Daniil Lukich Mordovtsev

Born Dec. 7 (19), 1830, in the Danilovka sloboda (settlement) of Ust’-Medveditsa District, Rostov Province; died June 10 (23), 1905, in Kislovodsk; buried in Rostov-on-Don. Russian and Ukrainian writer and historian. His father was a Zaporozhian Cossack and later the manager of several estates.

Mordovtsev graduated from the faculty of history and philology at St. Petersburg University in 1854. For more than 30 years he served as an official in Saratov and was the editor of Saratovskie gubernskie vedomosti (Saratov Provincial News). He contributed to the democratic journals Russkoe slovo (The Russian Word), Otechestvennye zapiski (The Fatherland Notes), and Delo (Affairs).

Mordovtsev’s first work was the narrative poem The Cossacks and the Sea (1854, published 1859). The struggle of revolutionary Narodnichestvo (Populism) was the subject of the novella New Russian People (1868) and of the novel Signs of the Times (1869), although Mordovtsev did not share Narodnik (Populist) views. Mordovtsev’s historical novels enjoyed popularity (1812, 1879; The False Dmitrii, 1879; Tsar Peter and the Regent Sophia, 1885; The Tsar and the Hetman, 1880; Solovetskii Siege, 1880; Lord Novgorod the Great, 1882; Sagaidachnyi, 1882; For Whose Sins?, 1890); these novels revealed Mordovtsev’s interest in democratic movements.

Mordovtsev was the author of publicistic and historical works, such as Impostors and the Freemen of the Lower Reaches (1867), Haidamak Uprising (1870), Political Movements of the Russian People (2 vols., 1871), and On the Eve of Freedom (1872, published 1889), as well as his memoirs, From My Past and Experiences(1902, in Ukrainian), in which he tells of his meetings with T. G. Shevchenko and N. G. Chernyshevskii.