Grigory Danilevsky

Grigory Petrovich Danilevsky (Russian: Григо́рий Петро́вич Даниле́вский, Ukrainian: Григорій Петрович Данилевський; 26 April [O.S. 14 April] 1829 - 18 December [O.S. 6 December] 1890) was a Russian historical novelist. Born into the family of an impoverished landowner, Petr Ivanovich Danilevsky, in the Izyumsky district of Sloboda Ukraine, Grigory was educated in the Moscow Dvoryansky institut (Institute of the Nobility) from 1841 to 1846, then studied law at Saint Petersburg University. In 1849 he was mistakenly arrested in connection with the Petrashevsky case and spent several months in the prison of the Peter and Paul Fortress, but he was released and received his certification as kandidat in 1850. From 1850 to 1857 he served in the Ministry of Education, where he was sent a number of times to examine the archives of monasteries in the south. In 1856 he was one of the writers sent by Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich to study the borderlands of Russia. In 1857 he retired to his estates in the Kharkov Governorate, serving in various local offices, but in 1869 he became an assistant editor of the new Pravitelstvenny vestnik (Government Herald) and in 1881 was named the chief editor, thus becoming part of the council supervising the Russian press. He died in December 1890 in Saint Petersburg and was buried in the village of Prishib in the Kharkov region. Aside from some minor verses and translations, Danilevsky's first literary work was a series of stories of Ukrainian life and traditions, collected in 1854 in the book Slobozhane (Sloboda dwellers). His first novel, Beglye v Novorossii (Fugitives in Novorossiya, 1862), published under the pseudonym D. Skavronsky, brought him wide success; it was followed by Beglye vorotilis (The return of the fugitives, 1863) and Novye mesta (New places, 1867), the whole trilogy describing the settlement of the Ukrainian steppe by runaway serfs. His 1868 story "Zhizn cherez sto let" (Life a hundred years from now, 1868) was a work of science fiction imagining the year 1968.