The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Two

Readers have suggested two possible identities for the Mysterious Dolgov. Hannes Bok is one. The other is Boris Artzybasheff.

Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965)

Once or twice a century, an artist comes along whose vision is so extraordinary that he can hardly be categorized or placed with other artists. Boris Artzybasheff was one of these artists. He was born on May 25, 1899, in Kharkov, in what is now Ukraine. I believe that birthdate was under the old calendar, as Artzybasheff gave his birthdate as June 5, 1899, in his petition for naturalization. He arrived in the United States, at the port of New York, on June 17, 1919, after having left Russia from the Black Sea port of Novorsisk more than a month before. I don't know much about the tangled and tragic history of the Russian Revolution, but I believe Novorsisk may have been a last refuge of White Russian forces in 1918-1920. There were pogroms in Ukraine at about the same time, carried out by the Green Army, but I believe Artzybasheff's family to have been Eastern Orthodox and not Jewish. Still, socialism has its depredations, and the young artist escaped from them at about the same time that so many of his countrymen and countrywomen did, including at least three tellers of weird tales, Maria Moravsky (1889-1947), Nadia Lavrova (1897-1989), and Edith M. Almedingen (1898-1973). Artzybasheff's father, Mikhail Artsybashev (1878-1927), also an artist, escaped not long after his son, going to Poland in 1923. Artsybashev was a fierce opponent of Bolshevism and edited a newspaper in Poland called For Liberty! According to endlessly repeated sources on the Internet, his surname became the root of a Soviet pejorative, artsybashevchina.

One of my readers has suggested that Boris Artzybasheff, who by the 1940s was a well-established and successful commercial artist and illustrator, contributed to Weird Tales under the pseudonym Boris Dolgov, effectively slumming among the pulps. I don't like to call improbabilities impossibilities, but I also don't think that to be very likely. Although it's true that the Mysterious Dolgov worked in a uniquely 1940s style, his art bears little resemblance to that of the other Boris, Artzybasheff. Beyond that, Artzybasheff was famed for his advertising work, moreover for his covers for Time magazine, of which he created more than 200 from 1941 to 1966. It doesn't seem likely that he could have been induced to contribute to Weird Tales for the kind of pittances the magazine offered artists during the 1940s and '50s. I like writing about Boris Artzybasheff and showing his art. I would like to think that he could have contributed to "The Unique Magazine." But it just doesn't seem to me that he was Boris Dolgov, especially considering that there really was a person by that name and identity. We know that from the photograph shown in the previous posting (here). I'll show more evidence in the next. I would like to thank my reader, though, and invite him and others to continue to comment and offer their research, suggestions, recommendations, and so on. It's always good to explore possibilities.

Boris Artzybasheff in his studio, ca. mid 1940s. In contrast to the Mysterious Dolgov, Artzybasheff was well known and frequently photographed. He was also very successful and widely published as an artist. And we know a lot about his life, including his birthdate, May 25, 1899 (O.S.), and his death date, July 16, 1965. A dedicated artist to the end, Artzybasheff died in his studio in that artist's haven of Connecticut, in his case, in Lyme. Artzybasheff moved from New York City to Lyme in mid 1955 at his wife's behest. Tragically, she died just half a year later, on December 11, 1955. She was the former Elisabeth Southard Snyder (1904-1955), whom he had married on February 22, 1930, in Manhattan. They spent just a quarter of a century together. The image is from Forty Illustrators and How They Work by Ernest W. Watson (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1946), page 9.

As I said, Artzybasheff was an artist of extraordinary vision. He could only have understood that about himself, as demonstrated in the cover image and title of his own book, As I See, from 1954.

Artzybasheff was the son of Mikhail Artsybashev, or Artzybasheff as in this cover. The elder Artsybashev (1878-1927) was a Polish-Russian writer, editor, artist, and journalist. Among his novels was The Savage, published in paperback in 1951 when just about any piece of literature, high or low, could be put into print as long as it had a suitably trashy and suggestive cover. The artist here was Tobey. I'm pretty sure that he wasn't the painter Mark Tobey (1890-1976), who knew Hannes Bok, but like I said, I don't like to call improbabilities impossibilities.

Boris Artzybasheff was not only a painter but also a graphic artist. Here is what looks to be a scratchboard drawing from his own book, Poor Shaydullah, from 1931, reproduced in Forty Illustrators and How They Work. The Wizard of Oz-like character in the middle of that blossoming whatsit looks like George Bernard Shaw.

