Gutta -perch boy

Dmitry Vasilievich Grigorovich (1822-1900) - Russian writer, translator. The son of a landowner, retired Major, and Frenchwoman, daughter of an executed royalist, Grigorovich almost did not speak Russian until 8 years old: his father died early, and his mother and grandmother, living in the Tula province, nevertheless gave the child a home French education. For three years, Dmitry studied in the French boarding house in Moscow, then for four years at the St. Petersburg Military Engineering School (where he met Fedor Dostoevsky), and then, not feeling a tendency to accurate sciences, transferred to the Academy of Arts.
A great influence on the 20-year-old Grigorovich had a meeting with a mature writer Nikolai Nekrasov, who at that time published literary collections. In one of them, the joint story of Grigorovich, Nekrasov and Dostoevsky “How dangerous to indulge in ambitious dreams” was released, in the other - the physiological essay of Grigorovich "Petersburg artisans": to achieve more naturalism in details, he bypassed all St. Petersburg slums.
Grigorovich made on the novels "Village" and "Anton-Goremyk", printed in the main literary magazines of his time and painting the bitter everyday life of the fortress peasants. Leo Tolstoy spoke about their great meaning for their time, Vissarion Belinsky and others. In the most progressive then genre of realism, the novels "Lineral Roads" (1852), "Fishermen" (1853), "Pigitors" (1855), "Pigar" (Pacific ”(1853) were created (1853) 1856).
After a sharp split in the editorial office of the Nekrasovsky "Contemporary", which was Grigorovich, he stops writing and goes headlong into the work on the society of encouraging arts, where he works as a secretary.
"The Gutta Pepper Boy" (1883) was written by Grigorovich in the mature period of creativity after 20 years of silence. The story of a flexible one, as if an “rubber "boy-Akrobat, so spectacularly declared in a circus poster, is shown from the inside and draws a tough and unsightly picture of the operation of childhood. Turgenev called the story "a small masterpiece", and indeed, it is difficult to resist tears, reading deliberately dry lines that deeply immerse us during the days of a short and hopeless life of a boy from a poor family