Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sollogub
Count Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sollogub was a notable Russian writer and civil servant, born on August 20, 1813, in St. Petersburg. He came from a privileged background, being the son of a powerful count and closely connected to Tsar Alexander I through his mother. Sollogub's early education was enriched by private tutors and travel, particularly to France, which influenced his literary style. He attended Derpt University from 1830 to 1834, where the German intellectual environment shaped his writing, often featuring Baltic German characters.
His literary career spanned from 1839 to 1850, during which he gained popularity with works such as "Istoriia dvukh kalosh" and "Bol'shoi svet." Sollogub's storytelling drew comparisons to prominent contemporaries like Lermontov and Gogol. After 1850, his writing style fell out of favor, leading him to explore drama, producing several comedies and vaudevilles, including "Beda ot nezhnogo serdtsa." In addition to his literary pursuits, Sollogub had a lengthy civil service career, focusing on prison reform and serving as the official historian during the Russo-Turkish War. He experienced personal challenges, including living apart from his first wife, who died in 1878, before remarrying later in life. Sollogub's contributions to Russian literature and society remain significant, illustrating the complexities of his life and work.
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Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sollogub
Fiction and Nonfiction Writer, Playwright and Poet
- Born: August 20, 1813
- Birthplace: St. Petersburg, Russia
- Died: June 17, 1882
- Place of death: Hamburg, Germany
Biography
A gifted writer, Count Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sollogub was popular for only a portion of his near forty years of literary activity. Sollogub was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on August 20, 1813, to Count Aleksandr Ivanovich Sollogub, a man of great social and political power, and to Sofia Ivanovna Arkharova, a close friend of Tsar Alexander I. Sollogub’s childhood was privileged; he had private tutors, traveled to France, and spent summers at his maternal grandparents’ estate in Pavlovsk. He studied at Derpt University, in present-day Estonia, from 1830 to 1834. The German intellectual milieu of the university would influence his prose, much of which depicts Baltic German characters.
After graduation, Sollogub became a special envoy at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He received many promotions over the course of his long, but relatively undistinguished, career. He worked in Smolensk, Vitebsk, Tver’, the Caucasus, and France. Following his work on Paris theaters and Russian prisons, which resulted in the monograph Ob organizatsii v Rossii tiurmenogo truda (on the organization of prison labor in Russia, 1866) and the essay “Tiur’my i teatry” (prisons and theaters, 1867), Sollogub was appointed head of the Moscow Prison Council (in 1870) and chairman of the Committee on Prison Improvement (in 1875). In 1877, during the Russo-Turkish War, he was elected official historian. Sollogub married Sofia Mikhailovna Viel’gorskaia in 1840; they had many children but lived apart beginning in the 1860’s. After Viel’gorskaia’s death in 1878, Sollogub married Vera Ivanovna Arkudinskaia.
Sollogub’s literary career was considerably shorter than his civil-service career. While he wrote until the end of his life, he was best known for those prose works composed from 1839 to 1850. His first short story, “Tri zhenikha” (three marriage suitors), was published in Sovremmenik (the contemporary) in 1837. Sollogub became a household name with the appearance of “Istoriia dvukh kalosh” (a story of two galoshes, 1839) in Otechestvennye zapiski (notes of the fatherland). The same journal also published his immensely popular novel Bol’shoi svet (great high society, 1840) and the first chapters of Tarantas, a critically acclaimed and formally innovative best seller when it came out in 1845. Sollogub’s provincial tales, including Aptekarsha (the druggist’s wife, 1841) and some of the short stories collected in Vchera i segodnia (yesterday and today, 1845-1846), were also esteemed by the reading public.
Scholars have discerned affinities between Sollogub’s prose and the works of Mikhail Iur’ievich Lermontov, Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol, and Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, his greater contemporaries whom he discusses at length in his unfinished work Vospominaniia (memoirs). After 1850, Sollogub’s prose was no longer fashionable; he turned to drama, writing a number of comedies and vaudevilles. One of his vaudevilles, Beda ot nezhnogo serdtsa (trouble from a tender heart, 1850), was still being performed in the late twentieth century. Among Sollogub’s accolades was his election to Vol’noe obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti (the free society of lovers of Russian literature) in 1865.