ALEXEY FEOFILACTOVICH

PEESEMSKY (182o-1881)  , Russian novelist, was born on his father's estate, in the province of Kostroma, on the loth/22nd of March 1820 . In his auto-biography he describes his family as belonging to the ancient Russian nobility, but his more immediate progenitors were all very poor, and unable to read or write . His grandfather ploughed the fields as a simple peasant, and his father, as Peesemsky himself said, was washed and clothed by a rich relative, and placed as a soldier in the army, from which he retired as a major after thirty years' service . During childhood Peesemsky read eagerly the translated works of Walter Scott and Victor Hugo, and later those of Shakespeare, Schiller., Goethe, Rousseau, Voltaire and George Sand . From the I facture of felt, boots and metal wares . gymnasium of Kostroma he passed through Moscow University, Pegau grew up round a monastery founded in 1o96, but does and in 1884 entered the government service as a clerk in the not appear as a town before the close of the 12th century. office of the Crown domains in his native province . Between Markets were held here and its prosperity was further enhanced 1854 and 1872, when he finally quitted the civil service, he by its position on a main road running east and west . In the occupied similar posts in St Petersburg and Moscow . His monastery, which was dissolved in 1539, a valuable chronicle early works exhibit a profound disbelief in the higher qualities was compiled, the Annales pegavienses, covering the period of humanity, and a disdain for the other sex, although he appears to have been attached to a particularly devoted and sensible wife . His first novel, Boyarstchina, was forbidden for its unflattering description of the Russian nobility . His principal novels are Tufak (" A Muff "), 185o; Teesicha doush (" A Thousand Souls "), 1862, which is considered his best work of the kind; and Vzbalomoucheneoe more (" A Troubled Sea "), giving a picture of the excited state of Russian society about the year 1862 . He also produced a comedy, Gorkaya soudbina (" A Bitter Fate "), depicting the dark sides of the Russian peasantry, which obtained for him the Ouvaroff prize of the Russian Academy .

In 1856 he was sent, together with other

literary men, to report on the ethnographical and commercial I obtained general acceptance, and has been extended by many condition of the Russian interior, his particular field of inquiry authors to include vein-rocks of similar structure and geological having been Astrakhan and the region of the Caspian Sea. relationships, which occur with syenites, diorites and gabbros . His scepticism in regard to the liberal reforms of the 'sixties Only a few of these pegmatites have graphic structure or mutual made him very unpopular among the more progressive writers intergrowth of their constituents . Many of them are exceedingly of that time . He died at Moscow on the 2nd of February 188r coarse-grained; in granite-pegmatites the feldspars may be (Jan .