Bashkin, Vasily Vasilyevich

Vasily Bashkin was born in Petersburg , in a merchant family; Educated at the St. Petersburg Commercial School, after graduation he entered the Forestry Institute, where he stayed for 2 years. Bashkin began to study literature very early and in the last grade of the school he already published poems and short stories. Most of all, Bashkin collaborated in the Journal for All , the editors of Viktor Mirolyubov ; at the same time, his participation in the newspaper Son of the Fatherland , as a reporter; Recently, he published quite a lot in the Russian Wealth , and put his stories in almanacs (“Earth” and others).

Throughout his short life, Vasily Bashkin was in dire need and suffered from a consuming illness - consumption . Both the need and the illness intensified when he, a year before his death, married.

Bashkin left three volumes of short stories, of which the last came out after his death (the first and third volumes in the Public Benefit edition, in 1909 and 1910 , and the second in the Link publication, 1910), and a small volume of poems (edition Business ").

There is a little-known lifetime collection of Bashkin's poems printed by the Maria Malykh Library in 1905.

Both stories and poems reveal in him the nature of the lyrics; but stories are stronger and brighter than poems. In the manner of writing Vasily Bashkin, he can be counted as a Chekhov school, but he himself was more inclined towards newer methods of creativity; innovation was not always possible for him, but still stories with a “modernist” color, for example, “Limes rustled,” are among the most mature and artistically completed. This story is in many ways close to the most famous of his poem, which became the urban romance “Pines” (“Gloomy pines rustle under the window ...”).

Bashkin's literary talent was not great, but was distinguished by originality and charm. Silent elegiac thoughtfulness and attentive humane treatment of a person are a feature of him as a writer.

Vasily Bashkin’s early stories: “The Danube Waves”, “Moskalevs” , etc., are mainly of a household nature, while the subsequent ones are more of a psychological interest. In the last stories, for example, “The Last Days of Repnikov,” and “The White Death,” with a terrible realism and consistency, the sensation of impending death is depicted; they make a heavy impression. But Bashkin was far from being a pessimist. His hero, the author's alter ego, quite fully expressed the author's basic feeling for life: “One of my colleagues in all of his things tried to show that life was frightening, not death. In my opinion this is a profound delusion. If there is something terrible in a sweet and loving life, it is her immediate neighborhood with death "... When a pessimistic colleague asked the dying Bashkin, they agreed or disagreed with him now, - the dying seriously answered him:" feel sorry for everyone. ” These own words of Bashkin perfectly characterize both himself and his gentle, vivifying muse.

Among his comrades and all those who knew Vasily Bashkin closely, he enjoyed great sympathy. In memory of Bashkin his collection “Ogni” (St. Petersburg, 1910) was published by literary peers.

• Bashkin, Vasily Vasilyevich // Great Soviet Encyclopedia : 66 tons (65 tons and 1 extra) / Ch. ed. O. Yu. Schmidt . - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia , 1926-1947.
• Memories of Mikhail Artsybashev in the collection "Fires".
• Memoirs of Victor Muizhel in “ Russian Wealth ” (1909, No. 12)