Vladimir Pecherin

Born June 15 (27), 1807, in the village of Dymerka, now in Cherkassy Oblast; died Apr. 17 (29), 1885, in Dublin, Ireland. Russian poet and thinker.

The son of a nobleman, Pecherin graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1831. In 1835 and 1836 he was a professor of Greek philology at Moscow University. Pecherin was influenced by the French Utopian socialists, in particular by the Christian socialism of F. Lamennais. In 1836 he left Russia to take part in the Western European revolutionary movement, but this intention proved to be short-lived. In 1840 he converted to Catholicism.

Beginning in the late 1840’s, Pecherin lived in England and Ireland. He corresponded with A. I. Herzen, whom he met in 1853, and with N. P. Ogarev; he retained an interest in critical social and philosophical problems and in the Russian liberation movement. Pecherin’s literary works, written principally in the 1830’s, were in the spirit of Russian civic romanticism. His dramatic narrative poem The Triumph of Death (1833) was included by Herzen and Ogarev in the collection Secret Russian Literature of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1861). In the 1860’s and 1870’s Pecherin wrote his memoirs, Notes From Beyond the Grave.