Chulkov was born in Moscow in the family of an impoverished
Tambov nobleman. He studied medicine at
Moscow University in 1898–1901. After joining a revolutionary student organization, he was arrested in December 1901 and exiled to
Amga in the
Yakutsk region of
Siberia. He was amnestied in 1903 and was allowed to settle in
Nizhny Novgorod, where he lived for a year. In 1904 Chulkov moved to
St. Petersburg and became the de facto editor of Novy Put' (New Path), a
literary magazine published by
Dmitry Merezhkovsky and
Zinaida Gippius. When the publication of Novy Put' was suspended in January 1905 during the turmoil of the
Russian Revolution of 1905, Chulkov moved to Voprosy Zhizni (Problems of Life), its replacement, where he worked with its editors
Nikolai Berdyaev,
Sergei Bulgakov and
Nikolai Lossky until it folded in December 1905.
In 1906, Chulkov edited Fakely (Torches), an anthology of Symbolist writing, which called on Russian writers to:
abandon Symbolism and
Decadence and move forward to "new mystical experience".[1]
Later in the year Chulkov followed up with a "Mystical Anarchism" manifesto. Russian poets
Alexander Blok and especially
Vyacheslav Ivanov were supportive of the new movement while
Valery Bryusov, the editor of the leading Symbolist magazine Vesy (The Balance), and
Andrei Bely were opposed to it.
Chulkov published a number of novels, poems and short story collections between 1906 and the outbreak of
World War I in 1914, when he joined the Russian army. After the war and the
Russian Civil War that followed, Chulkov returned to writing, but found it difficult to publish poetry and fiction under the new
Soviet regime: for example, his unpublished poems made fun of
Marxism.[2] After 1922 he concentrated on literary criticism and Russian history. Between 1925 and 1939 he published books about the
Decembrist revolt,
Fyodor Tyutchev,
Alexander Pushkin,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
Don Quixote and the
Romanov dynasty in the nineteenth century.
Georgy Chulkov died in 1939 from emphysema. He was buried in Moscow at the
Novodevichy Cemetery.
English translation: On Mystical Anarchism in Russian Titles for the Specialist no. 16, Letchworth, Prideaux P., 1971.
English translation: On Mystical Anarchism in A Revolution of the Spirit: Crisis of value in Russia, 1890-1924, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal. Fordham, 1990, pp. 175–186.
Demons and Modern Life in Apollon, nos. 1-2, St. Petersburg, 1914.
English translation in: A
Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences, ed. Marilyn McCully, Princeton, 1982, p. 104-106.
^Joan Delaney Grossman. "Rise and Decline of the 'Literary' journal: 1880-1917" in Literary Journals in Imperial Russia, ed. Deborah A. Martinsen, Cambridge University Press, 1997,
ISBN0-521-57292-4, p. 186.
^L.A. Sugaj. Georgy Chulkov i ego poema "Rus'", Vestnik slavyanskih kul'tur No. 1, Moscow, GASK, 2000, pp. 67–68.
References
L.A. Sugaj. Georgy Chulkov i ego poema "Rus'", Vestnik slavyanskih kul'tur No. 1, Moscow, GASK, 2000, p. 66-72.
Available onlineArchived 2016-03-03 at the
Wayback Machine
Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal. "The Transmutation of the Symbolist Ethos: Mystical Anarchism and the Revolution of 1905" in Slavic Review 36, No. 4 (December 1977), pp. 608–627.