Nikolai Grech

Born Aug. 3 (14), 1787, in St. Petersburg; died there Jan. 12 (24), 1867. Russian journalist, writer, and philologist. Son of a clerk.

From 1812 to 1839, Grech was the editor and publisher (jointly with F. V. Bulgarin after 1825) of the journal Syn otechestva (Son of the Fatherland). Until the middle of the 1820’s. the journal was connected with Decembrist circles. After the suppression of the Decembrist uprising. Grech became a monarchist and a reactionary. During the years 1831–59, in partnership with Bulgarin, he published the newspaper Severnaia pchela, which enjoyed the protection of the Third Section (the section in charge of political investigations), and he led a struggle against the progressive course of Russian literature. For this activity, N. A. Dobroliubov called him the “champion of falsehood and gloom.”

Grech is also known as the author of the novel Black Woman (1834), in which the romantic plot is combined with the features of an adventure novel descriptive of the morals and manners of fashionable life. His An Attempt at a Short History of Russian Literature (1822) was the first book on the history of literature in Russia. For his Practical Russian Grammar (1827), he was elected a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In 1840 he published Readings About the Russian Language. Grech’s Memoirs on My Life (complete edition, 1886) contains extensive literary-historical material, as well as information about the everyday life of the times.