Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (14 February 1855 — 5 April 1888) was a Russian author of short stories.
Garshin’s work is not voluminous: it consists of some twenty stories, all of them included in a single volume. His stories are characterized by a spirit of compassion and pity that some have compared to Dostoevsky’s.
In A Very Short Novel he examines the infidelity of a woman to a crippled hero. The story displays Garshin’s talent for concentration and lyrical irony. That Which Was Not and Attalea Princeps are fables with animals and plants in human situations. The second of these stories has a sense of tragic irony. In Officer and Servant he is a forerunner of Chekhov; it is an excellently constructed story conveying an atmosphere of drab gloom and meaningless boredom. From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov — the title story in the most recent English language collection of Garshin’s work — has the same Russo-Turkish War setting of Four Days, and includes as minor players the characters from Officer and Servant.
His best-known and most characteristic story is
The Red Flower ; it fits in the series of lunatic-asylum stories in Russian literature (including Gogol’s Diary of a Madman (1835), Leskov’s Hare Remise (1894) and Chekhov’s Ward No. 6 (1892)
In 1883 Garshin was the model for the younger in Ilya Repin’s painting Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan.
Translated by Thomas Seltzer.