When they asked him: “Why did you take such a strange pseudonym for yourself - Sasha Cherny?”, he calmly answered: “I have two brothers and two sisters. One of the sisters is also Sasha, and she is blonde. And I'm brunette."

On October 13, 1880, a son named Alexander was born into the family of Odessa pharmacist Mikhail Glikberg.

For the first ten years, the boy lived as almost all children from relatively educated and intelligent (according to the concepts of that time and especially place) families lived. He wasn’t particularly busy with anything around the house, he wandered around the city, read books, went fishing, got acquainted with street boys... The only difference was that his father, a pedantic man who did not like negligence, taught him the correct Russian language.

The situation changed dramatically when Sasha Glikberg turned ten years old. He was surprised when his father invited him to accept Orthodox baptism. The Glickbergs were not distinguished by religious zeal; they went to the synagogue carelessly, for which they were scolded - and after such an event the pharmacist could lose half of his clients and lose almost all his friends and acquaintances.

But the father was persistent. He really wanted to give his son an education, and for this it was necessary to overcome the so-called “three percent barrier” - among the number of gymnasium and university students, Jews could make up no more than three percent.

Sasha Glikberg was baptized. I entered the gymnasium. And he did not live up to his father’s hopes - he studied poorly, was expelled several times for poor academic performance, and in the end he never completed the full gymnasium course. Teachers referred to his “bad memory” and “dreamy character.”

At the age of 15, he ran away from home out of boredom. The angry father did not answer his letters. A prominent official from Zhitomir, a certain Roche, took part in the fate of the young tramp, took him into his house and sent him to the local gymnasium. However, even there, Sasha Glikberg did not find a common language with the authorities and did not receive a high school certificate.

At the age of 21, he was legally drafted into the army. As a literate Orthodox Christian with an incomplete secondary education, he served not for 7 years, but for only two years as a volunteer (an officer candidate). But he didn’t want to put on shoulder straps; after his service, he got a job in customs.

Through self-education, Alexander Glikberg studied foreign languages ​​well, acquired historical and philological knowledge, and even attended a course of lectures at Heidelberg University as a volunteer student. But his main occupation since 1904 was literature: he began publishing in the provincial newspaper of the city of Zhitomir under the pseudonyms “On His Own” and “Dreamer”. It quickly became clear that he was not a dreamer at all, but a real satirist and humorist.

The Zhitomir newspaper closed, and Sasha Glikberg decided to move to St. Petersburg. Roche, his patron, once again helped him get a job at the Warsaw Railway. There, in the railway office, he “married” his immediate boss, Maria Ivanovna Vasilyeva, which he later regretted. But he was able to quit his service and indulge in literary work for numerous St. Petersburg satirical magazines, the most famous of which is Satyricon.

The first poem published on behalf of Sasha Cherny, “Nonsense,” was read throughout Russia in lists. Now it is difficult for us to understand it, it is very topical, connected with the events of its time, but at that time the effect was enormous.

In 1914, Sasha Cherny went to war. He received a severe psychological shock from trench life, fell into depression, fell ill, and was hospitalized. Having recovered, he served as a nurse.

In the spring of 1917, the Minister of Justice of the Provisional Government A.F. Kerensky, on the recommendation, appointed “the writer and journalist Glikberg-Cherny” as deputy government commissioner of the Northern Front. Sasha Cherny also failed to cope with such a high post. He did not accept the Bolshevik coup, although he was courted and offered to become the editor-in-chief of a newspaper in Vilna. In the fall of 1918, he left for the Baltic states, then to Germany, Italy, and eventually ended up in Paris.

In exile, Sasha Cherny lived alone and poorly. He didn’t beg, but he was rarely completely full. Literary collaboration in emigrant publications brought in pennies, and the fees from the numerous prose books he wrote were also meager. He joined a cooperative of Russian emigrants who bought a plot of land in the south of France and tried to organize a Russian colony there. The undertaking was not crowned with success; the cooperators had little idea of ​​life on earth, and none of them knew peasant labor.

On July 5, 1932, one of the colony's houses caught fire. Sasha Cherny was the first to run to put out the fire, and an hour later he was struck down by a heart attack.

Andrey Krotkov

, Le Lavandou, Provence, France) - Russian poet of the Silver Age, prose writer, who became widely known as the author of popular lyrical and satirical poetic feuilletons.

