In the Kyivsky district of our city, there is a small, quiet street. Its name won’t mean much to most people. To be honest, when I stumbled upon it by chance many years ago, I was genuinely convinced that it was named after some prominent communist. But this year, while walking around Kharkiv with some friends from Kyiv, I took them to Harshyna Street. “So, what’s so interesting here?!” they asked me then. “Have you read the fairy tale ‘The Traveling Frog’?” I asked them. The older ones nodded.
“Do you remember Ilya Repin’s painting *Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan*?” The other group, the younger one, finally nodded happily. “Well, Garshin is the author of the fairy tale and the model for Ivan the Terrible’s son in the painting!” I concluded.
It is regrettable that the life and achievements of one of the finest writers of the late 19th century—Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin, a son of Sloboda Ukraine—were summed up in just a single sentence.
Yet at one time his popularity was so great that in 1913, the residents of Proektnaya Street, in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the writer’s death, drafted a petition requesting that their street be renamed after the writer V. M. Garshin. During the Soviet era, he was one of those pre-revolutionary authors whose name not only avoided falling into disfavor but was classified by the authorities as one of the victims of tsarism who had protested against autocracy by every means available to them.
His books were widely published, and the older generation surely remembers stories such as “The Signal” and “The Red Flower” from their school days. For this reason, Harshyna Street in Kharkiv was not renamed after 1917.
One could talk endlessly about this writer’s genius.
In his letter to Vasily Nazarovich Afanasyev dated December 31, 1881, Vsevolod Mikhailovich admits, in particular:
“I can’t write (I suppose), and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to. You know what I wrote, and you can imagine how hard that writing was for me. Whether what I wrote turned out well or not is beside the point; but to say that I wrote with nothing but my wretched nerves and that every letter cost me a drop of blood—that, truly, would not be an exaggeration. For me, writing now means starting that old story all over again and, in three or four years, perhaps ending up in a mental hospital once more. To hell with literature if it drives one to a state worse than death—much worse, believe me. Of course, I’m not giving it up forever: in a few years, perhaps, I’ll write something. But to make literary pursuits my sole occupation in life—that I resolutely refuse…”
It was apparently because of these lines that people said, “Garshyn writes with his own blood.” Some called him the “modern Hamlet” or the “Hamlet of the heart.” What drew the writer closer to this Shakespearean hero was a painfully acute aversion to any injustice or imperfection in human relationships, which caused him constant, almost physical pangs of conscience and bouts of compassion.
Other contemporaries, endowed with artistic talent, painted this extraordinary man, conveying his “pure soul” to the viewer through their paintings.
In his autobiography, *The Far and the Near*, Ilya Efimovich Repin writes:
“From the very first time I met V. M. Garshyn—I believe it was in Pavlova Hall [a concert and theater hall on Troitskaya Street, now Anton Rubinstein Street—Ed.], where he was accompanied by several young people, female students, and university students—I was struck by a special tenderness toward him. I wanted to help him sit more comfortably so that he wouldn’t bump into anything or get jostled in any way. Garshyn was charming and handsome, like a sweet, kind, beautiful young woman. Almost from the very first glance at Garshyn, I wanted to paint his portrait, but this intention was realized later…”
We see Vsevolod Mikhailovich in a sketch of the prince’s head for the painting *Ivan the Terrible and His Son* in 1883.
In his letter to Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov dated August 10, 1884, Repin wrote:
…Meanwhile, as a form of relaxation, I’m painting two portraits: one of Vsevolod Garshin here in St. Petersburg, and one of Nadezhda Vasilyevna Stasova at her dacha in Yukki. I love both of these subjects; they are lovely people, especially Garshin—I have never before encountered such gentleness, such dove-like purity in a person. His soul is like a crystal!
Whenever Garshin came to see me, I could always sense it even before he rang the doorbell. He would enter silently, always bringing with him a quiet sense of delight, as if he were an incorporeal angel.
“The defining trait of Garshina’s character was something angelic—not of this world. She had the kindest, most sensitive nature: she bore everything in the spirit of peaceful, good relations. All his young friends loved him as if he were an angel,” writes Repin.
We also see the artist’s favorite model in the painting “We Were Not Expecting Them” (1884), which was first shown at the 12th Itinerant Exhibition. And here is Vsevolod Mikhailovich in what is perhaps Repin’s most famous and controversial painting from 1885, “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan.”
Repin himself admitted: “When I conceived a painting, I always looked for people in real life whose figures and facial features would express what I needed for my painting. What struck me about Garshin’s face was his sense of doom: he had the face of a man doomed to perish. That was exactly what I needed for my prince.”
At the official exhibition in St. Petersburg, the public was shocked by this painting—some couldn’t hold back their emotions and wept right in front of it, while others even suffered hysterical fits. Ironically, a terrifying mystical coincidence is associated with this painting. On March 19, 1888, at the age of 33, Garshin, after a long sleepless night, left his apartment in St. Petersburg and threw himself down the stairwell. A few days later, on March 24, he died from his injuries. Some claim that the fatal traumatic brain injury the writer sustained during the fall occurred in the very spot indicated by the artist on the famous canvas.
There are quite a few mystical stories associated with Vsevolod Garshyn.
His close friend Viktor Andreevich Fausek recalls how, while visiting Garshin in Kharkiv in the fall of 1879, he heard him recite his favorite poem by Lermontov:
Do not mock my prophetic anguish;
I knew that fate’s blow would not spare me;
I knew that the head you loved Would pass
from your bosom to the block;
I told you: neither happiness nor glory
Can I find in this world;—a bloody hour will come,
And I shall fall; and cunning enmity
Will, with a smile, slander my unfulfilled genius;
And I shall perish without a trace
Of my hopes, my torments;
But I await my untimely end without fear.
It is high time for me to see a new world;
Let the crowd trample my crown:
The singer’s crown, the crown of thorns!..
Let them! I did not cherish it.
Fausek goes on to write
He stood before me, his gaze fixed intently on me, and in his sad, serious eyes, in his hushed, agitated voice, there was so much anguish, so much deep conviction, so much certainty in the prophetic truth of the words he was speaking… ‘But I await my untimely end without fear. It is high time for me to see a new world,” he read, and I heard in those words and in his tone the expression of his innermost thoughts—a hopeless, heavy certainty of his own doom.
After the author’s death, his close friend, the poet Nikolai Maksimovich Minsky, wrote a remarkably beautiful poem. It is with this poem that I would like to conclude this text. After all, before writing about everything that connected the brilliant writer Vsevolod Garshin to our city, I would very much like to portray him simply as a living person—a man whose name, much to our regret, has begun to be forgotten in our time…
“At the Grave of V. Garshin”
You lived a sorrowful life. The troubled conscience of the age
marked you as its herald;
In those days of malice, you loved people and humanity,
And longed to believe, though tormented by unbelief.
But the wellspring of your sorrow ran too deep;
Your soul grew weary, truest among us—
And the strings snapped, the sobs faded away…
You lived out of time, and passed away before your time!I knew of nothing more beautiful or more sorrowful
Than your radiant eyes and pale brow,
As if, for you, life on earth were
A longing for a homeland beyond reach.
Both your art and the beauty of your face
Merged in perfect harmony with your fate,
And your destiny resembles, right up to its terrible end,
A sad tale told by you.And you left us, like that ailing singer,
Stripped of glory by the breath of the grave;
Like a storm, death swept over our generation,
Mowing down every peak with its envious hand.
Those whose consciences ached most deeply
over our lies Could no longer eke out a life among us,
And we live in darkness, and darkness has overcome us…
Without you, life is hard for us; without you, we are ashamed to live!
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