Yama (The Pit)

Aleksandr Kuprin was born in Narovchat, Penza in Russia on 7th September 1870.

At 3 his Father died and 3 years later he and mother moved into the Widows'' Home in Kudrino, Moscow. His initial education at the Razumovsky boarding school was to cause him many childhood grievances, but he was popular amongst his peers and already a fine storyteller.

In 1880 Kuprin enrolled at the Second Moscow Military High School and his interest in literature began in earnest along with the writing of several poems and some translations of foreign verse. In autumn, 1888 he entered the Alexander Military Academy in Moscow and graduated two years later as a sub-lieutenant and was posted to the 46th Dnieper Infantry Regiment for the next four years.

In 1889 he published his debut short story ‘The Last Debut’, based on the real life incident of the suicide by poisoning on stage of the singer Yevlalya Kadmina in 1881. Three years later came ‘Psyche’.

He continued writing and in 1894 resigned from the Army with the publication of ‘The Enquiry’. The appearance of this story written and signed by an officer made further time in the military difficult.

On a five-year-long trip through the South-West of the country he took up many jobs; dental care, land surveying, acting, circus performer, psalm singer, doctor, hunter, fisherman, all of these varied experiences were later used in his fiction.

In summer 1894 Kuprin arrived in Kiev and began work for local newspapers Kievskoe Slovo, Zhizn i Iskusstvo, and later Kievlianin. He kept up his other contributions for newspapers further afield.

Eight of his sketches were printed in book form in March 1896. His second collection ‘Miniatures’, the following year, earned high praise from a certain Leo Tolstoy.

In 1896 Moloch, Kuprin''s first major work was published, a critique of the rapidly expanding Russian capitalism and a reflection of the growing social unrest in the country.

By 1901 his reputation had earned him an invitation to St Petersburg to work on a popular monthly magazine. Here he met and befriended Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin and joined a literary society of the emerging young realist writers including Gorky, Bunin, and Leonid Andreyev.

Marriage came in February 1902 to the daughter of the editor of Mir Bozhy raising gossip of nepotism. His long hours and responsibilities working for the monthly left him little time for his own writing.

In 1904 Kuprin started working on ‘The Duel’. This novel, first conceived during his army years, and commenting on the "horror and tedium of army life," was published in May 1905. For him it was cathartic for literature, a sensation.

After the 1905 Revolution Kuprin became openly critical of the regime and put under secret police surveillance. Another brush with the law brought him a fine and ten days'' house arrest.

From 1905 he put himself forward as an elector to the first State Duma for the city of Petersburg. He also made several quite daring adventures; an air balloon flight with the renowned sportsman Sergey Utochkin, then to the Black Sea depths as a diver and accompanied the airman Ivan Zaikin on several airplane trips.

In 1907 he divorced his wife and married Yelizaveta Geinrikh, who, in 1908, gave birth to their daughter Ksenia.

In October 1909 Kuprin was awarded the prestigious Pushkin Prize, jointly with Bunin.

In 1908 Kuprin started working on ‘The Pit’, his most ambitious and controversial novel. This study of prostitution appeared in parts in 1909, 1914, and the third in 1915. Part I provoked controversy but Parts II and III only indifference and the beginning of a creative decline.

As World War I broke out, Kuprin opened a military hospital in his Gatchina home, then visited towns on the Western front. As a reserve officer, he was called up in November 1914 to command an infantry company in Finland till May 1915, then discharged on grounds of ill health.

The October Revolution of 1918 saw his attitude to the new regime remain ambivalent. He admired Lenin as "an honest and courageous man," and that "Bolshevism constitutes a great, pure, disinterested doctrine that is inevitable for mankind" but also argued that the Bolsheviks threatened Russian culture and had brought widespread suffering to the peasants.

Kuprin drew up elaborate plans for Zemlia, a paper designed for the peasantry and to assist the government in the radical transformation of rural life along lines not conflicting with the principles of communism. Although approved by Lenin the project never materialised.

As Civil War raged Kuprin took his family to Finland. After six months in Helsinki they sailed for France, arriving in Paris in July 1920.

The next seventeen years saw the continued decline of his talents and his succumbing to alcoholism. Grieved at his distance from Russia, he became lonely and withdrawn. The family''s poverty increased his malaise. By 1930 poverty and debt were crushing him. His literary fees were meager, his heavy drinking continued, his sight began to deteriorate, and now his handwriting became impaired. His wife''s attempts to establish a book-binding shop and a library for émigrés were financial disasters.

He believed that only a return to the Soviet Union could solve his material and psychological difficulties. In May 1937, waved off by their daughter, the Kuprin’s left for Moscow. On arrival they were installed in the Metropole Hotel and then to a dacha owned by the Soviet Union of Writers at Golitsyno, outside Moscow, where Kuprin received medical attention and rested till the winter when they moved to a Leningrad apartment.

His return saw his work published in the Soviet Union, but he wrote almost nothing new after that. In January 1938 Kuprin''s health deteriorated and by July the end was in sight. Already suffering from a kidney disorder and sclerosis, he had now developed cancer of the oesophagus.

Aleksandr Kuprin died on 25th August 1938.