Biography

Sasha Cherny was born in Odessa, into a Jewish family of a pharmacist, an agent of a trading company. The family had five children, two of whom were named Sasha. The blond was called “white”, and the brunette was called “black”. This is how the pseudonym appeared.

To give the child the opportunity to enter the Bila Tserkva gymnasium, his parents baptized him. Alexander did not study at the gymnasium for long. The boy ran away from home, became a beggar, and begged. His sad fate was written about in the newspaper, and the Zhytomyr official K.K. Roche, moved by this story, took the boy to his place. K.K. Roche, who did a lot of charity work and loved poetry, had a great influence on Alexander.

From 1914 to 1917, Alexander Glikberg served as a private in the training team, then worked at the Novoselensk customs. On June 1, 1904, the Zhytomyr newspaper “Volynsky Vestnik” published his “Diary of a Reasoner” with the signature “On his own.”

He published a collection of prose “Frivolous Stories” (1928), the story “Wonderful Summer” (1929), children’s books: “The Dream of Professor Patrashkin” (1924), “The Diary of Fox Mickey” (1927), “Cat Sanatorium” (1928), “ The Ruddy Book" (1930).

In 1929, he acquired a plot of land in the south of France, in the town of La Favière, and built his own house, where Russian writers, artists, and musicians came.

Sasha Cherny died of a heart attack on August 5, 1932. Risking his life, he helped put out a fire on a neighboring farm; when he came home, he fell ill and never rose again.

Memory

The poet's grave was lost due to the fact that there was no one to pay for it. Sasha Cherny's wife, Maria Ivanovna, died in 1961. In 1978, a symbolic memorial plaque dedicated to the poet was installed at the Lavandou cemetery.

In 1933, the books “Soldier's Tales” and “Seafaring Squirrel” were published posthumously.

In the early 1960s, thanks to the efforts of Korney Chukovsky, Sasha Cherny's one-volume books were published in the Big and Small series of the Poet's Library.

Editions

• First acquaintance. Berlin, 1923.
• Cherny S. Selected prose / Comp., afterword and comments. A. S. Ivanova. - M.: Book, 1991. - 432 p. (From literary heritage)
• Black S. Collected works in five volumes. - M.: Ellis Luck, 1996. ISBN 5-7195-0044-8
• Black S. Favorites / Comp. V. M. Roshal. - St. Petersburg: Diamant LLP, 1997. - 448 p.
• Cherny, S. Children's Island / art. S. A. Kovalenkov. - M.: RIPOL classic, 2013. - 80 p. - (Masterpieces of book illustration “mini”). - ISBN 978-5-386-04815-0, UDC 821.161.1, BBK 84(2Ros=Rus)6-44, Ch-49.

Film adaptations of works

• - Christmas stories, short story “Rozhdestvenskoe”
• - About a girl who found her teddy bear
• - Girl Lyusya and grandfather Krylov
• - Soldier's song

In music

At the theater

“Sasha Cherny’s Piano Concert with an Artist” is a solo performance by Alexey Devotchenko, created by the artist together with director Grigory Kozlov in 1990. The literary basis is the poetry of Sasha Cherny; the performance features music by Rachmaninoff, Massenet, Beethoven, Strauss, and Alexey Devotchenko. There is also a television version of the production.

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Notes

See also

Literature

• Milenko Victoria. Sasha Cherny: The sad knight of laughter. ZhZL. M.: Young Guard, 2014.

