry in
Awards

H.B. Zardabi prize, 1999

Golden Word literature prize by Ministry of Culture for the translation book Nobody Ever
Dies, 2011

Rasul Rza International literature prize, 2016, Baku

International literature prize "Rodnoy Dom", 2016, Minsk, Belarus

 Joanita Male
Seven years ago, Juanita got a call from Child Protective Services (CPS) about her niece and
two nephews, who had shown up to school hungry, dirty, and disheveled. She learned that
the day before her sister, who was addicted to drugs and prostitution, had abandoned her
children Michael (10), Nathan (7), and Leilah (2) at a hotel.

These children had yet to see a day in their life with any stability. Abandoned by their father,
exposed to substance abuse, trauma, and neglect, this was the last straw for them. Juanita
was already a single mother of four struggling to make ends meet, already juggling to be
both father and mother to her three sons and daughter, but Juanita adopted her niece and
nephews and welcomed them into her family.

Juanita herself was just putting her life together after suffering from years of abuse,
domestic violence, trauma, homelessness, and drug use. Just four years before, her sister
had referred Juanita to Big Brothers Big Sisters and she enrolled all her boys, Damian,
Bernard, and Seth. A year later all of her boys were matched with Big Brothers and it was a
major turning point for Juanita.

“After my children had mentors, it was like I turned a new leaf, I knew I had to make healthy
choices,” she says. She enrolled herself in school, started volunteering with CPS, juggled
multiple jobs, and made some major lifestyle changes to offer her children a better life.

“Having Big Brothers was like having a family, someone to lean on. It’s been a struggle and I
have been through a lot but they have supported me in every way,” Juanita confesses. As
Juanita rebuilt her life from scratch and worked day and night to make sure she could
support her children, her “kids got to experience role models who taught them what healthy
relationships are like. They got lots of educational and enjoyable experiences that I can’t
provide because I don’t have the resources.”
Today, Juanita’s two older sons are now 22 and 23 and had Big Brothers for 10+ years, and
Juanita is still raising five young children ages 9 to 17, including her niece and nephews, who
are each actively matched with a Big Brother or Big Sister. She raves about how her children
have grown in every aspect, whether it’s academics, social and emotional needs, or just
instilling kindness and respect for each other.

She explains “the program gave the boys somebody they can talk to, someone they trust
and who doesn’t confine them. And the girls, they get their girl time and learn their self
worth. That’s what I love the most about the program” — something she was unable to
provide as a single mom running a tight ship.

“I can’t emphasize enough how much help the Bigs have provided for the kids and me. Just
seeing mentors who actually care and want my kids to succeed. They become your network.
Your family,” she explains.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Bay Area cherishes moments like these, especially during the
holidays. The presence of a mentor allows our children and families to embrace the holidays
knowing that there is someone special who will share their joy and experiences with them.
Watching our Littles grow and succeed is the best Christmas present we could ask for!
 Leo Tolstoy

(1828–1910)
Early Life

On September 9, 1828, writer Leo Tolstoy was born at his family's estate, Yasnaya
Polyana, in the Tula Province of Russia. He was the youngest of four boys. When
Tolstoy's mother died in 1830, his father's cousin took over caring for the children.
When their father, Count Nikolay Tolstoy, died just seven years later, their aunt was
appointed their legal guardian. When the aunt passed away, Tolstoy and his siblings
moved in with a second aunt, in Kazan, Russia. Although Tolstoy experienced a lot
of loss at an early age, he would later idealize his childhood memories in his writing.

Tolstoy received his primary education at home, at the hands of French and German
tutors. In 1843, he enrolled in an Oriental languages program at the University of
Kazan. There, Tolstoy failed to excel as a student. His low grades forced him to
transfer to an easier law program. Prone to partying in excess, Tolstoy ultimately left
the University of Kazan in 1847, without a degree. He returned to his parents' estate,
where he made a go at becoming a farmer. He attempted to lead the serfs, or
farmhands, in their work, but he was too often absent on social visits to Tula and
Moscow. His stab at becoming the perfect farmer soon proved to be a failure. He did,
however, succeed in pouring his energies into keeping a journal — the beginning of
a lifelong habit that would inspire much of his fiction

As Tolstoy was flailing on the farm, his older brother, Nikolay, came to visit while on
military leave. Nikolay convinced Tolstoy to join the Army as a junker, south in the
Caucasus Mountains, where Nikolay himself was stationed. Following his stint as a
junker, Tolstoy transferred to Sevastopol in Ukraine in November 1854, where he
fought in the Crimean War through August 1855.
Early Works

During quiet periods while Tolstoy was a junker in the Army, he worked on an
autobiographical story called Childhood. In it, he wrote of his fondest childhood
memories. In 1852, Tolstoy submitted the sketch to The Contemporary, the most
popular journal of the time. The story was eagerly accepted and became Tolstoy's
very first published work.

After completing Childhood, Tolstoy started writing about his day-to-day life at the
Army outpost in the Caucasus. However, he did not complete the work, entitled The
Cossacks, until 1862, after he had already left the Army.

Tolstoy still managed to continue writing while at battle during the Crimean War.
During that time, he composed Boyhood (1854), a sequel to Childhood, the second
book in what was to become Tolstoy's autobiographical trilogy. In the midst of the
Crimean War, Tolstoy also expressed his views on the striking contradictions of war
through a three-part series, Sevastopol Tales. In the second Sevastopol Tales book,
Tolstoy experimented with a relatively new writing technique: Part of the story is
presented in the form of a soldier's stream of consciousness.

Once the Crimean War ended and Tolstoy left the Army, he returned to Russia. Back
home, the burgeoning author found himself in high demand on the St. Petersburg
literary scene. Stubborn and arrogant, Tolstoy refused to ally himself with any
particular intellectual school of thought. Declaring himself an anarchist, he made off
to Paris in 1857. Once there, he gambled away all of his money and was forced to
return home to Russia. He also managed to publish Youth, the third part of his
autobiographical trilogy, in 1857.

Back in Russia in 1862, Tolstoy produced the first of a 12 issue-installment of the

journal Yasnaya Polyana, marrying a doctor's daughter named Sofya Andreyevna
Bers that same year.

Books

'War and Peace'

Residing at Yasnaya Polyana with his wife and children, Tolstoy spent the better part
of the 1860s toiling over his first great novel, War and Peace. A portion of the novel
was first published in the Russian Messenger in 1865, under the title "The Year
1805." By 1868, he had released three more chapters and a year later, the novel
was complete. Both critics and the public were buzzing about the novel's historical
accounts of the Napoleonic Wars, combined with its thoughtful development of
realistic yet fictional characters. The novel also uniquely incorporated three long
essays satirizing the laws of history. Among the ideas that Tolstoy extols in War and
Peace is the belief that the quality and meaning of one's life is mainly derived from
his day-to-day activities.
Following the success of War and Peace, in 1873, Tolstoy set to work on the second
of his best-known novels, Anna Karenina. Like War and Peace, Anna Karenina
fictionalized some biographical events from Tolstoy's life, as was particularly evident
in the romance of the characters Kitty and Levin, whose relationship is said to
resemble Tolstoy's courtship with his own wife.

