Sergei Nikolaevich Terpigorev

(pen name Atava). Born May 12 (24), 1841, in the village of Nikol’skoe, Usman’ District, Tambov Province; died June 13 (25), 1895, in St. Petersburg. Russian writer.

Born into the nobility, Terpigorev entered the law faculty of the University of St. Petersburg in 1860, but he was expelled in 1862 for participating in student riots. His first published work—denunciatory articles for the journal Russkoe slovo, the newspaper Golos, and other periodicals—appeared in 1861. Terpigorev won fame with the novella Impoverishment: Sketches, Notes, and Reflections of a Tambov Landowner, published in Otechestvennye zapiski in 1880. The theme of this novella, the fate of the Russian landed nobility, reappears in the cycle of literary sketches The Troubled Shadows (1883–94) and in Terpigorev’s other works. Terpigorev developed the traditions of the natural school and was influenced by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, as is seen in From the Notes of a Failed Bureaucrat (1863).