Durov, Sergei Fedorovich

Born in 1816 in Orel Province; died Dec. 6 (18), 1869, in Poltava. Russian poet, member of the Petrashevskii circle from the beginning of 1847. From a family of the dvorianstvo (nobility or gentry).

Durov graduated from the Noble Boarding School attached to St. Petersburg University. In March 1849 a circle began to meet in Durov’s apartment. This group rapidly adopted a politically radical tendency and strove to organize the distribution of revolutionary literature. V. G. Belinskii’s letter to N. V. Gogol was read for the first time in St. Petersburg in Durov’s circle. Durov’s first work as a poet and translator dates from 1843. He wrote the novella Someone Else’s Child (1846), the play Mother and Daughter (1847), and a number of essays; he was a writer of the naturalist school. Durov’s death sentence in the Petrashevskii affair was commuted to four years at hard labor to be followed by service as a soldier. After the 1856 amnesty he lived in Odessa and Poltava.