The first sentence of Anna Karenina is among the most famous lines of the book: "All
happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own
way." Anna Karenina was published in installments from 1873 to 1877, to critical and
public acclaim. The royalties that Tolstoy earned from the novel contributed to his
rapidly growing wealth.

Philosophy, Religious Conversion

Despite the success of Anna Karenina, following the novel's completion, Tolstoy
suffered a spiritual crisis and grew depressed. Struggling to uncover the meaning of
life, Tolstoy first went to the Russian Orthodox Church but did not find the answers
he sought there. He came to believe that Christian churches were corrupt and, in lieu
of organized religion, developed his own beliefs. He decided to express those beliefs
by founding a new publication called The Mediator in 1883.

As a consequence of espousing his unconventional — and therefore controversial —

spiritual beliefs, Tolstoy was ousted by the Russian Orthodox Church. He was even
watched by the secret police. When Tolstoy's new beliefs prompted his desire to give
away his money, his wife strongly objected. The disagreement put a strain on the
couple's marriage until Tolstoy begrudgingly agreed to a compromise: He conceded
to granting his wife the copyrights — and presumably the royalties — to all of his
writing predating 1881.

Later Fiction

'The Death of Ivan Ilyich'

In addition to his religious tracts, Tolstoy continued to write fiction throughout the
1880s and 1890s. Among his later works' genres were moral tales and realistic
fiction. One of his most successful later works was the novella The Death of Ivan
Ilyich, written in 1886. In Ivan Ilyich, the main character struggles to come to grips
with his impending death. The title character, Ivan Ilyich, comes to the jarring
realization that he has wasted his life on trivial matters, but the realization comes too
late.

In 1898, Tolstoy wrote Father Sergius, a work of fiction in which he seems to criticize
the beliefs that he developed following his spiritual conversion. The following year,
he wrote his third lengthy novel, Resurrection. While the work received some praise,
it hardly matched the success and acclaim of his previous novels. Tolstoy's other late
works include essays on art, a satirical play called The Living Corpse that he wrote in
1890, and a novella called Hadji-Murad (written in 1904), which was discovered and
published after his death.

Elder Years

Over the last 30 years of his life, Tolstoy established himself as a moral and religious
leader. His ideas about nonviolent resistance to evil influenced the likes of social
leader Mahatma Gandhi.

Also during his later years, Tolstoy reaped the rewards of international acclaim. Yet
he still struggled to reconcile his spiritual beliefs with the tensions they created in his
home life. His wife not only disagreed with his teachings, but she also disapproved of
his disciples, who regularly visited Tolstoy at the family estate. Their troubled
marriage took on an air of notoriety in the press. Anxious to escape his wife's
growing resentment, in October 1910, Tolstoy, his daughter, Aleksandra, and his
physician, Dr. Dushan P. Makovitski, embarked on a pilgrimage. Valuing their
privacy, they traveled incognito, hoping to dodge the press, to no avail.

Death and Legacy

Unfortunately, the pilgrimage proved too arduous for the aging novelist. In November
1910, the stationmaster of a train depot in Astapovo, Russia opened his home to
Tolstoy, allowing the ailing writer to rest. Tolstoy died there shortly after, on
November 20, 1910. He was buried at the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in Tula
Province, where Tolstoy had lost so many loved ones yet had managed to build such
fond and lasting memories of his childhood. Tolstoy was survived by his wife and
their brood of 8 children. (The couple had spawned 13 children in all, but only 10 had
survived past infancy.)

To this day, Tolstoy's novels are considered among the finest achievements of
literary work. War and Peace is, in fact, frequently cited as the greatest novel ever
written. In contemporary academia, Tolstoy is still widely acknowledged as having
possessed a gift for describing characters' unconscious motives. He is also
championed for his finesse in underscoring the role of people's everyday actions in
defining their character and purpose.
 Aleksandr Pushkin
Aleksandr Pushkin, in full Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, (born May 26 [June 6,
New Style], 1799, Moscow, Russia—died January 29 [February 10], 1837, St.
Petersburg), Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer; he has often
been considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian
literature.

The early years

Pushkin’s father came of an old boyar family; his mother was a granddaughter of
Abram Hannibal, who, according to family tradition, was an Abyssinian princeling
bought as a slave at Constantinople (Istanbul) and adopted by Peter the Great,
whose comrade in arms he became. Pushkin immortalized him in an unfinished
historical novel, Arap Petra Velikogo (1827; The Negro of Peter the Great). Like
many aristocratic families in early 19th-century Russia, Pushkin’s parents adopted
French culture, and he and his brother and sister learned to talk and to read in
French. They were left much to the care of their maternal grandmother, who told
Aleksandr, especially, stories of his ancestors in Russian. From Arina Rodionovna
Yakovleva, his old nurse, a freed serf (immortalized as Tatyana’s nurse in Yevgeny
Onegin), he heard Russian folktales. During summers at his grandmother’s estate
near Moscow he talked to the peasants and spent hours alone, living in the dream
world of a precocious, imaginative child. He read widely in his father’s library and
gained stimulus from the literary guests who came to the house.

In 1811 Pushkin entered the newly founded Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo
(later renamed Pushkin) and while there began his literary career with the publication
(1814, in Vestnik Evropy, “The Messenger of Europe”) of his verse epistle “To My
Friend, the Poet.” In his early verse, he followed the style of his older
contemporaries, the Romantic poets K.N. Batyushkov and V.A. Zhukovsky, and of
the French 17th- and 18th-century poets, especially the Vicomte de Parny.
While at the Lyceum he also began his first completed major work, the romantic
poem Ruslan i Lyudmila (1820; Ruslan and Ludmila), written in the style of the
narrative poems of Ludovico Ariosto and Voltaire but with an old Russian setting and
making use of Russian folklore. Ruslan, modeled on the traditional Russian epic
hero, encounters various adventures before rescuing his bride, Ludmila, daughter of
Vladimir, grand prince of Kiev, who, on her wedding night, has been kidnapped by
the evil magician Chernomor. The poem flouted accepted rules and genres and was
violently attacked by both of the established literary schools of the day, Classicism
and Sentimentalism. It brought Pushkin fame, however, and Zhukovsky presented
his portrait to the poet with the inscription “To the victorious pupil from the defeated
master.”

St. Petersburg

In 1817 Pushkin accepted a post in the foreign office at St. Petersburg, where he
was elected to Arzamás, an exclusive literary circle founded by his uncle’s friends.
Pushkin also joined the Green Lamp association, which, though founded (in 1818)
for discussion of literature and history, became a clandestine branch of a secret
society, the Union of Welfare. In his political verses and epigrams, widely circulated
in manuscript, he made himself the spokesman for the ideas and aspirations of those
who were to take part in the Decembrist rising of 1825, the unsuccessful culmination
of a Russian revolutionary movement in its earliest stage.

Exile in the south

For these political poems, Pushkin was banished from St. Petersburg in May 1820 to
a remote southern province. Sent first to Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk,
Ukraine), he was there taken ill and, while convalescing, traveled in the northern
Caucasus and later to Crimea with General Rayevski, a hero of 1812, and his family.
The impressions he gained provided material for his “southern cycle” of romantic
narrative poems: Kavkazsky plennik (1820–21; The Prisoner of the Caucasus),
Bratya razboyniki (1821–22; The Robber Brothers), and Bakhchisaraysky fontan
(1823; The Fountain of Bakhchisaray).

