Evgenii Nikolaevich Chirikov

Born July 24 (Aug. 5), 1864, in Kazan; died Jan. 18,1932, in Prague. Russian writer.

The son of a member of the dvorianstvo (nobility), who had achieved noble rank through state service, Chirikov was expelled from the University of Kazan in 1887 during his fourth year of study for having taken part in revolutionary disturbances. His poems and realistic stories were first published in 1885. Such plays as Jews (1904), Ivan Mironych (1905), and Muzhiks (1906) enjoyed great success. Chirikov’s work often appeared in the Sborniki tovarishchestva “Znanie” (Collections of the Znanie Association).

In the autobiographical novel The Life of Tarkhanov (books 1–4, 1911–25) and in the short-story collections The Flowers of Memories (1912), Early Shoots (1913), and Volga Tales (1916), Chirikov dealt with childhood, with pure love, with the provincial intelligentsia, and with nature in the Russian countryside. He emigrated in 1920. Although written from an anti-Soviet point of view, Chirikov’s novel Beast from the Abyss (published 1926) truthfully portrays the moral decay of the White Army.