Artzybasheff was renowned for his personified machines. "I like machines," he said. "I would rather watch a 1,000-ton dredge dig a canal than see it done by 1,000 spent slaves lashed into submission." That quote, from The Hartford Courant, July 17, 1955, I think has hidden meaning in it, for Artzybasheff, having lived under socialism, had had personal experience with the mass slavery of the Machine Age. Another biographical note coming from this image: Artzybasheff was born in Kharkov, later site of four great battles during World War II between Nazis and Communists.

Artzybasheff's art might be called unique but it seems to me to have been a part of a distinctive look of mid-century American illustration, advertising art, and commercial art. For example, this image looks like it could have been created by the great James Flora (1914-1998) . . .

While this one bears resemblance to the crazy art of Basil Wolverton (1909-1978) . . .

And this one looks a little like drawings made by Hannes Bok (1914-1964), who of course collaborated with the Mysterious Dolgov. I'm not sure that Bok had repressed hostility, but I'm pretty sure that he had a repressed something or other.

There is still more to come in this series, including a possible death date and cause of death for Boris Dolgov.

Text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Totalitarian Monster in Art

It has been awhile since I wrote. I hope to get back into the swing of things over the next couple of weeks by completing my series on the monster of the twenty-first century. Like a monster itself, this series has grown out of control. I would like to lay it to rest.

A blog without pictures isn't always very interesting. I have written most of this series without posting any images. I hope today's posting will make up for that.

I'll begin with "El sueño de la razon produce monstruos" ("The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters") by Francisco Goya, No. 43 in his series Los Caprichos (Caprices or Follies, 1799). We think of the eighteenth century as the second in an Age of Reason, yet the century closed with the French Revolution and the beginnings of Romanticism in art, literature, music, and politics. Significantly, the beginning of the Romantic movement (in as far as any such thing can be said to have a beginning) is dated to about 1800, or about the same time Goya published Los Caprichos. Romanticism in art, literature, and music is one thing. Romanticism in politics is quite another.

The totalitarian monster as a modern, political creature was born in the eighteenth century and was baptized in the blood of the French Revolution. The American Revolution was practically bloodless by comparison. Beyond that, our Constitution, a work of supreme reason, has outlived all the fevered dreams and Utopian fantasies of the Leftist, Statist, Marxist, Communist, Fascist, Nazi, Socialist, and Nihilist--in short, of the totalitarian.

Our fiction of monsters and of horror, terror, and fantasy dates from the 1700s as well. Gothicism--a kind of Romanticism--came in reaction to the Age of Reason. Curiously, one of the great works of Gothicism, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, was also a work of nascent science fiction. In that book, she gave us a new kind of monster, the man-made monster of science, and an icon for the twentieth century.

If the artist is like a canary in a coal mine, you can expect him to recognize the connection between human monsters and monsters of the imagination. Different artists exercise their power in different ways. Some use imagery of monstrous horror to depict the human monster. Others--particularly cartoonists--reduce the human monster through satire, ridicule, and parody. Few cartoonists were as capable of such things as Will Elder (1921-2008). In "Frank N. Stein," published in Mad #8 (Dec. 1953), the monster turns out to have the face of Hitler--and the brain of a bird.

Not to be outdone, Joseph Stalin, Hitler's one-time ally and then murderous rival, donned his monster suit to pose for this drawing of the creature. It comes from the back cover of Tales of the Uncanny, a parody or sendup of the superhero comics of the early 1960s, published by Image Comics in June 1993.

Our popular image of Frankenstein's monster comes of course from the Universal movies of the 1930s in which Boris Karloff played the creature. The makeup, by Jack Pierce (1889-1968), was green but showed up on black-and-white film as light gray. 

If you were a kid in 1951, you might have spent your pennies on a set of gum cards called "Red Menace," issued by Bowman. There are forty-eight cards in the set. This card, called "War-Maker" and showing the image of Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung, is number forty-seven. (Mao had earned his gum-card moniker by sending Chinese troops into Korea the year before "Red Menace" was released.) Mao looks friendly enough in this picture, but the green tint to his skin would have been a signal to all that he was in fact a monster in the mold of Frankenstein's creation from a generation before . . . 

. . . or like the Phantom of the Opera, whose portrait was painted by Basil Gogos  in the 1960s.

