Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov (July 1, 1813 – March 20, 1887) was a significant Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n literary critic and memoirist.

Biography

Annenkov was born into a wealthy landowning family in Moscow. He attended the philological faculty of St Petersburg University. In the late 1830s he met Vissarion Belinsky

Vissarion Belinsky

Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky was a Russian literary critic of Westernizing tendency. He was an associate of Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin , and other critical intellectuals...

, Alexander Herzen

Alexander Herzen

Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian pro-Western writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism", and one of the main fathers of agrarian populism...

, Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism. He has also often been called the father of anarchist theory in general. Bakunin grew up near Moscow, where he moved to study philosophy and began to read the French Encyclopedists,...

 and Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century...

, with whom he became life long friends. In the 1840s he went abroad and formed a close relationship with Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

.

His letters from Europe appeared in the journal Notes of the Fatherland

Otechestvennye Zapiski

Otechestvennye Zapiski was a Russian literary magazine published in St Petersburg on a monthly basis between 1818 and 1884. The journal served liberal-minded readers, known as the intelligentsia...

. A second series of letters from Paris were published in The Contemporary

Sovremennik

Sovremennik was a Russian literary, social and political magazine, published in St. Petersburg in 1836-1866. It came out four times a year in 1836-1843 and once a month after that...

 in 1847/48. He edited the first major scholarly edition of Pushkin's works in 1855. His critical articles were published in various popular journals throughout the 1850s and 1860s. He was an important proponent of aestheticism

Aestheticism

Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...

 along with his friend and fellow critic Alexander Druzhinin

Alexander Druzhinin

Alexander Vasilyevich Druzhinin , , was a Russian writer, translator, and magazine editor.-Biography:...

 and with Vasily Botkin

Vasily Botkin

Vasily Petrovich Botkin was a Russian essayist, literary, art and music critic, translator and publicist.-Early life:Vasily was the son of a wealthy merchant and the brother of the well known physician Sergey Botkin...

.

He is best known now for his memoirs The Extraordinary Decade (1880), the title of which has become attached to the Russian literary generation coming up in the 1830s and 1840s. During the 1880 Pushkin celebrations, he was given an honorary doctorate from Moscow University. He died in Dresden in 1887.

English Translations

• The Extraordinary Decade: Literary Memoirs, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1968.