Although this cycle of poems confirmed the reputation of the author of Ruslan and
Ludmila and Pushkin was hailed as the leading Russian poet of the day and as the
leader of the romantic, liberty-loving generation of the 1820s, he himself was not
satisfied with it. In May 1823 he started work on his central masterpiece, the novel in
verse Yevgeny Onegin (1833), on which he continued to work intermittently until
1831.

In it he returned to the idea of presenting a typical figure of his own age but in a
wider setting and by means of new artistic methods and techniques.

Yevgeny Onegin unfolds a panoramic picture of Russian life. The characters it

depicts and immortalizes—Onegin, the disenchanted skeptic; Lensky, the romantic,
freedom-loving poet; and Tatyana, the heroine, a profoundly affectionate study of
Russian womanhood: a “precious ideal,” in the poet’s own words—are typically
Russian and are shown in relationship to the social and environmental forces by
which they are molded. Although formally the work resembles Lord Byron’s Don
Juan, Pushkin rejects Byron’s subjective, romanticized treatment in favour of
objective description and shows his hero not in exotic surroundings but at the heart
of a Russian way of life. Thus, the action begins at St. Petersburg, continues on a
provincial estate, then switches to Moscow, and finally returns to St. Petersburg.

Pushkin had meanwhile been transferred first to Kishinyov (1820–23; now Chişinău,
Moldova) and then to Odessa (1823–24). His bitterness at continued exile is
expressed in letters to his friends—the first of a collection of correspondence that
became an outstanding and enduring monument of Russian prose. At Kishinyov, a
remote outpost in Moldavia, he devoted much time to writing, though he also
plunged into the life of a society engaged in amorous intrigue, hard drinking, gaming,
and violence. At Odessa he fell passionately in love with the wife of his superior,
Count Vorontsov, governor-general of the province. He fought several duels, and
eventually the count asked for his discharge. Pushkin, in a letter to a friend
intercepted by the police, had stated that he was now taking “lessons in pure
atheism.” This finally led to his being again exiled to his mother’s estate of
Mikhaylovskoye, near Pskov, at the other end of Russia.

At Mikhaylovskoye

Although the two years at Mikhaylovskoye were unhappy for Pushkin, they were to
prove one of his most productive periods. Alone and isolated, he embarked on a
close study of Russian history; he came to know the peasants on the estate and
interested himself in noting folktales and songs. During this period the specifically
Russian features of his poetry became steadily more marked. His ballad “Zhenikh”
(1825; “The Bridegroom”), for instance, is based on motifs from Russian folklore; and
its simple, swift-moving style, quite different from the brilliant extravagance of Ruslan
and Ludmila or the romantic, melodious music of the “southern” poems, emphasizes
its stark tragedy.

In 1824 he published Tsygany (The Gypsies), begun earlier as part of the “southern
cycle.” At Mikhaylovskoye, too, he wrote the provincial chapters of Yevgeny Onegin;
the poem Graf Nulin (1827; “Count Nulin”), based on the life of the rural gentry; and,
finally, one of his major works, the historical tragedy Boris Godunov (1831).

The latter marks a break with the Neoclassicism of the French theatre and is
constructed on the “folk-principles” of William Shakespeare’s plays, especially the
histories and tragedies, plays written “for the people” in the widest sense and thus
universal in their appeal. Written just before the Decembrist rising, it treats the
burning question of the relations between the ruling classes, headed by the tsar, and
the masses; it is the moral and political significance of the latter, “the judgment of the
people,” that Pushkin emphasizes. Set in Russia in a period of political and social
chaos on the brink of the 17th century, its theme is the tragic guilt and inexorable
fate of a great hero—Boris Godunov, son-in-law of Malyuta Skuratov, a favourite of
Ivan the Terrible, and here presented as the murderer of Ivan’s little son, Dmitri.

The development of the action on two planes, one political and historical, the other
psychological, is masterly and is set against a background of turbulent events and
ruthless ambitions. The play owes much to Pushkin’s reading of early Russian
annals and chronicles, as well as to Shakespeare, who, as Pushkin said, was his
master in bold, free treatment of character, simplicity, and truth to nature. Although
lacking the heightened, poetic passion of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Boris excels in
the “convincingness of situation and naturalness of dialogue” at which Pushkin
aimed, sometimes using conversational prose, sometimes a five-foot iambic line of
great flexibility. The character of the pretender, the false Dmitri, is subtly and
sympathetically drawn; and the power of the people, who eventually bring him to the
throne, is so greatly emphasized that the play’s publication was delayed by
censorship. Pushkin’s ability to create psychological and dramatic unity, despite the
episodic construction, and to heighten the dramatic tension by economy of language,
detail, and characterization make this outstanding play a revolutionary event in the
history of Russian drama.

Return from exile of Aleksandr Pushkin

After the suppression of the Decembrist uprising of 1825, the new tsar Nicholas I,
aware of Pushkin’s immense popularity and knowing that he had taken no part in the
Decembrist “conspiracy,” allowed him to return to Moscow in the autumn of 1826.
During a long conversation between them, the tsar met the poet’s complaints about
censorship with a promise that in the future he himself would be Pushkin’s censor
and told him of his plans to introduce several pressing reforms from above and, in
particular, to prepare the way for liberation of the serfs. The collapse of the rising had
been a grievous experience for Pushkin, whose heart was wholly with the “guilty”
Decembrists, five of whom had been executed, while others were exiled to forced
labour in Siberia.

Pushkin saw, however, that without the support of the people, the struggle against
autocracy was doomed. He considered that the only possible way of achieving
essential reforms was from above, “on the tsar’s initiative,” as he had written in
“Derevnya.” This is the reason for his persistent interest in the age of reforms at the
beginning of the 18th century and in the figure of Peter the Great, the “tsar-
educator,” whose example he held up to the present tsar in the poem “Stansy”
(1826; “Stanzas”), in The Negro of Peter the Great, in the historical poem Poltava
(1829), and in the poem Medny vsadnik (1837; The Bronze Horseman).

In The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin poses the problem of the “little man” whose
happiness is destroyed by the great leader in pursuit of ambition. He does this by
telling a “story of St. Petersburg” set against the background of the flood of 1824,
when the river took its revenge against Peter I’s achievement in building the city. The
poem describes how the “little hero,” Yevgeny, driven mad by the drowning of his
sweetheart, wanders through the streets. Seeing the bronze statue of Peter I seated
on a rearing horse and realizing that the tsar, seen triumphing over the waves, is the
cause of his grief, Yevgeny threatens him and, in a climax of growing horror, is
pursued through the streets by the “Bronze Horseman.” The poem’s descriptive and
emotional powers give it an unforgettable impact and make it one of the greatest in
Russian literature.

