Filipp Diomidovich Nefedov

Born Oct. 6 (18), 1838, in Ivanovo; died Mar. 12 (25), 1902, in the village of Perebor, in what is now Sobinka Raion, Vladimir Oblast. Russian writer.

In 1862, Nefedov audited courses at Moscow University. Later, in the 1860’s and 1870’s, he worked as a journalist. He was the author of sketches and short stories about the hard life of the Ivanovo textile workers, such as “Women’s Gathering,” “Christmastide,” and “Our Factories and Plants.” A book that enjoyed considerable fame was In the Company of Others (1872), which included stories about the ravaging of the countryside after the peasant reform of 1861. Nefedov’s democratic sympathies were combined with a populist idealization of patriarchal peasantry and hostility toward urban civilization. Themes of conciliation between peasants and urban dwellers became stronger in his works of the 1890’s, such as the novella Stenia Dubkov (1898).