Vladimir Korolenko

Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko was born July 27, 1853, into the family of a district judge in Zhitomir, Ukraine, Russian Empire. He studied at the St. Petersburg College of Technology, then at the Moscow Academy of Agriculture.

In 1876 he was expelled from college for his revolutionary activities, and imprisoned in Kronstadt, St. Petersburg.

In 1877-79 he was a student at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute.

In 1879 he was arrested again on false political accusations and exiled to Siberia, but returned and settled in the city of Perm.

Korolenko published his first stories in 1879, calling for social justice in the Russian Empire.

In 1881 he refused to pledge to the new Russian Tsar Alexander III and was sentenced to his second exile in Siberia, where he spent 3 years. After the Siberian exile he was allowed to settle in Nizhni Novgorod on the Volga river. There he got married and had a daughter. His impressions from his life in exile and his life in several provincial cities provided him with rich material for his writings.

His story "Makar's Dream" (1885) about the dying peasant's dream of heaven was translated and published in English in 1891, bringing him international recognition.

His masterpiece novel "The Blind Musician" (1886) was published in English in 1892, and made him the internationally renown writer.

Korolenko made a trip to United States in 1893, visiting the Chicago World Exibition. There Korolenko met recent immigrants from Russia, which gave him material for the short novel "Without a Language", a story of an uneducated Ukrainian peasant, who struggles in America without ability to speak a word in English.

After 1900 Korolenko turned from fiction to journalism.

In 1902 Korolenko together with Anton Chekhov resigned from the Russian Academy of Sciences in solidarity with Maxim Gorky. He regarded writers Nikolay Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai A. Nekrasov, and Lev Tolstoy as his most important influences. Korolenko was a human rights advocate and a prominent journalist.

His historic description of the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 was also published in English. During the Russian Revolution and the following Civil War Korolenko opposed to the bloody methods of the communist regime, and called against the terror and destruction.

He took strong public stand against the anti-Semitic Beilis trial and wrote the powerful essay "Call to the Russian People in regard to the blood libel of the Jews" (1911-13).