Links

• V

Excerpt characterizing Sasha Cherny

“It must be very interesting,” said Desalles. - The prince is able to know...
- Oh, very interesting! - said Mlle Bourienne.
“Go and bring it to me,” the old prince turned to Mlle Bourienne. – You know, on a small table under a paperweight.
M lle Bourienne jumped up joyfully.
“Oh no,” he shouted, frowning. - Come on, Mikhail Ivanovich.
Mikhail Ivanovich got up and went into the office. But as soon as he left, the old prince, looking around restlessly, threw down his napkin and went off on his own.
“They don’t know how to do anything, they’ll confuse everything.”
While he walked, Princess Marya, Desalles, m lle Bourienne and even Nikolushka silently looked at each other. The old prince returned with a hasty step, accompanied by Mikhail Ivanovich, with a letter and a plan, which he, not allowing anyone to read during dinner, placed next to him.
Going into the living room, he handed the letter to Princess Marya and, laying out the plan of the new building in front of him, which he fixed his eyes on, ordered her to read it aloud. After reading the letter, Princess Marya looked questioningly at her father.
He looked at the plan, obviously lost in thought.
- What do you think about this, prince? – Desalles allowed himself to ask a question.
- I! I!.. - the prince said, as if awakening unpleasantly, without taking his eyes off the construction plan.
- It is quite possible that the theater of war will come so close to us...
- Ha ha ha! Theater of War! - said the prince. “I said and say that the theater of war is Poland, and the enemy will never penetrate further than the Neman.
Desalles looked with surprise at the prince, who was talking about the Neman, when the enemy was already at the Dnieper; but Princess Marya, who had forgotten the geographical position of the Neman, thought that what her father said was true.
- When the snow melts, they will drown in the swamps of Poland. “They just can’t see,” the prince said, apparently thinking about the campaign of 1807, which seemed so recent. - Bennigsen should have entered Prussia earlier, things would have taken a different turn...
“But, prince,” Desalles said timidly, “the letter talks about Vitebsk...
“Ah, in the letter, yes...” the prince said dissatisfied, “yes... yes...” His face suddenly took on a gloomy expression. He paused. - Yes, he writes, the French are defeated, which river is this?
Desalles lowered his eyes.
“The prince doesn’t write anything about this,” he said quietly.
- Doesn’t he write? Well, I didn’t make it up myself. - Everyone was silent for a long time.
“Yes... yes... Well, Mikhaila Ivanovich,” he suddenly said, raising his head and pointing to the construction plan, “tell me how you want to remake it...”
Mikhail Ivanovich approached the plan, and the prince, after talking with him about the plan for the new building, looked angrily at Princess Marya and Desalles, and went home.
Princess Marya saw Desalles' embarrassed and surprised gaze fixed on her father, noticed his silence and was amazed that the father had forgotten his son's letter on the table in the living room; but she was afraid not only to speak and ask Desalles about the reason for his embarrassment and silence, but she was afraid to even think about it.
In the evening, Mikhail Ivanovich, sent from the prince, came to Princess Marya for a letter from Prince Andrei, which was forgotten in the living room. Princess Marya submitted the letter. Although it was unpleasant for her, she allowed herself to ask Mikhail Ivanovich what her father was doing.
“They’re all busy,” said Mikhail Ivanovich with a respectfully mocking smile that made Princess Marya turn pale. – They are very worried about the new building. “We read a little, and now,” said Mikhail Ivanovich, lowering his voice, “the bureau must have started working on the will.” (Recently, one of the prince’s favorite pastimes was working on the papers that were to remain after his death and which he called his will.)
- Is Alpatych being sent to Smolensk? - asked Princess Marya.
- Why, he’s been waiting for a long time.

