Potekhin, Aleksei Antipovich

Born July 1 (13), 1829, in the city of Kineshma, now in Ivanovo Oblast; died Oct. 16 (29), 1908, in St. Petersburg. Russian dramatist. Honorary Academician of the Committee on Belles-lettres (1900).

Potekhin graduated from the Demidov Lycée in Yaroslavl in 1849 and begun publishing in 1851. He was on close terms with the young editorial staff of the journal Moskvitianin (The Muscovite) and was a moderate liberal.

Potekhin’s early works were the muzhik dramas Man’s Judgment, Not God’s (1854) and No Good Comes of Another’s Property (1855) and the novel A Peasant Woman (1853). These works idealized patriarchal relations in rural Russia. Potekhin gained fame with his plays written during the growth of the social movement of the 1860’s, including Tinsel (1858) and On His Own (1865). His novellas and short stories of the 1870’s and 1880’s about the countryside reflected a critical attitude toward the peasant commune; an example was his short story The Ailing One (1876). Such novels as The Evil Influence Of Money (1876) and Young Shoots (1879) depicted the inception of bourgeois relations and the labor movement.