After returning from exile, Pushkin found himself in an awkward and invidious
position. The tsar’s censorship proved to be even more exacting than that of the
official censors, and his personal freedom was curtailed. Not only was he put under
secret observation by the police but he was openly supervised by its chief, Count
Benckendorf. Moreover, his works of this period met with little comprehension from
the critics, and even some of his friends accused him of apostasy, forcing him to
justify his political position in the poem “Druzyam” (1828; “To My Friends”). The
anguish of his spiritual isolation at this time is reflected in a cycle of poems about the
poet and the mob (1827–30) and in the unfinished Yegipetskiye nochi (1835;
Egyptian Nights).

Yet it was during this period that Pushkin’s genius came to its fullest flowering. His
art acquired new dimensions, and almost every one of the works written between
1829 and 1836 opened a new chapter in the history of Russian literature. He spent
the autumn of 1830 at his family’s Nizhny Novgorod estate, Boldino, and these
months are the most remarkable in the whole of his artistic career. During them he
wrote the four so-called “little tragedies”—Skupoy rytsar (1836; The Covetous
Knight), Motsart i Salyeri (1831; Mozart and Salieri), Kamenny gost (1839; The
Stone Guest), and Pir vo vremya chumy (1832; Feast in Time of the Plague)—the
five short prose tales collected as Povesti pokoynogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina
(1831; Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin); the comic poem of everyday lower-
class life Domik v Kolomne (1833; “A Small House in Kolomna”); and many lyrics in
widely differing styles, as well as several critical and polemical articles, rough drafts,
and sketches.

Among Pushkin’s most characteristic features were his wide knowledge of world
literature, as seen in his interest in such English writers as William Shakespeare,
Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and the Lake poets; his “universal sensibility”; and his
ability to re-create the spirit of different races at different historical epochs without
ever losing his own individuality. This is particularly marked in the “little tragedies,”
which are concerned with an analysis of the “evil passions” and, like the short story
Pikovaya Dama (1834; The Queen of Spades), exerted a direct influence on the
subject matter and techniques of the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Last years
In 1831 Pushkin married Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharova and settled in St.
Petersburg. Once more he took up government service and was commissioned to
write a history of Peter the Great. Three years later he received the rank of
Kammerjunker (gentleman of the emperor’s bedchamber), partly because the tsar
wished Natalya to have the entrée to court functions. The social life at court, which
he was now obliged to lead and which his wife enjoyed, was ill-suited to creative
work, but he stubbornly continued to write. Without abandoning poetry altogether, he
turned increasingly to prose. Alongside the theme of Peter the Great, the motif of a
popular peasant rising acquired growing importance in his work, as is shown by the
unfinished satirical Istoriya sela Goryukhina (1837; The History of the Village of
Goryukhino), the unfinished novel Dubrovsky (1841), Stseny iz rytsarskikh vremen
(1837; Scenes from the Age of Chivalry), and finally, the most important of his prose
works, the historical novel of the Pugachov Rebellion, Kapitanskaya dochka (1836;
The Captain’s Daughter), which had been preceded by a historical study of the
rebellion, Istoriya Pugachova (1834; “A History of Pugachov”).

Meanwhile, both in his domestic affairs and in his official duties, his life was
becoming more intolerable. In court circles he was regarded with mounting suspicion
and resentment, and his repeated petitions to be allowed to resign his post, retire to
the country, and devote himself entirely to literature were all rejected. Finally, in
1837, Pushkin was mortally wounded defending his wife’s honour in a duel forced on
him by influential enemies.

Legacy

Pushkin’s use of the Russian language is astonishing in its simplicity and profundity
and formed the basis of the style of novelists Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, and
Leo Tolstoy. His novel in verse, Yevgeny Onegin, was the first Russian work to take
contemporary society as its subject and pointed the way to the Russian realistic
novel of the mid-19th century. Even during his lifetime Pushkin’s importance as a
great national poet had been recognized by Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, his
successor and pupil, and it was his younger contemporary, the great Russian critic
Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky, who produced the fullest and deepest critical study
of Pushkin’s work, which still retains much of its relevance. To the later classical
writers of the 19th century, Pushkin, the creator of the Russian literary language,
stood as the cornerstone of Russian literature, in Maxim Gorky’s words, “the
beginning of beginnings.” Pushkin has thus become an inseparable part of the
literary world of the Russian people. He also exerted a profound influence on other
aspects of Russian culture, most notably in opera.

Pushkin’s work—with its nobility of conception and its emphasis on civic

responsibility (shown in his command to the poet-prophet to “fire the hearts of men
with his words”), its life-affirming vigour, and its confidence in the triumph of reason
over prejudice, of human charity over slavery and oppression—has struck an echo
all over the world. Translated into all the major languages, his works are regarded
both as expressing most completely Russian national consciousness and as
transcending national barriers.
 Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin born Katherine O'Flaherty; February 8, 1850 – August 22, 1904) was an
American author of short stories and novels based in Louisiana. She is considered
by scholars to have been a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of
Southern or Catholic background, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, and is one of the most
frequently read and recognized writers of Louisiana Creole heritage.

Of maternal French and paternal Irish descent, Chopin was born in St. Louis,
Missouri. She married and moved with her husband to New Orleans. They later lived
in the country in Cloutierville, Louisiana. From 1892 to 1895, Chopin wrote short
stories for both children and adults that were published in such national magazines
as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth's Companion.
Her stories aroused controversy because of her subjects and her approach; they
were condemned as immoral by some critics.

Her major works were two short story collections: Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in
Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included "Désirée's Baby" (1893), a tale of
miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana, "The Story of an Hour" (1894), and "The
Storm" (1898).[6] "The Storm" is a sequel to "At the Cadian Ball," which appeared in
her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk.

Chopin also wrote two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), which are
set in New Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively. The characters in her stories are
usually residents of Louisiana, and many are Creoles of various ethnic or racial
backgrounds. Many of her works are set in Natchitoches in north-central Louisiana, a
region where she lived.

Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading
writers of her time.[8] In 1915, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, "some of [Chopin's] work is
equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. [She
displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting
almost to genius.

Life

Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, Thomas
O’Flaherty, was a successful businessman who had immigrated to the United States
from Galway, Ireland. Her mother, Eliza Faris, was his second wife, and a well-
connected member of the ethnic French community in St. Louis as the daughter of
Athénaïse Charleville, a Louisiana creole of French Canadian descent. Some of
Chopin's ancestors were among the first European (French) inhabitants of Dauphin
Island, Alabama.

Kate was the third of five children, but her sisters died in infancy and her half-
brothers (from her father's first marriage) died in their early twenties. They were
reared Roman Catholic, in the French and Irish traditions. She also became an avid
reader of fairy tales, poetry, and religious allegories, as well as classic and
contemporary novels. She graduated from Sacred Heart Convent in St. Louis in
1868.

At the age of five, she was sent to Sacred Heart Academy where she learned how to
handle her own money and make her own decisions, as the nuns intended. Upon her
father's death, she was brought back home to live with her grandmother and great-
grandmother, comprising three generations of women who were widowed young and
never remarried. For two years she was tutored at home by her great-grandmother,
Victoria (or Victoire) Charleville, who taught French, music, history, gossip and the
need to look on life without fear. After those two years, Kate went back to Sacred
Heart Academy, which her best friend and neighbor, Kitty Garesche, also attended,
and where her mentor, Mary O’Meara, taught. A gifted writer of both verse and
prose, O'Meara guided her student to write regularly, to judge herself critically, and to
conduct herself valiantly. Nine days after Kate and Kitty's first communions in May
1861, the Civil War came to St. Louis. During the war, Kate's half-brother died of
fever, and her great-grandmother died as well. After the war ended, Kitty and her
family were banished from St. Louis for supporting the Confederacy.