When Mikhail Ivanovich returned to the office with the letter, the prince, wearing glasses, with a lampshade over his eyes and a candle, was sitting at the open bureau, with papers in his far-off hand, and in a somewhat solemn pose was reading his papers (remarks, as he called them), which were to be delivered to the sovereign after his death.
When Mikhail Ivanovich entered, there were tears in his eyes, memories of the time when he wrote what he was now reading. He took the letter from Mikhail Ivanovich’s hands, put it in his pocket, put away the papers and called Alpatych, who had been waiting for a long time.
On a piece of paper he wrote down what was needed in Smolensk, and he, walking around the room past Alpatych, who was waiting at the door, began to give orders.
- First, postal paper, do you hear, eight hundred, according to the sample; gold-edged... a sample, so that it will certainly be according to it; varnish, sealing wax - according to a note from Mikhail Ivanovich.
He walked around the room and looked at the memo.
“Then personally give the governor a letter about the recording.
Then they needed bolts for the doors of the new building, certainly of the style that the prince himself had invented. Then a binding box had to be ordered for storing the will.
Giving orders to Alpatych lasted more than two hours. The prince still did not let him go. He sat down, thought and, closing his eyes, dozed off. Alpatych stirred.
- Well, go, go; If you need anything, I will send it.
Alpatych left. The prince went back to the bureau, looked into it, touched his papers with his hand, locked it again and sat down at the table to write a letter to the governor.
It was already late when he stood up, sealing the letter. He wanted to sleep, but he knew that he would not fall asleep and that his worst thoughts came to him in bed. He called Tikhon and went with him through the rooms to tell him where to make his bed that night. He walked around, trying on every corner.
Everywhere he felt bad, but the worst thing was the familiar sofa in the office. This sofa was scary to him, probably because of the heavy thoughts that he changed his mind while lying on it. Nowhere was good, but the best place of all was the corner in the sofa behind the piano: he had never slept here before.
Tikhon brought the bed with the waiter and began to set it up.
- Not like that, not like that! - the prince shouted and moved it a quarter away from the corner, and then again closer.
“Well, I’ve finally done everything over, now I’ll rest,” the prince thought and allowed Tikhon to undress himself.
Frowning in annoyance at the efforts that had to be made to take off his caftan and trousers, the prince undressed, sank heavily onto the bed and seemed to be lost in thought, looking contemptuously at his yellow, withered legs. He did not think, but he hesitated in front of the difficulty ahead of him to lift those legs and move on the bed. “Oh, how hard it is! Oh, if only this work would end quickly, quickly, and you would let me go! - he thought. He pursed his lips and made this effort for the twentieth time and lay down. But as soon as he lay down, suddenly the whole bed moved evenly under him back and forth, as if breathing heavily and pushing. This happened to him almost every night. He opened his eyes that had closed.
- No peace, damned ones! - he growled with anger at someone. “Yes, yes, there was something else important, I saved something very important for myself in bed at night. Valves? No, that's what he said. No, there was something in the living room. Princess Marya was lying about something. Desalle—that fool—was saying something. There’s something in my pocket, I don’t remember.”
- Quiet! What did they talk about at dinner?
- About Prince Mikhail...
- Shut up, shut up. – The prince slammed his hand on the table. - Yes! I know, a letter from Prince Andrei. Princess Marya was reading. Desalles said something about Vitebsk. Now I'll read it.
He ordered to take the letter out of his pocket and move a table with lemonade and a whitish candle to the bed and, putting on his glasses, began to read. Here only in the silence of the night, in the faint light from under the green cap, did he read the letter for the first time and for a moment understand its meaning.
“The French are in Vitebsk, after four crossings they can be at Smolensk; maybe they’re already there.”
- Quiet! - Tikhon jumped up. - No, no, no, no! - he shouted.
He hid the letter under the candlestick and closed his eyes. And he imagined the Danube, a bright afternoon, reeds, a Russian camp, and he enters, he, a young general, without one wrinkle on his face, cheerful, cheerful, ruddy, into Potemkin’s painted tent, and a burning feeling of envy for his favorite, just as strong, as then, worries him. And he remembers all the words that were said then at his first Meeting with Potemkin. And he imagines a short, fat woman with yellowness in her fat face - Mother Empress, her smiles, words when she greeted him for the first time, and he remembers her own face on the hearse and that clash with Zubov, which was then with her coffin for the right to approach her hand.

Sasha Cherny

Russian satirist poet

Sasha Cherny- pseudonym of the famous satirist Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg . The pseudonym was taken from the very flesh of life.

Sasha was born on October 13, 1880 and grew up in Odessa, in a large Jewish family with five children, two of whom were Sasha. The light one was called white, and the dark one was called black. Due to the then existing limit of Jewish students in gymnasiums, it was impossible for Sasha to enter the gymnasium. And when the parents suddenly decided to baptize all their children, in Sasha’s opinion, it was already too late to study. He fled to St. Petersburg, but soon realized that he could not survive there alone. The parents did not answer the letters, letting Sasha understand that he had chosen his own path. Sasha was saved from starvation by a wealthy Zhytomyr official who accepted him into his family. The entire further biography of Sasha Cherny is the biography of a satirist poet.

In 1905-1906, he actively collaborated with various satirical magazines: “Almanac”, “Journal”, “Hammer”, “Masks”, “Leshy”. But one of his publications in The Spectator on November 27, 1905 caused such a scandal that the magazine was closed. Cherny's first collection of poems, “Different Motives” (1906), was arrested. To avoid arrest himself, he and his wife went to Germany, where he created a cycle of lyrical satires “At the Germans”, poems “Carnival in Heidelberg”, “Corporants”, etc. The level of his poetic skill increased sharply, his horizons expanded, which allowed him to soon after returning from abroad, take the place of one of the poetic leaders in the St. Petersburg weekly Satyricon, where Sasha Cherny finally found his niche. At that time, his poems were literally memorized, they were so topical.

