Vladimir Gilyarovsky


Vladimir Alekseyevich Gilyarovsky, was a Russian writer and newspaper journalist, best known for his reminiscences of life in pre-Revolutionary Moscow, which he first published in a book form in 1926.

Biography

He was born on 26 November 1855 on a manor near Vologda where his father, a Novgorodian, worked as an assistant to the manor's bailiff, a Zaporozhian Cossack whose daughter he later married. Gilyarovsky treasured his partly Cossack descent: as a young man, he posed for one of the Cossacks depicted on Repin's huge canvas Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks; he was also a model for Taras Bulba, whose figure is part of the Gogol Monument in Moscow.
Raised by his well-educated mother and his aristocratic stepmother, he left home early and, after a series of odd jobs, he enlisted as a volunteer during the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish war. After a short career as a provincial actor, he established himself as a journalist, winning praise and notoriety as one of the best crime reporters in Moscow. His first book, The Stories of the Slums recorded his experiences with the Moscow underworld, the Moscow of poverty and crime, finding its epitome in the area of Khitrovka.
After the revolution he dedicated himself to writing memoirs. Among those were My Travels and Newspaper Moscow, which recorded his reminiscences of the newspaper business of pre-revolutionary Moscow and of some famous people he'd worked with, and Theatre People. He died in Moscow on 1 October 1935.