Chopin house in Cloutierville

In St. Louis, Missouri, on June 8, 1870, she married Oscar Chopin and settled with
him in his home town of New Orleans, an important port. The Chopins had six
children between 1871 and 1879: in order of birth, Jean Baptiste, Oscar Charles,
George Francis, Frederick, Felix Andrew, and Lélia (baptized Marie Laïza).[13] In
1879, Oscar Chopin's cotton brokerage failed.

The family left the city and moved to Cloutierville, in south Natchitoches Parish, to
manage several small plantations and a general store. They became active in the
community, where Chopin found, in the local creole culture, much material for her
future writing.

When Oscar Chopin died in 1882, he left Kate $42,000 in debt (approximately 1.2
million dollars in 2021). According to Emily Toth, "for a while the widow Kate ran his
[Oscar's] business and flirted outrageously with local men; (she even engaged in a
relationship with a married farmer)."[14] Although Chopin worked to make her late
husband's plantation and general store succeed, two years later she sold her
Louisiana business.

Her mother had implored her to move back to St. Louis, which Chopin did, with her
mother's financial support. Her children gradually settled into life in the bustling city,
but Chopin's mother died the following year.

Chopin struggled with depression after the successive loss of her husband, her
business, and her mother. Chopin's obstetrician and family friend, Dr. Frederick
Kolbenheyer, suggested that she start writing, believing that it could be therapeutic
for her. He understood also that writing could be a focus for her extraordinary
energy, as well as a source of income.

By the early 1890s, Chopin's short stories, articles, and translations were appearing
in periodicals, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, and in various
literary magazines. During a period of considerable publishing of folk tales, works in
dialect, and other elements of Southern folk life, she was considered a regional
writer who provided local color. Her strong literary qualities were overlooked.

In 1899, her second novel, The Awakening, was published. Some newspaper critics
reviewed the novel favorably.[18] However, the critical reception was largely
negative. The critics considered the behavior of the novel's characters, especially the
women - and Chopin's general treatment of female sexuality, motherhood, and
marital infidelity - to be in conflict with prevailing standards of moral conduct and
therefore offensive.

This novel, her best-known work, is the story of a woman trapped within the confines
of an oppressive society. Out of print for several decades, it was rediscovered in the
1970s, when there was a wave of new studies and appreciation of women's writings.
The novel has since been reprinted and is widely available. It has been critically
acclaimed for its writing quality and importance as an early feminist work of the
South.

Critics suggest that such works as The Awakening were scandalous and therefore
not socially embraced. Chopin herself was deeply discouraged by the lack of
acceptance, but she continued to write, turning to the short story.[17] In 1900, she
wrote "The Gentleman from New Orleans." That same year she was listed in the first
edition of Marquis Who's Who. However, she never made much money from her
writing, getting by on the investments she made locally in Louisiana and St. Louis of
the inheritance from her mother's estate.

Kate Chopin's grave in Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri While visiting the St.
Louis World's Fair on August 20, 1904, Chopin suffered a brain hemorrhage. She
died two days later, at the age of 54. She was interred in Calvary Cemetery in St.
Louis.
 Adaeze Ibechukwu
Adaeze Ibechukwu was born in Lagos, Nigeria. She has been a writer and a story
teller since she was nine. She runs her own website www.adaezewrites.com where
she publishes daily story series and has received a number of awards with her most
recent being the Short Story (series) Writer of the Year at the prestigious Nigerian
Writers Awards. She is a published author of children's books, which include
'Chidiebere the brave boy and The Insatiable husband'. She introduces strong
characters in her stories and loves to create suspense. Writing means everything to
her and she is always so excited to share a bit of herself with her readers through
her writing.
 Chika Unigwe
Chika Unigwe was born on 12 June, 1974 in Enugu, Nigeria, is a Nigerian-born Igbo
author. Discover Chika Unigwe's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats,
Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates. Learn How rich is She in this year and
how She spends money? Also learn how She earned most of networth at the age of
46 years old?
In 2016, Unigwe was appointed as the Bonderman Professor of Creative Writing at
Brown University in Rhode Island.
In September 2016, Unigwe's novel Night Dancer (published in 2012) was shortlisted
for the NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature; the winner was subsequently announced
as Abubakar Adam Ibrahim.
Unigwe sits on the Board of Trustees of pan-African literary initiative Writivism, and
set up the Awele Creative Trust in Nigeria to support young writers. In April 2014,
she was selected for the Festival's Africa39 list of 39 sub-Saharan African writers
aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in Africa.
In autumn 2014 the University of Tübingen welcomed Unigwe and her fellow authors
Taiye Selasi, Priya Basil and Nii Ayikwei Parkes to the year's Writers' Lectureship, all
of them authors representing what Selasi calls Afropolitan literature.
In 2014, Unigwe published Black Messiah, a novel about Olaudah Equiano.
Unigwe formerly lived in Turnhout, Belgium, with her husband and four children. She
emigrated to the United States in 2013. She writes in English and Dutch.
Her first novel, De Feniks, was published in Dutch in September 2005 and is the first
book of fiction written by a Flemish author of African origin. Her second novel, Fata
Morgana, was published in Dutch in 2008 and subsequently released in English as
On Black Sisters' Street. On Black Sisters' Street is about African prostitutes living
and working in Belgium, and was published to acclaim in London in 2009 by
Jonathan Cape. On Black Sisters' Street won the 2012 Nigeria Prize for Literature;
valued at $100,000 it is Africa's largest literary prize. Also in 2012, Zukiswa Wanner
in The Guardian rated her as one of the "top five African writers". Still in 2012, she
floored Olushola Olugbesan's Only A Canvass and Ngozi Achebe's Onaedo: The
Blacksmith's Daughter to clinch the coveted $100,000 Nigeria Liquified Natural Gas
NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature, becoming the second Diaspora writer to win the
prize.
She won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition and a Commonwealth Short Story
Competition award. In 2004, she was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African
Writing. In the same year, her short story made the top 10 of the Million Writers
Award for best online fiction. In 2005, she won third prize in the Equiano Fiction
Contest.
Chika Nina Unigwe (born 12 June 1974) is a Nigerian-born Igbo author who writes in
English and Dutch. In April 2014 she was selected for the Hay Festival's Africa39 list
of 39 sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define
future trends in African literature. Previously based in Belgium, she now lives in the
United States.
Chika Unigwe was born in 1974 in Enugu, Nigeria. She is the sixth of seven children.
She attended Secondary school at Federal Government Girls' college in Abuja and
obtained a BA in English in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1995. In 1996, Chika
earned an MA in English from the KU Leuven (KUL, the Catholic University of
Leuven). She has a Ph.D in Literature (2004) from the University of Leiden in the
Netherlands. Her debut novel, De Feniks, was published in 2005 by Meulenhoff and
Manteau (of Amsterdam and Antwerp, respectively) and was shortlisted for the
Vrouw en Kultuur debuutprijs for the best first novel by a female writer. She is also
the author of two children's books published by Macmillan, London.
 Ay