In 1910, the collection “Satires” was published, combining cycles of poems published earlier, which ridiculed the Russian man in the street and the vulgarity of the world around him. Then the second book of poems was published - “Satires and Lyrics” (1911). The poet was also published in other publications - in the newspapers “New Day”, “Kyiv Mysl”, “Russian Rumor”, “Odessa News”, magazines “Modern World”, “Argus”, “Sun of Russia”, and the almanac “Rosehipnik”. He looked for support in art, nature, children, and folk life, creating cycles of lyrical miniatures about the village (“Northern Twilight”, “In the Village”, etc.), wrote prose works - “People in Summer” (1910), “First Acquaintance” ( 1912), etc. Another direction of Cherny’s creativity was poetry for children, which he wrote since 1911, and in 1912 he took part in the “Blue Book” created on the initiative of M. Gorky and in the children’s almanac “Firebird”. He tried himself as a translator from German, preparing for publication “The Book of Songs” by G. Heine (1911), “Selected Stories” by G. Safir (1912), translations by R. Demel, K. Hamsun and others. With the beginning of the First World War “ Private Glickberg" went to serve in a field hospital.

His impressionability almost deprived him of his sanity and life. Only a loving wife and the opportunity to pour out impressions on paper saved the poet. The impressions received at the front formed the basis for the cycle of poems “War”. After the October revolution, he left Russia among the first emigrants. This decision greatly extended his life and gave him the opportunity to delight readers with his books for many more years. At first, Cherny lived in Vilna, where he wrote poems about Lithuania, the cycle “Russian Pompeii”, in which the poet admits that for him “there is no turning back”, as well as a book of children’s poems “Children’s Island”. In 1920, the poet moved to Berlin, where he worked for more than two years at the publishing houses “Grani”, “Russkaya Gazeta” and “Rule”, in the magazines “Spolokhi”, “Volya Rossii”, and edited the literary department of the magazine “Firebird”. At the same time, his third book of satires, “Thirst,” was published, which became the completion of the work of the Black poet.

Since 1924, Alexander has lived in Paris, and now prose occupies an increasingly important place in his work: numerous books for children (“Biblical Tales”, “The Dream of Professor Patrashkin”, “The Sailor Squirrel”, “The Rusty Book”, “The Diary of Fox Mickey” , “Silver Tree”, etc.), the story “Wonderful Summer”, “Frivolous Stories”, “Soldier’s Tales”, the poem “Who Lives Well in Emigration” and other works.

In the summer of 1930, Sasha Cherny and his wife settled in a small house in the south of France (La Favière, near Lavender), where he died on August 5, 1932 at the age of 52 - he overstrained his heart while helping neighbors put out a fire.

A line from Pushkin’s poem is carved on his tombstone: “Once upon a time there lived a poor knight.” Alexander Mikhailovich actually looked like that same poor knight. Merciless in his satire, in life he was a very sincere and kind person. He could not stay away from someone else's misfortune.

Biography

CHERNY, SASHA (1880−1932) (pseud.; real name, patronymic and surname Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg; other pseudonyms - On his own, Dreamer), Russian poet, novelist, translator. Born (13) October 1880 in Odessa in the family of a Jewish pharmacist. Baptized by his father at the age of 10 in order to be able to enter the gymnasium outside the “percentage norm,” he did not complete his studies (he was repeatedly expelled for poor academic performance). In 1902-1904 he served in the Novoselitsk customs, from 1905 - an official in St. Petersburg, where, thanks to his marriage to a student of the prominent philosophy professor A.I. Vvedensky and a relative of the famous merchants Eliseev, he had the opportunity to engage in self-education.

