Boborykin, Petr Dmitrievich

Born Aug. 15 (27), 1836, in Nizhnii Novgorod; died Aug. 12, 1921, in Lugano, Switzerland. Russian writer.

Boborykin studied at the universities of Kazan and Dorpat. During the period 1863–65 he was editor and publisher of the journal Biblioteka dlia chteniia. In the early 1890’s he moved abroad. Boborykin wrote more than 100 novels, novellas, and plays, in which there were strong traits of naturalism. In the novels Businessmen (1872–73), Kitai-gorod (1882), Vasilii Terkin (1892), the novella He Grew Wiser (1890), and others he described bourgeois businessmen, the appearance of a proletariat, and the differentiation between the bourgeois and the democratic intelligentsia. Boborykin is the author of The European Novel in the 19th Century (1900) and memoirs entitled For Half a Century.