Ayi Kwei Armah

Ayi Kwei Armah, (born 1939, Takoradi, Gold Coast [now Ghana]), Ghanaian novelist
whose work deals with corruption and materialism in contemporary Africa.
Armah was educated in local mission schools and at Achimota College before going
to the United States in 1959 to complete his secondary education at Groton School
and his bachelor’s degree at Harvard University. He thereafter worked as a
scriptwriter, translator, and English teacher in Paris, Tanzania, Lesotho, Senegal,
and the United States, among other places.
In his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Armah showed his
deep concern for greed and political corruption in a newly independent African
nation. In his second novel, Fragments (1970), a young Ghanaian returns home after
living in the United States and is disillusioned by the Western-inspired materialism
and moral decay that he sees around him. The theme of return and disillusionment
continued in Why Are We So Blest? (1971), but with a somewhat wider scope. In
Two Thousand Seasons (1973) Armah borrowed language from the African dirge
and praise song to produce a chronicle of the African past, which is portrayed as
having a certain romantic perfection before being destroyed by Arab and European
despoilers. The Healers (1979), Armah’s fifth novel, explores a young man’s quest to
become a practitioner of traditional medicine while the Asante empire falls to British
forces. Armah took an extended break from publishing before releasing Osiris Rising
in 1995. The novel examines the struggles of independent Africa and the lingering
effects of colonialism. His later books included KMT: In the House of Life (2002) and
The Resolutionaries (2013).
 Ahdaf Soueif
Ahdaf Soueif is a novelist and political and cultural commentator.

Born in Cairo, she was raised and educated in both England and Egypt. Her debut
novel, In the Eye of the Sun, was published in 1993.

She is best known for her second novel, The Map of Love, which was shortlisted for
the Booker Prize in 1999. It has since been translated into 21 languages and sold
over a million copies.

In 2008 she initiated the first Palestine Festival of Literature - an annual cultural
festival that tours around Palestine.

Her debut novel, In the Eye of the Sun (1993), set in Egypt and England, recounts
the maturing of Asya, a beautiful Egyptian who, by her own admission, "feels more
comfortable with art than with life." Soueif's second novel, The Map of Love (1999),
was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize,[3] has been translated into 21 languages
and sold more than a million copies. She has also published two works of short
stories, Aisha (1983) and Sandpiper (1996) – a selection from which was combined
in the collection I Think Of You in 2007, and Stories Of Ourselves in 2010.

Soueif writes primarily in English,but her Arabic-speaking readers say they can hear
the Arabic through the English.[5] She translated Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah
(with a foreword by Edward Said) from Arabic into English.

Along with her readings of Egyptian history and politics, Soueif also writes about
Palestinians in her fiction and non-fiction. A shorter version of "Under the Gun: A
Palestinian Journey" was originally published in The Guardian and then printed in full
in Soueif's recent collection of essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common
Ground (2004) and she wrote the introduction to the NYRB's reprint of Jean Genet's
Prisoner of Love.
In 2008 she initiated the first Palestine Festival of Literature,of which she is the
Founding Chair.

Soueif is also a cultural and political commentator for the Guardian newspaper and
she has been reporting on the Egyptian revolution.In January 2012 she published
Cairo: My City, Our Revolution – a personal account of the first year of the Egyptian
revolution. She initially supported the overthrow of democracy and its replacement
with the government of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.Her sister Laila Soueif, and Laila's
children, Alaa Abd El-Fatah and Mona Seif, are also activists.

She was married to Ian Hamilton, with whom she had two sons: Omar Robert
Hamilton and Ismail Richard Hamilton.

She was appointed a Trustee of the British Museum in 2012 and re-appointed for a
further 4 years in 2016.However she resigned in 2019 complaining about BP's
sponsorship, the reluctance to re-hire workers transferred to Carillion and lack of
engagement with repatriating artworks.

In June 2013, Soueif and numerous other celebrities appeared in a video showing
support for Chelsea Manning.
 William Tyler Page
William Tyler Page (1868 – October 19, 1942) was an American public servant. He
worked on the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. for 61 years, first as a page
boy and later as a clerk of the United States House of Representatives. He was the
author of American Creed and Story of Nation’s Capital.
Page was born in 1868 in Frederick, Frederick County, Maryland. He was the great-
great-grandson of Carter Braxton, (1736–1797), a member of the House of
Burgesses of the Province of Virginia.He was also a descendant of President John
Tyler.
Page began working "twelve hours a day in a printing shop and a paper-bag factory"
at the age of 10.
Page began working as a page boy for the United States House of Representatives
in Washington, D.C. on December 19, 1881, and he became a clerk in 1919.[3] Page
worked for the Capitol for 61 years in total.[3]
In 1917, at 49, Page wrote "The American's Creed," as a submission to a nationwide
patriotic contest suggested by Henry Sterling Chapin, of New York, which was
inspired by a fervor at the beginning of the American entry into the First World War.
The goal was to have a concise but complete statement of American political faith.
Inspired by thoughts on his way home from church in May 1917, having just recited
the Apostles' Creed used in most Christian churches as a statement of belief, Page
drew on a wide variety of historical documents and speeches, including the
Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the US Constitution, Abraham
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, a speech made by Daniel Webster, and text from
Edward Everett Hale's 1863 patriotic short story of a military officer condemned to
exile, "The Man Without a Country." He proceeded to craft a simple but moving
expression of American patriotism.
His submission was chosen in March 1918 over more than 3000 other entries. On
April 3, 1918,[4] it was accepted by the House Speaker of the United States House
of Representatives, and the US Commissioner of Education (then part of the US
Department of the Interior) on behalf of the American people, according to the
"Congressional Record", No. 102, April 13, 1918. A prize of $1000 was also awarded
by Mayor James H. Preston on behalf of the City of Baltimore, which was the
birthplace of the National Anthem. Page used it to purchase Liberty Bonds for the
war effort and donated them to his church. Today, it also often comprises part of the
naturalization ceremony to swear in new American citizens, along with other patriotic
symbols, such as the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag and the singing of
various songs and anthems.
 James Henry Leigh Hunt

James Henry Leigh Hunt (19 October 1784 – 28 August 1859), best known as Leigh
Hunt, was an English critic, essayist and poet.
Hunt co-founded The Examiner, a leading intellectual journal expounding radical
principles. He was the centre of the Hampstead-based group that included William
Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, known as the 'Hunt circle'. Hunt also introduced John
Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson to the
public.
Hunt's presence at Shelley's funeral on the beach near Viareggio was immortalised
in the painting by Louis Édouard Fournier, although in reality Hunt did not stand by
the pyre, as portrayed. Hunt inspired aspects of the Harold Skimpole character in
Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House.
James Henry Leigh Hunt was born 19 October 1784, at Southgate, London, where
his parents had settled after leaving the United States. His father, Isaac, a lawyer
from Philadelphia, and his mother, Mary Shewell, a merchant's daughter and a
devout Quaker, had been forced to come to Britain because of their Loyalist
sympathies during the American War of Independence.
Once in England, Isaac Hunt became a popular preacher but was unsuccessful in
obtaining a permanent living. He was then employed by James Brydges, 3rd Duke of
Chandos, as tutor to his nephew, James Henry Leigh for whom Isaac named his
son.
Leigh Hunt was educated at Christ's Hospital in London from 1791 to 1799, a period
that Hunt described in his autobiography. Thomas Barnes was a school friend. One
of the boarding houses at Christ's Hospital is named after Hunt.

