Alexander Grin
1880–1932 · Russian neoromantic writer
Alexander Green, whose surname is usually rendered Grin, was a Russian writer of the early twentieth century associated with neoromanticism. He wrote in Russian and became known for adventure novels and short stories set in an imaginary seaside country. His work matters because it kept a dreamy, hopeful outlook through years of hardship, censorship and abrupt political change.
He was born in Slobodskoy, in Vyatka province, the son of a Polish nobleman exiled after the 1863 uprising and a Russian mother who died when he was thirteen. From childhood he longed to travel and to see the sea. In 1896 he ran away from home and reached Odessa, beginning a vagabond life in which he worked as a sailor, soldier, fisherman, laborer, lumberjack and gold prospector, crossing Russia from the Black Sea to the Urals.
Around the turn of the century he joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. He was arrested in Sevastopol in 1903 for political agitation and spent about two years in prison. After a second arrest in 1906 he was banished to Tobolsk province, but escaped with a forged passport and made his way to Moscow, where he began to write. His first story appeared in 1907, and in 1909 he published his first short romantic novels while searching for a style of his own. Further exile in Arkhangelsk and a period in hiding in Finland followed, until he returned to St Petersburg after the February Revolution of 1917.
During the civil war he served in the Red Army as a liaison soldier. In 1919 he caught typhus and nearly died. Once recovered, he wrote the works for which he is remembered in the 1920s, yet Soviet literary institutions judged them foreign to the new society, and critics largely ignored him. He moved to Feodosia in 1924 and to Stary Krym in 1929. Ill, unable to work and with almost no income, he died there in 1932 of cancer.
His fictional world, which readers call Grinlandia, is an imagined coast of ports and sailors, peopled by honest, brave characters faithful to their dreams, where a touch of magic sometimes breaks in as a miracle. His legacy survives in two museums devoted to him, in Kirov (formerly Vyatka) and in Feodosia, and in film adaptations of his stories.
Key works
- 'The Life of Gnor' (1912)
- 'Scarlet Sails' (1923), an adventure novel about a girl who waits for a ship that will carry her out of an ordinary life, and the promise that sustains her.
- 'The Shining World' (1923), a novel about a man who learns to see the world differently through an extraordinary power.
- 'The Heart of the Desert' (1923), a romantic adventure story set in a distant, exotic landscape.
- 'Running on the Waves' (1928), a sea novel about freedom and destiny.
Curiosities
An imaginary land
His readers call the fictional world of his novels and stories Grinlandia, a seaside realm of ports and sailors that does not correspond to the Russia of his time.
A memory from Tarkovsky
The filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, in his book Sculpting in Time, recalls that Grin, dying of hunger, went into the mountains with a homemade bow and arrows to hunt some kind of game.
A pen name
His pen name, Grin, is a shortened form of his family surname, Grinevsky, and sounded less Russian to many readers.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.