Youth

The novel “Youth” is partly autobiographical. The beginning of the novel is the hero’s youth—his first experiences, his schooling, his first love for the fair-haired Zoya. Everything suggests it’s drawn from life. The romance of experiences is paired in Chirikov with a sense of humor; irony, often directed at himself, is typical of his narrative style.

The novel’s credibility lies in the absence of conventional, invented characters—black in the novel is truly black, while white dazzles with its purity. The artist’s colors are natural; the feelings are alive. Through the years that passed after it was written, “Youth” carried to our day a belief in the triumph of truth, in the beauty of inner clarity, and in a love that endures suffering, but is not defeated. Reading “Youth,” one is inevitably drawn into a feeling of belief in living words of cleansing—so necessary in our dark days.

Going into emigration did not change Chirikov’s inner character; rather, it defined his position as both writer and person even more clearly. An idealist by nature, with undiminished youthful energy and unrestrained passion, he condemned the Bolshevik newcomers.

Could a man of such high humanistic aspirations feel otherwise—someone who preserved his faith in freedom, in the triumph of truth, in the best ideals of the Russian intelligentsia, of which he was a vivid representative?

Today, Chirikov’s name is known not only to Russian readers. His novels “A Soul in Ruins” and “Youth” have been published in French. In German they came out as “My Novel” and “The Red Clown.” “Mar’ka from the Pit” was translated into English. Almost all of Chirikov’s works have been published in Czech, and also translated into many other Slavic languages. In lectures on Russian literature, students at Columbia University learn about the type of Russian student of the 1880s through Chirikov’s works, and young Americans studying Russian are captivated by his stories in the old, still preserved collections of “Znaniye” (“Knowledge”).

Evgeny Nikolayevich Chirikov died on January 18, 1932, in Prague. The literary legacy he left is of enormous cultural and historical value.

In the obituary devoted to Chirikov and printed in “New Russian Word” after the writer’s death, critic Petr Pilsky wrote: “Chirikov’s literary legacy must not be forgotten, cannot be lost; it should not be buried, and it should not be neglected.”

With the publication of the novel “Youth,” this first step has been taken along the path toward restoring and preserving the works of the fiery fighter for the best aspirations of the Russian people— to whom E. N. Chirikov devoted all his love and all his talent as a writer.