By the end of the Great War, the totalitarian society was becoming a reality and the artist was there to give warning. Here is a poster or cartoon entitled "The Communist Monster Threatens to Undermine the Country," drawn by a German artist, Thomas Theodor Heine (1867-1948). I don't know the date, but I suspect it's from the period of the Weimar Republic, probably about 1918 or so, as Heine fled Germany in the year the Nazis came to power, 1933.

"Die Heimat ist in Gefahr!" ("Your Country Is in Danger!"), from 1918, warning of the advance of the monster of Bolshevism. (Note the word Bolschewismus in the first line under the title.) The artist was Carl Hachez (1880-1958). This is clearly a piece of propaganda . . . or is it? If propaganda begins where truth gives way to sensationalism, then how can any piece of art warning of the horrors of totalitarianism be more sensational than the reality of that system? The totalitarian is in truth a monster, a murderer, a destroyer. A piece of art that you might call propagandistic is actually an understatement when it comes to the horrors perpetrated by the twentieth-century totalitarian.

Another poster with the same slogan, obviously in the same series and presumably from about the same period. The artist was Victor Arnaud (1890-?). The date looks like 1919.

"Bolschewismus Bringt Krieg, Arbeitslosigkeit und Hungersnot" ("Bolshevism Brings War, Unemployment and Famine"), a poster from 1918 by Julius Ussy Engelhard (1883-1964). Again, the Bolshevist is depicted as a monster, a sort of apeman armed with a knife and a bomb. (Note the similar image, an ape with the sword, in the background of the Mao Tse-tung trading card above.) Is it propaganda or is it truth? Now, nearly one hundred years later, we know that Communism does indeed bring war and ruin, yet there are those who still cling to the fantasy that everyone can be made equal--and are willing to deprive people of their rights and even their lives in order to make it happen.

German artists of 1918 and after weren't the only ones to recognize the monstrousness of totalitarianism. Here is a poster created by a White Russian artist and against Trotsky, Lenin's left-hand man and head of the Red Army. The title is ironic: "Peace and Liberty in Sovdepiya" (presumably an early alternate name for the Soviet Union). Trotsky is depicted here as the devil, but there is also a strong suggestion of his Jewishness. Too often, those who oppose Communism have also been anti-Semitic, as with the Nazis. This image also appears on an atrocious anti-Semitic website.

I have not been able to find an image of Lenin depicted as a monster of any kind, but you don't have to use much of your imagination to see the demonic quality in his visage. 

"Communisme Ennemi de la France" ("Communism: Enemy of France"). A lot happened between 1918, when the German posters above were printed, and 1942, the date of this poster by Michel Jacquot (dates unknown). The German people, instead of choosing freedom in their struggles against Communism, threw in their lot with the rabid anti-Communist (and anti-Jewish) Nazi Party. Certain elements in France did the same thing, forming the Parti Populaire Français (French Popular Party) in 1936. Except for his insignia, the man in this picture could be a Nazi. It's worth noting that he is throttling what appears to be a werewolf: near the end of the war, the Nazis came up with their project Werwolf, a scheme to carry on the fight after the war. It's also worth noting that the Parti Populaire Français was founded in part by former Communists. As Eric Hoffer noted in his indispensable book, The True Believer (1951), the easiest convert for the true believer (such as a Nazi) is simply another true believer (such as a Communist). Likewise, the true believer reserves his bitterest enmity not for the liberal (in the classical sense of the word, not in the contemporary American sense) but for other true believers.

When it comes to recognizing the monstrousness of totalitarianism, the Soviets were no less perceptive than the Nazis, as this poster, "Kill the Fascist Monster!" by Viktor Nikolaevich Deni (1893-1946), shows. (That translation may not be entirely accurate. I invite a reader of Russian to comment. The date by the way appears to be 1942.)

If the translation of the Russian title above is accurate, this American poster is equally unequivocal--and the enemy is even more obviously monstrous. The monster in this poster by Bert Yates (dates unknown) is two-headed: I suspect that it was executed after Mussolini. The image is propagandistic to be sure, but the caption--"this monster that stops at nothing"--is true of the totalitarian himself and of the totalitarian impulse.