In 1906-1907 he attended a course of lectures at the University of Heidelberg. In the First World War he was a medical orderly. In March 1917, he was appointed deputy commissioner of the Northern Front by the Provisional Government. After the October Revolution (which Cherny did not accept, despite the Bolsheviks’ proposals to head a newspaper in Vilna), in the fall of 1918 he went to the Baltic states (where poems about Lithuania and the Russian Pompeii cycle were created, which for the first time outlined the motif of nostalgia, which clearly sounds in the emigrant work of the poet ); in 1920 - to Berlin; from the second half of 1923 to the beginning of 1924 - in Italy, in the family of L.N. Andreev (impressions of the Eternal City were reflected in lyrical and humorous miniatures from a Roman notebook and Roman etchings). From 1924 he lived in Paris, contributed to the newspapers Latest News, the Parisian Satyricon and other periodicals, organized literary evenings, traveled around France and Belgium, speaking poetry to Russian listeners. He began publishing in Zhitomir in 1904. In the 1900s, he was an active contributor to the progressive satirical magazines “Spectator”, “Hammer”, “Masks”, “Satyricon”, etc. The daring political satire of Black Nonsense (1905; “Trepov is softer than Satan”) brought him fame. The poet's first collection of poems, Different Motives (1906), containing literary and political humoresques along with lyrics, was banned by censorship. The collection of Satires (1910), with an ironic dedication to “all the poor in spirit,” presenting the original satirical mask of an intelligent man in the street, exposes the pettiness, emptiness and monotony of a vain bourgeois existence in all spheres of social and literary life, combining sarcasm with notes of pessimism. In the second collection, Satires and Lyrics, Cherny’s attraction to “pure” lyrics, subtle landscape and psychological sketches was revealed. Having left Satyricon in the spring of 1911, where he had been one of the poetic leaders since 1908, Cherny was published in the newspapers Kievskaya Mysl, Russian Rumor, in the magazines Modern World, Argus, Sun of Russia, Sovremennik "and others. Acts as a children's writer (books Knock-Knock, 1913, Living ABC, 1914). The book of poems by Black Thirst (1923) and the poem Who Lives Well in Emigration (1931−1932), which reveals the only lucky person in a foreign land - a baby in a crib, are permeated with a painful longing for a lost homeland and a keen sense of homelessness. The organic synthesis of satire, gentle humor and lyricism, the nakedly sharp style and deliberate anti-aestheticism of Cherny’s virtuoso verse, his fundamental anti-bourgeoisism (poem On the graves, 1912, after a visit to Weimar: “Goethe and Schiller on soap and buckles, / On bottle caps, / On cigar boxes /And on suspenders... /The townspeople trade in titans..."), which influenced the formation of V. V. Mayakovsky, nominated the poet among the most original artists of the Silver Age. Among his other works is the poem Noah (1914), sadly predicting a new “global flood” for the modern generation; the poetic cycle War (1918), an impressive picture of the horrors of front-line and hospital life; poems, stories, short stories (the book The Dream of Professor Patrashkin, 1924; The Diary of Fox Mickey, 1927; The Cat Sanatorium, 1928; The Sailor Squirrel, 1933, etc.) and the play The Return of Robinson (1922) for children; prose collection Frivolous Stories (1928), with “a light smile, good-natured laughter, innocent prankishness” (A.I. Kuprin) resurrecting the St. Petersburg, Moscow and provincial life of old Russia, which from afar seems to Cherny to be an irretrievably lost paradise; the story Wonderful Summer (1929) is similar in tone to his; numerous stories about the meager life, material deprivation and moral humiliation of emigrant life. A special place in Cherny’s work is occupied by Soldier’s Tales (published in 1933), written in the style of a kind of anecdotal realism, close to the tales of N. S. Leskov and M. M. Zoshchenko. He also left translations from G. Heine, R. Demel, K. Hamsun and others. A cycle of musical works based on the words of Cherny was created by D. D. Shostakovich. Black died in La Favière, near the town of Lavandou (France) on August 5, 1932.

Sasha Cherny (real name Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg) was born on October 13, 1880 in a large Odessa family of a Jewish pharmacist. The nickname “Black” appeared in childhood, when two Sashas were named by their family by their hair color, one white, the other black. To give the bright boy the opportunity to study at the gymnasium, he was baptized at the age of ten. But his studies did not work out, and he was soon expelled for poor academic performance.

From 1901 to 1902 he served in customs, and in 1905 he moved to St. Petersburg, where he arranged his personal life and engaged in self-education. In the same year he published the satire “Nonsense” - the first work under the pseudonym “Sasha Cherny”. And the first consequences - the magazine was closed, a censorship ban was imposed on the collection “Different Motives”.

In 1906 he left to attend a course of lectures at the University of Heidelberg and returned two years later. In the Russian capital he writes for the magazine "Satyricon", works as a children's writer, creates the series "Living ABC"

He met the First World War as an orderly, while at the same time he was trying out a prose pen.