As a boy, Hunt was an admirer of Thomas Gray and William Collins, writing many
verses in imitation of them. A speech impediment, later cured, prevented Hunt from
going to university. "For some time after I left school," he says, "I did nothing but visit
my school-fellows, haunt the book-stalls and write verses."
Hunt's first poems were published in 1801 under the title of Juvenilia, introducing him
into British literary and theatrical society. He began to write for the newspapers and
published in 1807 a volume of theatre criticism, and a series of Classic Tales with
critical essays on the authors.
Hunt's early essays were published by Edward Quin, editor and owner of The
Traveller.
 Giosuè Carducci

Giosuè Carducci, (born July 27, 1835, Val di Castello, near Lucca, Tuscany [now
Italy]—died Feb. 16, 1907, Bologna, Italy), Italian poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1906, and one of the most influential literary figures of his age.
The son of a republican country doctor, Carducci spent his childhood in the wild
Maremma region of southern Tuscany. He studied at the University of Pisa and in
1860 became professor of Italian literature at Bologna, where he lectured for more
than 40 years. He was made a senator for life in 1890 and was revered by the
Italians as a national poet.
In his youth Carducci was the centre of a group of young men determined to
overthrow the prevailing Romanticism and to return to classical models. Giuseppe
Parini, Vincenzo Monti, and Ugo Foscolo were his masters, and their influence is
evident in his first books of poems (Rime, 1857; later collected in Juvenilia [1880]
and Levia gravia [1868; “Light and Serious Poems”]). He showed both his great
power as a poet and the strength of his republican, anticlerical feeling in his hymn to
Satan, “Inno a Satana” (1863), and in his Giambi ed epodi (1867–69; “Iambics and
Epodes”), inspired chiefly by contemporary politics. Its violent, bitter language
reflects the virile, rebellious character of the poet.
 Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo, in full Victor-Marie Hugo, (born February 26, 1802, Besançon, France—
died May 22, 1885, Paris), poet, novelist, and dramatist who was the most important
of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country’s
greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as Notre-Dame de Paris
(1831) and Les Misérables (1862).
Victor was the third son of Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo, a major and, later,
general in Napoleon’s army. His childhood was coloured by his father’s constant
traveling with the imperial army and by the disagreements that soon alienated his
parents from one another. His mother’s royalism and his father’s loyalty to
successive governments—the Convention, the Empire, the Restoration—reflected
their deeper incompatibility. It was a chaotic time for Victor, continually uprooted from
Paris to set out for Elba or Naples or Madrid, yet always returning to Paris with his
mother, whose royalist opinions he initially adopted. The fall of the empire gave him,
from 1815 to 1818, a time of uninterrupted study at the Pension Cordier and the
Lycée Louis-le-Grand, after which he graduated from the law faculty at Paris, where
his studies seem to have been purposeless and irregular. Memories of his life as a
poor student later inspired the figure of Marius in his novel Les Misérables.
From 1816, at least, Hugo had conceived ambitions other than the law. He was
already filling notebooks with verses, translations—particularly from Virgil—two
tragedies, a play, and elegies. Encouraged by his mother, Hugo founded a review,
the Conservateur Littéraire (1819–21), in which his own articles on the poets
Alphonse de Lamartine and André de Chénier stand out. His mother died in 1821,
and a year later Victor married a childhood friend, Adèle Foucher, with whom he had
five children. In that same year he published his first book of poems, Odes et
poésies diverses, whose royalist sentiments earned him a pension from Louis XVIII.
Behind Hugo’s concern for classical form and his political inspiration, it is possible to
recognize in these poems a personal voice and his own particular vein of fantasy.
 Johan Ludvig Runeberg

Johan Ludvig Runeberg (Finland Swedish: [ˈjuːhɑn ˈlʉdːviɡ ˈrʉːnebærj]; 5 February

1804 – 6 May 1877)[1] was a Finland-Swedish Lutheran priest, lyric and epic poet.
He is considered a national poet of Finland. He is the author of the lyrics to Vårt land
(Our Land, Maamme in Finnish) that became the unofficial Finnish national anthem.
Runeberg was also involved in the modernization of the Finnish Lutheran hymnal
and produced many texts for the new edition.
Runeberg was born into a Swedish-speaking family in Jakobstad, Finland, on the
shores of the Gulf of Bothnia. At the age of eight, Runeberg was sent to live with his
uncle and attend school in Oulu. Runeberg studied in the city of Vaasa, later on at
the Imperial Academy of Turku, where he befriended Johan Vilhelm Snellman and
Zacharias Topelius. His studies concentrated mainly on the classical languages of
Latin and Greek. He earned a Master of Philosophy during 1827. He served as a
tutor (1822–1826), docent at the Imperial Alexander University (1830) and teacher at
the Swedish-language Helsingfors Lyceum (1831–1836). From 1837 he lived in
Porvoo, where he served as professor of Latin literature in the Borgå gymnasium.
Finnish salon hostess Natalia Castrén (1830–1881) was a member of his cultural
circle.
 Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson, byname of Benjamin Jonson, (born June 11?, 1572, London, England
—died August 6, 1637, London), English Stuart dramatist, lyric poet, and literary
critic. He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after
William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I. Among his major plays are the
comedies Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone (1605), Epicoene; or, The
Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614).
Jonson was born two months after his father died. His stepfather was a bricklayer,
but by good fortune the boy was able to attend Westminster School. His formal
education, however, ended early, and he at first followed his stepfather’s trade, then
fought with some success with the English forces in the Netherlands. On returning to
England, he became an actor and playwright, experiencing the life of a strolling
player. He apparently played the leading role of Hieronimo in Thomas Kyd’s The
Spanish Tragedy. By 1597 he was writing plays for Philip Henslowe, the leading
impresario for the public theatre. With one exception (The Case Is Altered), these
early plays are known, if at all, only by their titles. Jonson apparently wrote tragedies
as well as comedies in these years, but his extant writings include only two
tragedies, Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611).
The year 1598 marked an abrupt change in Jonson’s status, when Every Man in His
Humour was successfully presented by the Lord Chamberlain’s theatrical company
(a legend has it that Shakespeare himself recommended it to them), and his
reputation was established. In this play Jonson tried to bring the spirit and manner of
Latin comedy to the English popular stage by presenting the story of a young man
with an eye for a girl, who has difficulty with a phlegmatic father, is dependent on a
clever servant, and is ultimately successful—in fact, the standard plot of the Latin
dramatist Plautus. But at the same time Jonson sought to embody in four of the main
characters the four “humours” of medieval and Renaissance medicine—choler,
melancholy, phlegm, and blood—which were thought to determine human physical
and mental makeup.
That same year Jonson killed a fellow actor in a duel, and, though he escaped
capital punishment by pleading “benefit of clergy” (the ability to read from the Latin
Bible), he could not escape branding. During his brief imprisonment over the affair he
became a Roman Catholic.
 Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello (Dec. 10, 1936, Rome), Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story
writer, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention of the “theatre
within the theatre” in the play Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921; Six Characters
in Search of an Author), he became an important innovator in modern drama.
Pirandello was the son of a sulfur merchant who wanted him to enter commerce.
Pirandello, however, was not interested in business; he wanted to study. He first
went to Palermo, the capital of Sicily, and, in 1887, to the University of Rome. After a
quarrel with the professor of classics there, he went in 1888 to the University of
Bonn, Ger., where in 1891 he gained his doctorate in philology for a thesis on the
dialect of Agrigento.
In 1894 his father arranged his marriage to Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of a
business associate, a wealthy sulfur merchant. This marriage gave him financial
independence, allowing him to live in Rome and to write. He had already published
an early volume of verse, Mal giocondo (1889), which paid tribute to the poetic
fashions set by Giosuè Carducci. This was followed by other volumes of verse,
including Pasqua di Gea (1891; dedicated to Jenny Schulz-Lander, the love he had
left behind in Bonn) and a translation of J.W. von Goethe’s Roman Elegies (1896;
Elegie romane). But his first significant works were short stories, which at first he
contributed to periodicals without payment.
In 1903 a landslide shut down the sulfur mine in which his wife’s and his father’s
capital was invested. Suddenly poor, Pirandello was forced to earn his living not only
by writing but also by teaching Italian at a teacher’s college in Rome. As a further
result of the financial disaster, his wife developed a persecution mania, which
manifested itself in a frenzied jealousy of her husband. His torment ended only with
her removal to a sanatorium in 1919 (she died in 1959). It was this bitter experience
that finally determined the theme of his most characteristic work, already perceptible
in his early short stories—the exploration of the tightly closed world of the forever
changeable human personality.
Nikolay Alekseyevich Nekrasov

