Makar's Dream and Other Stories

The writings of Vladimir Korolenko have been likened to “a fresh breeze blowing through the heavy air of a hospital.” The hospital is the pessimistic literature of the modern Russian intellectuals; the fresh breeze is the voice of the simple-hearted children of “Mother Russia.” These are for the most part tillers of the soil and conquerors of waste places; peasants, pioneers, and Siberian exiles; they often belong to the great class of “the insulted and the injured”: they suffer untold hardships, but their heads are unbowed and their hearts are full of courage and the desire for justice. Among them the great writer’s early life was spent.

Vladimir Korolenko was born on June 15th, 1853, in Zhitomir, a small town in Southwestern or Little Russia. On his father’s side he came of an old Cossack family, his mother was the daughter of a Polish landowner of Zhitomir. The boy’s early life was spent amidst picturesque surroundings; he grew up among the Poles, Jews, and light-hearted, dark-eyed peasants that make up the population of Little Russia, and he never lost the poetic love of nature and the wholesome sense of humour that were nurtured in him under those warm, bright skies. In his story entitled “In Bad Company” he has vividly described the romantic little town that was the home of his childhood. The stern but just judge of that tale is more or less the prototype of his own father. The elder Korolenko was distinguished for an impeccable honesty of practice rare in an official of those times; consequently, when he died in 1870, he left his widow and five children without the slightest means of support. Thanks, however, to the energy of his heroic mother, Vladimir was enabled at seventeen to enter the School of Technology in Petrograd.

Then followed three years of struggle to combine his schooling with the necessity for earning a living, during which Korolenko himself says that he does not know how he managed to escape starvation. Even a cheap dinner of eighteen copecks or nine cents was such a luxury to him in those days that he only treated himself to it six or seven times during the course of one whole year.

In 1874 the young student went to Moscow with ten hard-earned roubles in his pocket and entered the Petrovski Academy, but he was soon expelled from that seat of learning for presenting a petition from his fellow-students to the Director of the College. He returned to Petrograd where his family were now living, and he and his brother made a desperate attempt to support themselves and their brothers and sisters by proof-reading. The future author began sending articles to the newspapers and magazines, and it was then that occurred the first of the series of arrests to which he was subjected for what were considered his advanced social doctrines. He was sent first to Kronstadt for a year and then to Viatka; thence he travelled to Perm, and from Perm to Tomsk; at last he was finally exiled to the distant eastern Siberian province of Yakutsk.

There he spent nearly six years, the most valuable, to him, of his whole life. The vast forest that clothes those far northeastern marshes, grand, gloomy, and held forever in the grip of a deadly cold, made an indelible impression on the imagination of the young artist. He was profoundly moved by the sorrows of the half-savage pioneers inhabiting its trackless solitudes, by the indomitable spirit of his fellow-exiles, and by the adventurous life of the “brodiagi” or wanderers, convicts escaped from prison who return secretly on foot to their “Mother Russia” across the whole breadth of the Siberian continent.