Alexander Kuprin

Alexander Kuprin (1870–1938) is one of popular Russian writers whose cheerfulness and honesty, nobleness and humanism, riches of language, breadth and variety of plots had always attracted the hearts of readers. Kuprin’s writing is the original encyclopedia of life based on what he had gone through, seen and experienced.

The exhibition presents the complete set of works by Alexander Kuprin (2007) which, for the first time in the history of the author’s publications, comprises not only his fiction but also journalistic articles and epistolary texts found in archives and periodicals: the writer’s interviews, exerts from conversational and lectures, and also memoirs, literary portraits and letters.

The biographical book em>Голос оттуда. 1919–1934 by Moscow author and researcher of Kuprin’s life and career Olga Figurnova is of a great aesthetical, cultural and historical interest. This is the researcher’s attempts to gather Alexander Kuprin’s later works published in Russian periodicals in Narva, Reval (Tallinn nowadays), Helsingfors (Helsinki nowadays) and Pairs and mostly kept in inaccessible foreign depositories and Russian private collections.

The very interesting book of Alexander Kuprin’s articles he wrote in Helsinki Мы, русские беженцы в Финляндии compiled by Finnish author Ben Hellman is also on display.

Also the anniversary exposition presents single editions of Alexander Kuprin’s short stories translated into Polish and Belarusian languages: Pojedynek (Warsaw, 1906) and Алеся (Vilna, 1923).

The biographic book Жизнь Куприна by Oleg Mihajlov (series “Immortal Names”) portraits Alexander Kuprin as not a boring Russian classic from school textbooks but as a vivid and passionate person who had finely reflected in his books his own richest life experience.