He did not understand and did not accept Soviet power, he emigrated to the Baltic states, then moved to Paris. Actively works with French publications, reads poetry to Russian audiences in Belgium and Normandy.

If before the October Revolution in the poetry of Sasha Cherny there was a predominance of accusatory satire, protest against the emptiness and philistinism of the average man, and subtle sarcasm about money-grubbing, then the emigrant period is filled with the aching sadness of loss. Lyrical landscapes of the homeland are interspersed with the pain of no return; homeless emigrants live in a gray timelessness, having lost everything in their homeland and gaining nothing in an unkind foreign land.

Sasha Cherny died on August 5, 1932, suddenly from a heart attack, and was buried in the Lavandu cemetery.

Baptized by his father at the age of 10 in order to be able to enter the gymnasium outside the “percentage norm,” Sasha Cherny did not complete his studies (he was repeatedly expelled for poor academic performance).

In the 1900s actively collaborated in the progressive satirical magazines “Spectator”, “Hammer”, “Masks”, “Satyricon”, etc. In 1902-1904. served in Novoselitsk customs. He began publishing in Zhitomir in 1904 in the newspaper "Volynsky Vestnik".

Since 1905, he was an official in St. Petersburg, where, thanks to his marriage to a student of the prominent philosophy professor Alexander Vvedensky and a relative of the famous merchants Eliseev, he had the opportunity to engage in self-education.

Cherny's fame was brought to him by the daring political satire "Nonsense" ("The Spectator", 1905). The poet's first collection of poems, “Different Motives” (1906), containing literary and political humoresques along with lyrics, was banned by censorship. Fleeing from judicial responsibility, the poet left for Germany in 1906-1907. attended lectures at the University of Heidelberg.

Returning to Russia in 1908, he became a permanent contributor to the magazine "Satyricon" (since 1911 - "New Satyricon"). The books “Satires” (1910) and “Satires and Lyrics” (1911) brought particular popularity to Sasha Cherny.

Having broken with Satyricon in 1911, which moved away from topical political satire, Cherny, with the assistance of Maxim Gorky, moved to the Sovremennik magazine, where he published several feuilletons in verse on current socio-political topics.

At the same time, he began to publish in the newspapers "Kyiv Mysl", "Russian Rumor", in the magazines "Modern World", "Argus", "Sun of Russia", he also acted as a children's writer (books "Tuk-Tuk", 1913, "Living ABC", 1914).

In 1914, Cherny voluntarily went to the front. In March 1917, the Provisional Government appointed him Deputy Commissioner of the Northern Front. After the October Revolution (which Cherny did not accept, despite the Bolsheviks’ offers to head a newspaper in Vilna), in the fall of 1918 he left for the Baltic states (where poems about Lithuania and the cycle “Russian Pompeii” were created); in 1920 - to Berlin; from the second half of 1923 to the beginning of 1924, he lived in Italy (impressions from the Eternal City were reflected in the lyrical and humorous miniatures “From a Roman Notebook” and “Roman Etchings”). In 1923, a book of his poems, “Thirst,” was published.

Since 1924, Sasha Cherny lived in Paris, collaborated with the newspapers Latest News, the Parisian Satyricon and other periodicals, organized literary evenings, traveled around France and Belgium, speaking poetry to Russian listeners.

In 1927, he joined a group of emigrants who acquired a plot of land on shares and founded a Russian colony in the village of La Favière in Provence. Here, in the south of France, Sasha Cherny spent the last years of his life.

In 1931-1932 Cherny wrote the poem “Who Lives Well in Emigration.”

Among his other works are the poem "Noah" (1914), the poetic cycle "War" (1918), poems, novellas, stories (the book "The Dream of Professor Patrashkin", 1924; "The Diary of Fox Mickey", 1927; "Cat Sanatorium", 1928; “The Sailor Squirrel”, 1933, etc.) and the play “The Return of Robinson” (1922); prose collection "Frivolous Stories" (1928).

A special place in Cherny’s work is occupied by “Soldier’s Tales” (published in 1933), written in the style of a kind of anecdotal realism. The writer also left translations from Heinrich Heine, Richard Demel, Knut Hamsun and others. A cycle of musical works based on the words of Sasha Cherny was created by Dmitry Shostakovich.

The material was prepared based on information from open sources