The Allied victory in World War II (or the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call it) stopped the Nazis, the Fascists, and the Japanese warlords after all, but Communism survived and began to wage a new war, a Cold War, the outcome of which must have been in doubt for many years. The film I Married a Communist (1949, retitled The Woman on Pier 13) appears to have been drawn from the pulps: the genre, film noir, is from the hard-boiled fiction of the 1930s, while the confessional title comes straight from Bernarr Macfadden's True line of magazines. And, if you like drawing full circles, Rousseau, a progenitor of ideas that totalitarians have used against us, authored a book called Confessions. 

The confessional title showed up again in I Married a Monster from Outer Space, from 1958. There were other movies with titles in the same vein, including I Was Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, both from 1957. There is significance in those titles and the ideas behind them, namely that a Communist or a monster from outer space might easily pass among us, look like us, fool us, moreover, that he or she might threaten to undermine us and our society (as in the early German illustration above), worse yet, that he or she might recruit us or make us one of his or her own. There was another film from that period with just that theme. It's one of the most important science fiction movies not just of the decade but of all time. It came from the postwar development of the science-fictional monster, and it leads pretty directly to what I think must be the monster of the twenty-first century. The film is called Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Edith M. Almedingen (1898-1971)

Née Marta Aleksandrovna Almedingen

Aka E.M. Almedingen, Martha Edith Almedingen, Martha Edith von Almedingen

Teacher, Author, Poet

Born July 21, 1898, Saint Petersburg, Russia

Died March 5, 1971, London ?, England

Edith M. Almedingen may have been the most high-born of Russian contributors to Weird Tales, but like the others, she left the country of her birth soon after war and unrest set in. She was born Marta Aleksandrovna Almedingen on July 21, 1898, in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the nation's capital and a city of future revolutions. "My earliest predilection was for history," she remembered, but there were littérateurs on both sides of her family. On her mother's side, she was related to the British poets Robert Southey (1774-1843) and--more distantly--Edmund Spenser (ca. 1552-1599). Her father's family included her great-aunt Catherine Almedingen (1829-1893), a writer of children's books and subject of Edith Almedingen's own children's book, Katya (1966).

Marta Almedingen's father, Alexander Almedingen (?-1912), was a scientist and scion of a military family that wandered across Europe before settling in Russia. Her mother's family was far more prominent, for Olga-Sarah Sergeevna Poltoratzky (1857-1919) was a woman of noble birth and daughter of Russian literary scholar, bibliophile, humanitarian, and author Serge Poltoratzky. Serge Poltoratsky (1803-1884), who wrote the Dictionary of Russian Authors and whose personal library is now part of the Russian State Library, married twice. His second wife, young Helen (or Ellen) Sarah Southee, was an English woman who reared her children in her native Kent. Only later did Olga Poltoratzky return to the country of her father's birth.

In late nineteenth-century Russia, Olga met and married Alexander Almedingen, with whom she had several children. Then, in 1900, when Marta was only a toddler, Almedingen abandoned his family. Perhaps as compensation, the future writer claimed parentage from the city of her birth, beginning her autobiography four decades later with these words:

The story of a life may begin on a nursery floor or in an April wood, with a slab of chocolate or a broken, beloved toy. It may start with a fantasy woven round a face, a song, or even a picture on the earliest remembered wall. This record must needs begin with a city, whose child I was.

St. Petersburg . . . .

From her home on Vassily Island, young Marta explored the city and the world as she knew it. In 1941, she told her story in Tomorrow Will Come, an affecting and fascinating book which offers a picture of her family and of an old Europe that perished among the horrors of the twentieth century. Though poor, Edith entered the Xénia Institute for Noble Young Ladies, housed in the immense and magnificent Nicholas Palace in Saint Petersburg (renamed Petrograd in 1914). When revolution came, the Bolsheviks seized the palace and--dubbing it the Palace of Labour--handed it over to the trade unions, who proceeded to wreck part of its interior. By then, Marta had moved on to Petrograd University, where she studied from 1916 to 1920.

After completing her studies, Marta Almedingen lectured in English medieval history and literature at Petrograd University, becoming a member of the faculty in 1922. That same year--in September--with the Bolsheviks on the verge of victory in the Russian civil war, she was granted permission to leave her country and she emigrated to England. Arriving in 1923, she set about a career as a teacher and writer. Reversing her academic subjects, Edith lectured English students on Russian history and literature. In 1951, Edith Almedingen was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Edith met with equal success as a writer, eventually accounting for over four dozen volumes of fiction, folk tales, fairy tales, memoirs, biography, and history. Her first break came in 1941 when Atlantic Monthly awarded her its nonfiction prize and $5,000 for her autobiography, Tomorrow Will Come. On the other end of the scale, Weird Tales printed just one of her stories, "An Examination in Diplomacy" (August 1929), for which she probably received a hundred dollars or so.

