Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov

Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov (alias Andrey Pechersky, , 1818, Nizhny Novgorod – 1883) was a Russian writer, best known for his novels In the Forests and On the Hills, which describe the unique life of Transvolga and use its dialects.

Biography Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov was born in Nizhny Novgorod to a noble family of moderate means and spent his early years in Semyonov, a small provincial town. His childhood impressions, pictures of Transvolga, its common people's ways of life had a strong impact upon his later worldview.

In 1834 he enrolled at the Kazan University's philological faculty and graduated in 1837. As a student he became interested in the works of Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol, as well as Vissarion Belinsky's critical essays. Melnikov was about to embark upon the academic career at the university when for some kind of wrongdoing (the nature of which remains unknown) he was deported to Perm to start work there as a teacher of history and statistics. In 1838 he was transferred to Nizhny where he spent the major part of his life. From his teens, Melnikov's major interests were the economics and history of Russia.

As a writer, Melnikov debuted in 1839 in Otechestvennye Zapiski with the series of sketches called From Tambov Governorate to Siberia: The Traveller's Notes. But his first stab at fiction, a short story "About Who Epidor Perfilievich Was and Which Preparation Were Taken for his Birthday", published by Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1840, proved to be a failure; critics dismissed it as a poor imitation of Gogol. Dismayed, Melnikov stopped writing fiction for the next 12 years. Melnikov was a liberal, calling for reforms and enlightenment of the people. He remained sceptical of the revolutionary movement's true aims but greatly respected Alexander Hertzen. Nikolai Dobrolyubov too mentioned Melnikov alongside Saltykov-Schedrin as one of the Russia's two most prominent satirists of the 1850s. In 1858 the collection of stories by Pavel Melnikov was banned by censorship. Melnikov-Pechersky's two novels greatly influenced Vladimir Korolenko and especially Pavel Bazhov. It was Melnikov-Pechersky's dilogy that inspired Mikhail Nesterov to create pictures like "In the Woods", "On the Hills", "Nightingale Sings" and "Beyond the Volga". Rimsky-Korsakov was writing his opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya much under the impression of In the Forests novel.