Alexander Kuprin
Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin (1870–1938) was one of the major prose writers of the last Russian generation before the Revolution, admired in his lifetime alongside Chekhov and Bunin.
He was born in 1870 in Narovchat, a small town in the Penza province. His father, a minor government official, died when Kuprin was an infant; his mother, Lyubov Alekseyevna, descended from the Kulunchakovs, an impoverished line of Tatar princes, and brought him up in Moscow on very little. He was educated for the army, passing through the cadet corps and then the Alexander Military School, and served for several years as an infantry officer in the provincial garrison towns of the southwest, an existence of boredom, drink, and casual brutality that he would later anatomize in his novel The Duel.
Kuprin left the army in 1894 without a profession and spent the following years supporting himself by doing almost everything: reporting for provincial newspapers, surveying land, acting, working as a factory hand, an estate manager, a dental assistant, a fisherman on the Black Sea. That miscellaneous, hands-on knowledge of how the world actually works became the foundation of his fiction, which is prized for the precision of its physical detail and the warmth of its regard for ordinary people. His breakthrough came in 1905 with The Duel, an unsparing account of military life that made him briefly one of the most discussed writers in the country. Among his other enduring works are the Polesian romance Olesya (1898) and The Garnet Bracelet (1911), of which he said he had never written anything more chaste.
After the Revolution, Kuprin emigrated and lived for many years in Paris, where his work never quite found its footing in exile. Aging and gravely ill, he returned to the Soviet Union in 1937 and died in Leningrad on 25 August 1938. He is buried there, in the Volkovo Cemetery, near Turgenev.
He wrote a great deal across a long and unsettled life. He is remembered, above all, for a short novel about a love that asked for nothing and was recognized only after the man who felt it was dead.
