Zaitsev, Boris

Born Jan. 29 (Feb. 10), 1881, in Orel; died Jan. 22, 1972, in Paris. Russian writer. White Russian émigré.

Zaitsev’s works were first published in 1901. A collection of his short stories published in 1906, his novellas Agrafena (1908) and The Light Blue Star (1918), and his other early writings are written in the impressionistic manner that also characterizes his later works. Having failed to accept or understand the October Revolution, Zaitsev emigrated in 1922. He lived in Paris from 1924. His reactionary views are reflected in the novels The Golden Pattern (1926) and The House in Passy (1935), which are devoted to the Russian Revolution and the Civil War of 1918–20. Zaitsev wrote the autobiographical tetralogy Gleb’s Journey (1937), Silence (1948), Youth (1950), and The Tree of Life (1953), as well as collections of novellas, including The Travelers (1921) and Rivers of the Seasons (1968, New York). He also wrote the biographies Life of Turgenev (\\932),Zhukovskii (1951), and Chekhov (1954), as well as several plays. He translated Dante’s Inferno into Russian. Zaitsev was a subtle stylist. His works are characterized by a concern with ethical problems, psychologism, and mystical, religious perceptions of the universe.