Boborykin and his Chronicles of the Russian Intelligentsia

Abstract

With a modesty that did not invariably characterise his view of his own place in the history of Russian literature, P. D. Boborykin in one of his early critical essays numbered himself among the ‘workaday realists’ (bytovye realisty) of the 1860s, whose writings explored new areas of social life and ‘extended the claims of good literary realism’.¹ While in fact he had little in common with Pomialovsky, Reshetnikov, Gleb Uspensky and the other literary raznochintsy he refers to, it was always on his contribution as a chronicler of his times — ‘an artist of everyday life’ (bytopisatel-khudozhnik)² — that he based his own claim to literary recognition, and it is in this role that historians and critics have judged him.³