Although she fondly remembered the land of her birth, Edith Almedingen was happy to live in England:

[T]here is no end to the joys, and the five years (1917-1922) spent in Russia in an atmosphere of midnight house-searches, machine-gun snipers, beetroot doled out as a bread ration and all the rest of it, have certainly taught me to appreciate all I have found in my mother's country.

Edith Almedingen died on March 5, 1971, fifty-four years to the month after the last czar of Russia abdicated.

Edith M. Almedingen's Story in Weird Tales

"An Examination in Diplomacy" (Aug. 1929)

Further Reading

If you can find Tomorrow Will Come in its full version, I think it would prove well worth reading. Edith Almedingen's many other books are readily available as reprints or second-hand. Also, there's a nice profile of her in the Third Book of Junior Authors.

The Russian-English author Edith M. Almedingen, aka E.M. Almedingen (1898-1971). Photograph from the Third Book of Junior Authors.

Nicholas Palace in Saint Petersburg in a painting from 1861. The palace was later home of the Xénia Institute for Noble Young Ladies, attended by E.M. Almedingen when she was still known by her childhood name, Marta.

E.M. Almedingen wrote several dozen books. I'll offer an image of just one for now. Look for a book list sometime in the future.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley 

Maria Moravsky (1889-1947)

Poet, Author, Printer, Publisher, Hobbyist

Born December 31 [?], 1889, Warsaw, Russian Empire (now Poland)

Died June 26, 1947, Miami, Florida

Born in Siberia, Nadia L. Shapiro escaped the convulsions of the Russian Revolution by fleeing eastward. Polish poet Maria Moravsky, living in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), fled to the west. Born in Warsaw when Poland was yet part of the Russian Empire, Maria was in her late twenties when the czar abdicated. (1) Like thousands of others, she took to the streets during the revolution, by her own account tumbling "wounded from a barricade [and] taken to a hospital," only to learn later that the family with whom she had been staying was in the meantime "'pogromized' and all its members killed." She was also imprisoned for a time and decided in 1917 to emigrate. Her friends urged her to remain, believing things in Russia would calm down, moreover, that she would not be able to make a living as a writer in the United States. They starved in the new communist Petrograd. She thrived in her newly adopted country.

Known as a poet (or "poetess") in her native land, Maria went to work for a newspaper upon arriving stateside in 1917. "I learned that in America poetry was not a gainful profession," she recalled, "so I decided to write prose." Her first published article in English appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1918. Soon after, Harper's published her first story. Over the next four decades, her work appeared in every kind of magazine, from The Nation, The Bookman, and The Outlook to Reader's Digest, The Writer, and Popular Science to Love Romances, Marriage Stories, Brief Stories, and Short Stories. Weird Tales printed five of her stories and one poem spread out over twenty-two years, from 1926 to 1948. Stories by Maria Moravsky also appeared in Ghost Stories, Startling Stories, and Strange Stories between 1928 and 1941.

Maria Moravsky lived in the United States for about half of her life. In 1920, when the census taker found her, she was boarding on West Washington Square in Manhattan and employed as a writer. (2) Ten years later, Maria was married to another writer and living in Lakeland, Florida. Her husband, Edward M. "Ted" Coughlan, was born in Newfoundland and made his living in the pulp jungle of the 1930s and '40s, writing mystery stories for Black Book Detective, Detective Novels Magazine, G-Man Detective, Popular Magazine, Short Stories, Thrilling Detective, and Thrilling Mystery. He and his wife collaborated on at least one tale, "The Flaming Gods," for Short Stories (March 25, 1942).

