Alexander Michailowitsch Dobrolyubow

Alexander Mikhailovich Dobroliubov ( Russian Александр Михайлович Добролюбов , scientific transliteration Aleksandr Michajlovič Dobroljubov * August 27 ^jul. / 8. September  1876 ^greg. 1876 in Warsaw , Russian Empire ; † the end of 1944 or early 1945 in Udschary , Azerbaijan SSR ) was a Russian Writer of symbolism and leader of the Dobrolyubovian religious movement.

Life

His father was a tsarist civil servant with the rank of Active Councilor as a hereditary nobleman in Warsaw. In 1892 Alexander Dobrolyubov went to Saint Petersburg after the death of his father . There he attended a high school. He began to write poems in the style of Western European symbolism, as did his school friend Waldemar Hippius . Both came into contact with the writers Valery Bryusov and Nikolai Minsky . Alexander Dobrolyubov began studying at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Saint Petersburg . There he founded a circle that dealt with the ideas of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer . After the suicide of a fellow student in this group, he fell into a deep crisis and left the university.

He lived the life of a bohemian and also took drugs ( hashish ). He aspired to a religious life. In 1898 he went on a pilgrimage to various monasteries in and around Moscow and to the Solovetsky Islands in simple peasant clothes at a suggestion by the priest Johannes von Kronstadt . From the beginning of 1899 he moved through Russia and finally founded a religious community in the governorates of Samara and Orenburg . This was strongly oriented towards mysticalism and valued the spiritual person more than the physical appearance of a person. In 1901, Dobrolyubov was arrested after refusing military service . At the intervention of his mother, he was released because of alleged mental illness .

Alexander Dobroljubow lived in the following years as the leader of his community in the Volga region . After meeting him, Lev Tolstoy was impressed by the community, but not by his literary work. In 1905 Dobrolyubov published a volume of religious poems as the last publication.

After 1915 he and his followers went to Siberia in the area around Slavgorod . From this time there is hardly any evidence of him. In 1923 he returned to the Samara area. In 1925 he went to the Central Asian Soviet Republics, in 1927 to Azerbaijan, where he subsequently made his living in a stove fitter - Artel . During this time he maintained an exchange of letters with the widow Bryusov and with Wikenti Veressajew .

Dobrolyubov died in Azerbaijan towards or shortly after the end of the war ; the exact date is not known.

Works

• Natura naturans. Natura naturata (1895).
• “Собрание стихов Добролюбово” ( Collection of Poems by Dobrolyubov ), Saint Petersburg 1900, ed. v. Valery Bryusov.
• “Из книги невидимой” ( From the Invisible Book ), Poems, 1905.

literature

• Иванова Е. В .: Добролюбов Александр Михайлович . In: Русские писатели. 1800–1917: Биографический словарь. Т. 2. Москва: Большая российская энциклопедия, 1992. pp. 133-134.
• Wolfgang Kasack : Aleksandr Dobroljubov . In: Lexicon of Russian Literature of the 20th Century . Munich: Sagner 1992, ISBN 3-87690-459-5 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} Adrian Wanner: Miniature Worlds - Russian prose poems from Turgenev to Charms; Chapter: Short biographies and notes (bilingual anthology) . Pano Verlag, Zurich 2004, ISBN 3-907576-73-X , p. 206 f .
2. ↑ Anything is Possible. A Historical Commentary of New Russian Sects (2.) by Valery Shubinsky