The Blind Musician

The Blind Musician

It affords me great pleasure to link my name with that of Vladimir Korolenko by writing a few words in the form of an introduction to the translation of that gifted young authors Blind Musician, which is now to appear for the first time in English. I knew Korolenko by reputation and by his work long before I made his personal acquaintance. While engaged in making an investigation of the exile system in Siberia, I met many of his banished friends and comrades; and my attention was first called by them to the series of graphic sketches of Siberian life and experience that he was then publishing in[x] Russian Thought, The Northern Messenger, the Annals of the Fatherland, and other Russian periodicals. I read them carefully, and formed from them at once a high opinion of the authors character and talent. Upon my return from Siberia in the summer of 1886, I stopped for a few days in the old Tartar town of Nizhni Novgorod on the Volga (where Mr. Korolenko was then living), for the express purpose of calling upon a writer whose life and whose work had so deeply interested me. I need not describe the impression that he made upon me further than to say, that a feeling of warm personal regard and esteem for the man was soon added to the admiration that I already had for him as a literary artist. Mr. Korolenko seems to me to represent the most liberal, the most progressive, and[xi] the most sincerely patriotic type of young Russian manhood. The influence that he has exerted, personally and by his writings, has always been on the side of liberty, humanity, and justice; and there could hardly be a more significant commentary upon the existing form of government in Russia than the fact that this talented author, before he was thirty-five years of age, had been four times banished from his home to remote parts of the empire, without even the form of a judicial trial, and had twice been sent as a political exile to Siberia. If he had been an active revolutionist like Lopatin, or even a writer upon prohibited social and political subjects like Chernishfski, his banishment to Siberia would have been more comprehensible; but he was neither one nor the other. He was removed to the province of Vlogda, and[xii] afterward to the province of Viatka, merely because the police regarded him as a neblagonadzhni (politically untrustworthy person), and then he was exiled to Siberia as a result of a stupid police blunder. When, after years of hardship and privation, he finally returned to his home, he was called upon to take the oath of allegiance to Alexander III., and to swear that he would betray every one of his friends or acquaintances whom he knew to be engaged in revolutionary or anti-Government work. No conscientious and self-respecting man could take such an oath, and Mr. Korolenko, of course, declined to do it. He was thereupon exiled by administrative process to the East-Siberian province of Yakutsk, where in a wretched Yakut ooloos he lived for three years, and where he made some of the character studies, such as The Vagrant[xiii] and Makrs Dream, that first attracted to him the attention of the Russian reading public. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 59497
Author: Korolenko, Vladimir Galaktionovich
Release Date: May 13, 2019
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Illustrator: Garrett, Edmund H. (Edmund Henry), 1853-1929
Translator: Delano, Aline, 1845-