Arkady Averchenko

15 hrs. 41 min.

Language Russian

Author Victoria Milenko

Narrator Vyacheslav Gerasimov

Description

Arkady Averchenko (1880–1925) is the titled “king of laughter,” the founder, tireless editor, and many-faced author of the popular magazines “Satirikon” and “New Satirikon,” publishing book after book of his own stories—yet still managing to earn the fame of a connoisseur of good living, a regular at restaurants, and a notorious heartbreaker. Even now, his true story remains a mystery. Why did he, “a man from the people,” enthusiastically welcome the February Revolution and then drive a nail with his famous book “A Dozen Knives in the Back of the Revolution” into October? Why did Lenin respond to “A Dozen Knives” with a personal review titled “A Talented Little Book”? And why, in the end, did none of the “stories of the heart” bring the humorist to the marital altar? Vіktoriya Milenko, a candidate of philological sciences and a Sevastopol researcher of the life and work of her fellow townsman, made an attempt to write a substantial biography of Arkady Averchenko and answer many questions by combining foreign research, domestic scholarship, and her own discoveries both in archival collections and in the history of the writer’s family, searching for his living relatives. The book presents an impressive range of the writer’s addresses in his homeland and in exile—Sevastopol, Donbass, Kharkiv, Petersburg, Istanbul, Sofia, Bucharest, Berlin, Paris, Prague—as well as a circle of friends and colleagues: A. Kuprin, L. Andreev, N. Teffi, Sasha Cherny, V. Mayakovsky, A. Buhov, artists A. Radakov, N. Remizov, and others. In this edition, new documents, memoir evidence, and photographs are introduced into circulation for the first time. The book is dedicated to the 130th anniversary of A. Averchenko’s birth.