Nikolai Wagner

Nikolai Petrovich Wagner (; 30 July 1829, – 3 April 1907) was a Russian zoologist, editor, essayist and writer.

Biography Nikolai Wagner was born at the Bogoslovsky Zavod in Perm Governorate (now Karpinsk, Sverdlovsk Oblast) to a noble family. His father Pyotr Petrovich Wagner (1899–1876), originally a doctor in the Urals, later lectured as a professor of geology, mineralogy and anatomy at the Kazan University.

Literary career

As a fiction writer Wagner made his mark as an author of popular books for children, the most successful of which, Skazki kota Murlyki (Cat Purr's Fairytales), a collection of twenty five finely written mystical and philosophical fables and stories, came out in 1872. Wagner's fairytales, a peculiar mix of hazy mysticism and harsh realism centered around the theme of good against evil, elicited lively debate in the pedagogical spheres in Russia, the majority of critics agreeing that they had nothing to do with children's literature whatsoever. The fact that Skazki have been re-issued a dozen of times in the pre-1917 Russia (since 1918 Wagner's work stopped being published altogether) attests for their popularity, although apparently mostly with the adult readership.

Up until now the critics are divided about Wagner's literary legacy. The biographer Viktor Shirokov hails him as "Our Russian Andersen", Savely Dudakov called his essay on Wagner Evil Fairy-teller, while A. Goryashko combined both attitudes in a biography called The Bad Good Man Some of the critics (Dudakov among them) tended to explain the uneasy fact that the author, who became quite famous for his humanistic fables, preaching universal love and kindness, later in his life all of a sudden shifted dramatically to the right, owning up to the ideas that several years later would lead to pogroms, in terms of Wagner's progressing mental illness.

Nikolai Wagner died in 1907 of paralytic dementia. He is interred in the Smolensky Cemetery in Saint Petersburg.