The number of books published by Maria Moravsky or Maria Coughlan is uncertain. Thomas Y. Crowell issued her novel The Bird of Fire: A Tale of Russia in Revolution in 1927. I have also found references to books entitled Winglets and Poems (1938). The confusion arises from the fact that for many years, Maria operated her own printing press and published her own books from her Miami home, called "Fiction Farm." Maria arrived in Miami in 1932 and set about mastering (in the words of a contemporary article) "more than a dozen arts, trades, and floral and faunal activities." "Diversified hobbies are nerve tonics," she said, and Maria Coughlan was diversified. In addition to making garden furniture; growing coffee, vanilla, and aloe vera; practicing hydroponic gardening; raising ducks; and breeding lovebirds, Maria used a small hand press to print her own books of poetry, illustrated with linoleum-block prints she made herself. One of her poems was her book-length autobiography, "The Tiled Walk." Sadly, all this came to a crashing halt with her premature death from the results of a brain hemorrhage on June 6, 1947, in Miami.

Notes

(1) Maria Moravsky's birth year was 1889; one source gives her birthdate as December 31, but that may have been simply for neat record-keeping. Maria's birth year on several websites is given as 1859, an obvious error. An Internet query on Maria Moravsky offers her full name as Maria Magdalina Francheska Ludwigovna Moravskaya [sic], without providing a source for that name or spelling.

(2) Another Russian writer, David Cummings [1889-?], who worked at one time for The Music Trades, was also in the household. A question whose answer may be irretrievably lost in time: What was their relationship?

Maria Moravsky's Stories and Poem in Weird Tales

"The Ode to Pegasus" (story, Nov. 1926)

"The Castle of Tamara" (story, Apr. 1927)

"Beyond the Frame" (story, July 1940)

"Into Fantasy" (poem, Nov. 1942)

"Lover of Caladiums" (story, May 1943)

"The Green Brothers Take Over" (story, Jan. 1948)

Further Reading

There is a very interesting article on Maria Moravsky available on the Internet. It's called "Miami Writer Has Ridden Into Print on 'Hobbies'," written by Renee Greenfield and published in the Miami News, September 10, 1944, page 3B. You can access it at:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2206&dat=19440910&id=IihVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Xz0NAAAAIBAJ&pg=3796,2089629

You can also find many of her articles and stories from magazines of the early twentieth century by doing a simple search using her name.

A photograph of Maria Moravsky (on horseback) from an unknown date. Randal A. Everts has provided the photograph. I have darkened it and recolored it for improved viewing. Otherwise the image is unaltered.

And an image of her autograph.

Popular Detective, April 1943, with Ted Coughlan's byline on the cover. Coughlan was the husband and sometime collaborator of Maria Moravsky Coughlan. I don't know the artist's name. I hope someone out there will provide it.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Nadia Lavrova (1897-1989)

Weird Tales and the Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution began ninety-five years ago next month--in February 1917 by the old-style Julian calendar--and resulted in the downfall of czarist Russia and eventually the establishment of the Soviet Union. Now, almost a century later, after countless millions of people were murdered, starved, tortured, and imprisoned by the party, government, and system that claimed to be their champion, Russia is no longer communist. Lenin's mummy, one of the weirdest remnants of those long-ago times, still lies in a tomb in Red Square and can still be viewed nearly ninety years after his death. That's subject enough for a weird tale.

Nineteen seventeen and the years following were a tumultuous time in Russia. The lucky ones got out when they could, either by fleeing across international borders or by permission of whatever authority might have existed at the time. Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919), subject of a previous posting, was one of those. Unfortunately, Andreyev survived only a couple of years in exile. Others thrived, and at least four contributed stories to Weird Tales from homes in the Unites States or Great Britain. I'm planning to write about those four--Nadia Lavrova, Maria Moravsky, Edith M. Almedingen, and V.K. Kaledin--over the next couple of weeks. I'll begin with the writer about whom I know the most.  

Nadia Lavrova

Née Nadia L. Shapiro

Teacher, Interpreter, Journalist, Editor, and Author

Born October 20, 1897, Irkutsk, Siberia, Russia

Died June 20, 1989, Santa Rosa, California

During her long life, Nadia Lavrova Shapiro devoted herself to language, literature, journalism, and education. Daughter of an attorney, she was born on October 20, 1897, in Irkutsk, a city in the interior of Russia, and grew up in Blagoveschensk. Even when she lived in what she called "America's lovely lotus-land, California," Nadia remembered her Siberian home with fondness:

When I recall the Siberia of my childhood, I see a land of plenty, a land of ease and leisure and, most important of all, a land that to thousands of men and women spelled "second chance" in the bitter game of living.