Nikolay Alekseyevich Nekrasov, (born December 10 [November 28, Old Style],

1821, Nemirov, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died January 8, 1878 [December 27,
1877], St. Petersburg, Russia), Russian poet and journalist whose work centred on
the theme of compassion for the sufferings of the peasantry. Nekrasov also sought
to express the racy charm and vitality of peasant life in his adaptations of folk songs
and poems for children.
Nekrasov studied at St. Petersburg University, but his father’s refusal to help him
forced him into literary and theatrical hack work at an early age. His first book of
poetry was published in 1840. An able businessman, he published and edited literary
miscellanies and in 1846 bought from Pyotr Pletnev the magazine Sovremennik
(“The Contemporary”), which had declined after the death of its founder, Aleksandr
Pushkin. Nekrasov managed to transform it into a major literary journal and a paying
concern, despite constant harassment by the censors. Both Ivan Turgenev and Leo
Tolstoy published their early works in Sovremennik, but after 1856, influenced by its
subeditor, Nikolay Chernyshevski, it began to develop into an organ of militant
radicalism. It was suppressed in 1866, after the first attempt to assassinate
Alexander II. In 1868 Nekrasov, with Mikhail Saltykov (Shchedrin), took over
Otechestvenniye zapiski (“Notes of the Fatherland”), remaining its editor and
publisher until his death.
Nekrasov’s work is uneven through its lack of craftsmanship and polish and a
tendency to sentimentalize his subjects, but his major poems have lasting power and
originality of expression. Moroz krasny-nos (1863; “Red-Nosed Frost,” in Poems,
1929) gives a vivid picture of a brave and sympathetic peasant woman, and his
large-scale narrative poem, Komu na Rusi zhit khorosho? (1879; Who Can Be
Happy and Free in Russia?, 1917), shows to the full his gift for vigorous realistic
satire.
 William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth, (born April 7, 1770, Cockermouth, Cumberland, England—died

April 23, 1850, Rydal Mount, Westmorland), English poet whose Lyrical Ballads
(1798), written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic
movement.
Wordsworth was born in the Lake District of northern England, the second of five
children of a modestly prosperous estate manager. He lost his mother when he was
7 and his father when he was 13, upon which the orphan boys were sent off by
guardian uncles to a grammar school at Hawkshead, a village in the heart of the
Lake District. At Hawkshead Wordsworth received an excellent education in classics,
literature, and mathematics, but the chief advantage to him there was the chance to
indulge in the boyhood pleasures of living and playing in the outdoors. The natural
scenery of the English lakes could terrify as well as nurture, as Wordsworth would
later testify in the line “I grew up fostered alike by beauty and by fear,” but its
generally benign aspect gave the growing boy the confidence he articulated in one of
his first important poems, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey…,”
namely, “that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”
Wordsworth moved on in 1787 to St. John’s College, Cambridge. Repelled by the
competitive pressures there, he elected to idle his way through the university,
persuaded that he “was not for that hour, nor for that place.” The most important
thing he did in his college years was to devote his summer vacation in 1790 to a long
walking tour through revolutionary France. There he was caught up in the passionate
enthusiasm that followed the fall of the Bastille, and became an ardent republican
sympathizer. Upon taking his Cambridge degree—an undistinguished “pass”—he
returned in 1791 to France, where he formed a passionate attachment to a
Frenchwoman, Annette Vallon. But before their child was born in December 1792,
Wordsworth had to return to England and was cut off there by the outbreak of war
between England and France. He was not to see his daughter Caroline until she was
nine.
The three or four years that followed his return to England were the darkest of
Wordsworth’s life. Unprepared for any profession, rootless, virtually penniless,
bitterly hostile to his own country’s opposition to the French, he lived in London in the
company of radicals like William Godwin and learned to feel a profound sympathy for
the abandoned mothers, beggars, children, vagrants, and victims of England’s wars
who began to march through the sombre poems he began writing at this time. This
dark period ended in 1795, when a friend’s legacy made possible Wordsworth’s
reunion with his beloved sister Dorothy—the two were never again to live apart—and
their move in 1797 to Alfoxden House, near Bristol.
 Matthias Claudius
Matthias Claudius, (born Aug. 15, 1740, Reinfeld, Holstein—died Jan. 21, 1815,
Hamburg), German poet, most notable for Der Mond ist aufgegangen (“The Moon
Has Risen”) and editor of the journal Der Wandsbecker Bothe.
After studying at Jena, Claudius held a series of editorial and minor official positions
in Copenhagen and Darmstadt until in 1788 he acquired a sinecure in the Schleswig-
Holstein bank. He edited the Wandsbecker Bothe (1771–75), popular not only with a
general readership, for whose enlightenment it was designed, but also with the most
important literary men of the time. Among the journal’s contributors were the
philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, the poet Friedrich Klopstock, and the critic
and dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the three of whom, with Claudius, formed a
circle that fought against the prevailing rationalist and Classical spirit and sought to
preserve a natural and Christian atmosphere in literature. Claudius’ own poems
(e.g., “Der Tod und das Mädchen”) have a naive, childlike, and devoutly Christian
quality.