Ivan Chmelev

Coming from a family of Old Believer Moscow merchants, he was admited in the Law school of Moscow in 1984. His first short story, Near the Mill, appeared in 1895. That same year he married and visited the Monastery of Valaam for his wedding, which inspired his book, On the Cliffs of Valaam. This was a failure, and Chmelev stopped writing until 1905. He finished university in 1898, and spent several years as a civil servant in the provinces of the empire.

He published short stories (Disintegration, 1907, and Citizen Oukleïkine, 1908) which were noticed and brought him into literary circles. In 1909 he entered the Moscow literary circle Wednesday, where he rubbed shoulders with Gorky and Bunin, among others. In 1911, his novel Restaurant Waiter earned him new and great notoriety. From 1912 to 1914 he again wrote stories and short stories, the most famous of which is The Hidden Face (1916). If he saw with enthusiasm the revolution of February 1917, which responded to his social concerns, he firmly rejected that of October. He settled in Crimea in 1918, where he experienced the Red Terror and the disastrous famine of 1921 to 1922. He recounted these events later in the Sun of the Dead, the diary of a man who is in some ways his double, that many consider it his masterpiece. His son, a former officer, was arrested and shot in 1921. Chmeliov then went into exile and, like many writers who formed a community united in denouncing the new communist regime, settled in France in January 1923.

Uprooted, lacking recognition like most emigrant writers, he nevertheless found new strength and made it his duty to bear witness to the misfortunes of Russia. In 1923 he published The Sun of the Dead, which was praised by Thomas Mann and banned for a long time in the USSR. After several books and stories in an anti-Bolshevik vein (Story of an Old Woman, 1927; The Light of Reason, 1928) or describing the life of Russian émigrés in Paris, in the 1930s he turned towards evocations of the happy past and lost, his own and that of Russia, culminating with The Year of the Lord (1928-1944) and The Pilgrimage (1931). The Heavenly Ways, his last work, which seems to summarize all the others, remained unfinished after a first part published in 1946. Under the occupation, collaborated with the pro-Reich Russian newspaper Parijsky Viestnik - Le Courrier de Paris (Парижский вестник) .

Ignored or censored under the Soviet regime, he was rediscovered like many other emigrants following the fall of the communist regime at the end of the 1980s. Rehabilitated in the national memory, his remains were transferred in 2000 to the Donskoy Monastery, near Moscow, as he himself had wished.