Averchenko, Arkadii Timofeevich

Born 1881 in Sevastopol’; died Mar. 12, 1925, in Prague. Russian writer. Born into a merchant family.

In 1908, Averchenko became a member of the staff, and later the editor, of the liberal humorous magazine Satirikon; in 1913 he edited Novyi Satirikon (New Satyricon). In his humorous stories and articles he satirized the mediocrity and smugness of bourgeois life—for example, the anthology Merry Oysters (1910) and others.

He emigrated after 1917. Lenin characterized his book of stories A Dozen Knives in the Back of the Revolution (Paris, 1921) as a talented work, written by a member of “the white guard embittered almost to the point of madness ...” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 44, p. 249).