Sixty years ago—in July, 1853—Vladimir was born at Jitomir, in the government of Volynia. His father, of Cossack blood, was a district judge in the cities of Dubno and Rovno, having previously served as district attorney, and also as a minor judge. He was an honest man, since he forbore to enrich himself with bribes, but made his modest salary suffice. This course—eccentric in those days—left his wife in straitened circumstances when he died. Vladimir was about fifteen at the time, and still in the Gymnasium at Rovno, but his mother, the daughter of a Polish landed proprietor, was enabled to keep him in school and also maintain her other children, three boys and two girls.
The future author entered the Institute of Technology at St. Petersburg in due course, and for two years fought off the extremes of nakedness and hunger by coloring maps in the intervals of study, for he had come to the great capital with only seventeen rubles in his purse. The third year found him in Moscow, in the Petrovsk (St. Peter’s) Agricultural Academy, and here, in the third year of his new course (1875), he got his first taste of exile. His unforgivable crime was to participate in a joint address of the students to the Faculty! For this he was banished to the government of Vologda, but the sentence was not completely carried out, for some one relented and before he reached the place he was bidden to return to his home at Kronstadt. Here for one year he was kept under police surveillance.
At the end of the year he was allowed to remove with his family to St. Petersburg, where he worked in peace as a proof-reader, until February, 1879. But he was soon to learn that Government never forgets, for twice during that month was his home officially searched, and at length he, together with his brother, his brother-in-law, and his cousin, was banished to Glazof, in the government of Vyatka, and presently still further north, to Vyshne Volotsk, where he was confined in a political prison—and all without a trial, the reading of charges, or any semblance of human justice.
The whole term of his exile was spent without a single gleam of light to make clear his offense. But after his release in 1880, he learned that his exile was due to his having attempted to break prison—an offense which was alleged against him before he had ever been in prison!
The circumstances of his release were fortunate. Prince Imeritinsky had been deputized to investigate the condition of the political prisons and to report on the causes of incarceration. Among other prisons, he visited that at Vyshne Volotsk, and Korolenko was already on the way to Yakutsk, Siberia, when the message came ordering his release—probably as a result of the investigation.
Even then entire freedom was not granted him, for he was “allowed” to settle at Perm; and here he began his active work as a writer, though he had written successfully as early as 1879.
In 1881 Alexander III became Emperor of Russia, and all his subjects were required to take oath of allegiance. But Korolenko refused, because in addition the government officers demanded that he betray his friends by giving details of any revolutionary enterprises in which he knew them to be engaged. Rather than become a party to such villainy, the young man chose further exile, and for the succeeding three years lived miserably in Yakutsk, in East Siberia. At length he returned to the ancient Tartar city of Nijni Novgorod, on the Volga, where he now lives with his family.
All this period of maddening oppression was aggravated by the fact that his mother needed his help. When in 1879 Korolenko began to contribute literary sketches to such Russian periodicals as Russian Thought, The Northern Messenger, and Annals of the Fatherland, the meagre honorariums were indeed a blessing to his loved ones.
The thing that “goes without saying” often needs to be said just the same. That a writer is likely to reproduce his life-experiences in his writings is one of these truisms, yet it will always remain an interesting occupation to trace connection between life and literary product in the work of an author of individuality.