The Complete Short Novels

Slavery formally abolished in U.S.A.

Young nobleman Dmitry Karakozov tries to assassinate the tsar. Radical journals The Contemporary and The Russian Word suppressed. Austro-Prussian war.

St. Petersburg section of Moscow Slavonic Benevolent Committee founded (expansion of Pan-Slav movement). Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic poem Sadko .

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Chemist D. I. Mendeleyev wins international fame for his periodic table of chemical elements based on atomic weight.

Lenin born. Franco-Prussian war. End of Second Empire in France and establishment of Third Republic. Repin paints The Volga Boatmen (to 1873).

Paris Commune set up and suppressed. Fall of Paris ends war. German Empire established.

Three Emperors’ League (Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary) formed in Berlin. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, Narodnik (Populist) ‘‘going to the people’’ campaign gathers momentum: young intellectuals incite peasantry to rebel against autocracy.

First performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s first opera, The Maid of Pskov.

Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition; first performance of Boris Godunov.

Bulgarian Atrocities (Bulgarians massacred by Turks). Founding of Land and Freedom, first Russian political party openly to advocate revolution. Death of anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Official statute for Women’s Higher Courses, whereby women are able to study at the universities of St. Petersburg,

Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Kazan. By 1881 there are two thousand female students. Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India.

Russia declares war on Turkey (conflict inspired by Pan-Slav movement). Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake.

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Congress of Berlin ends Russo-Turkish war; other European powers compel Russia to give up many of her territorial gains; partition of Bulgaria between Russia and Turkey. Mass trial of Populist agitators in Russia (‘‘the trial of the 193’’). Shishkin, pioneer of the plein-air study in the 1870s, paints Rye, a classic evocation of Russian countryside.

Birth of Stalin. The People’s Will, terrorist offshoot of Land and Freedom, founded. Assassination of Prince Kropotkin, governor of Kharkov. Tchaikovsky: Evgeny Onegin. Death of historian S. M. Solovyov, whose history of Russia had been appearing one volume per year since 1851.

Oil drilling begins in Azerbaidzhan; big program of railway building commences. Borodin: In Central Asia. During 1870s and 1880s the Abramtsevo Colony, drawn together by railway tycoon Mamontov, includes Repin, Serov, Vrubel, and Chekhov’s friend Levitan. Nationalist in outlook, they draw inspiration from Russian folk art and the Russo-Byzantine tradition. Assassination of Alexander II by Ignatius Grinevitsky, a member of the People’s Will, following which the terrorist movement is crushed by the authorities. Revolutionary opposition goes underground until 1900. ‘‘Epoch of small deeds’’: intelligentsia work for reform through existing institutions. The new tsar, Alexander III, is much influenced by his former tutor, the extreme conservative Pobedonostsev, who becomes chief procurator of the Holy Synod. Resignation of Loris-Melikov, architect of the reforms of Alexander II’s reign. Jewish pogroms.

Censorship laws tightened. Student riots in Kazan and St. Petersburg. Reactionary regime of Alexander III characterized by stagnation in agriculture, retrogression in education, russification of non-Russian section of the population, and narrow bureaucratic paternalism.

First Russian Marxist revolutionary organization, the Liberation of Labor, founded in Geneva by Georgi Plekhanov. Increased persecution of religious minorities.

New education minister Delyanov increases powers of inspectors; university appointments made directly by the ministry rather than academic councils; fees increased. Fatherland Notes, edited by Saltykov-Shchedrin, suppressed. During 1880s organizations such as the Moscow Law Society and the Committee for the Advancement of Literacy become centers for the discussion of political and social ideas among the intelligentsia.

DATE AUTHOR’S LIFE LITERARY CONTEXT

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Students hold a demonstration to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Dobrolyubov. Several of them, disgusted by the brutal way in which the demonstration is suppressed, resolve to assassinate the tsar; the plot is discovered, and among those executed is Lenin’s brother Alexander Ulyanov, whose death he swears to avenge.

During the late 1880s Russia begins her industrial revolution.

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade.

Introduction of land captains, powerful administrator magnates who increase control of the gentry over the peasants, undermining previous judicial and local government reforms. Shishkin: Morning in a Pine Forest.

First performance of Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades and first (posthumous) performance of Borodin’s Prince Igor. Peasant representation on Zemstva reduced. Bismarck dismissed. During the 1890s growth rate for industrial output averages about 8 percent per annum. Important development of coal mines in southern