Nadia began studying English as a girl of nine. After receiving her high school diploma in Irkutsk and an elementary teacher certificate in Blagoveschensk, she studied at the Moscow Women's College in 1916-1917. She returned to Siberia as revolution set in, teaching English at Blagoveschensk Polytechnical School in 1917-1918. With her family, Nadia fled from Bolshevism to Harbin, Manchuria, China, in 1918, where she became an interpreter and a writer of newspaper features, later foreign editor of the newspaper Zaria.

Nadia L. Shapiro emigrated to the United States in August 1922 and--after the validation of her Russian diplomas was completed--received a bachelor's degree from the University of California at Berkeley in May 1923. Also within her first year here, she sold a story--"The Talisman"--to Weird Tales magazine, then only a few months old. A bachelor's degree and a sale to Weird Tales in her first year in America--I call that gumption.

Between 1923 and 1932, Nadia Shapiro wrote features and edited the book and art page of the San Francisco Examiner. Using the byline "Nadia Lavrova," the young Russian freelanced articles and stories from 1932 to 1942, her work appearing in The Christian Science Monitor and in publications on the West Coast. Midway through that period, Nadia went to work for the Federal government, first for the Works Projects Administration (1937-1942), then (ironically) for the U.S. Office of Censorship (1942-1945), finally for the U.S. Office of War Information (1945). As the war was coming to its end, Nadia was in just the right place to land a position as an interpreter and translator with the United Nations Conference on International Organization, which assembled in San Francisco on April 25, 1945. During the opening years of the Cold War (1946-1953), Nadia worked for the CIA as a foreign broadcast monitor.

By 1953 and after a thirty-year career, Nadia Shapiro was of an age to retire, but I suspect she continued to write, as writing to a person born to write is not an occupation but a way of life. Nadia Lavrova Shapiro died on June 20, 1989, in Santa Rosa, California, at age ninety-one. Sadly, she did not live long enough to see the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Nadia Lavrova’s Story in Weird Tales

"The Talisman" (Sept. 1923)

Further Reading

Nadia Lavrova Shapiro's papers are in the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University. For her very charming article, "My Old Home Town Was Blagoveschensk," see the Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1933 (p. G5).  

Photograph from 1933.

Text copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales from Russia

Alexander Pushkin

Born June 6 (May 26, old style), 1799, Moscow, Russia

Died February 10 (Jan. 29, old style), 1837, Saint Petersburg, Russia

For Weird Tales

"The Queen of Spades" (Aug. 1927)

Much has been written on Alexander Pushkin. I'll write only a little. He was born of an old Russian noble family but descended on his mother's side from an African. Her family name--Gannibal--has an ancient sound, as if it had come from the Levant and had been carried afar by Phoenician sailors. Pushkin wrote the novels Eugene Onegin (1825-1832), which gave us Tchaikovsky's opera (1879), and Boris Godunov (1825), which gave us by inversion the name of Bullwinkle's nemesis, Boris Badenov. Tchaikovsky also wrote an opera based on "The Queen of Spades" (1834), Pushkin's novella centered on an apparition. Weird Tales reprinted the story in its August 1927 issue. Pushkin, the father of Russian literature, also fathered four children in his brief life, which ended when he was shot fighting his twenty-ninth duel in defense of his honor. A municipality in Russia is named for him.

Ivan Turgenieff (Turgenev)

Born November 9 (October 28, old style), 1818, Oryal, Russia

Died September 3, 1883, Bougival, Seine-et-Oise, France

For Weird Tales

"The Song of Triumphant Love" (June 1927)

Ivan Turgenev wrote short stories, plays, and novels; Weird Tales reprinted one of his works, "The Song of Triumphant Love," in June 1927. In other words, Turgenev beat Pushkin by two months into the pages of "The Unique Magazine." Turgenev is best remembered for Fathers and Sons (1862) and other works such as Torrents of Spring (1872). The novella "The Song of Triumphant Love," dedicated to Turgenev's friend Gustave Flaubert, was also adapted to the ballet by Mikhail Nosyrev (1924-1981). Turgenev may have known something about enduring love, for he loved a French mezzo-soprano, Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910), from the first moment he saw her until the day he died, despite the fact that she was married to another man and carried on with a number of others.

Fedor (Fyodor) Sologub

Born March 1 (February 17, old style), 1863, Saint Petersburg, Russia

Died December 5, 1927, St. Petersburg?

For Weird Tales

"The White Dog" (Feb. 1926)

A few months after Turgenev and Pushkin's stories appeared in Weird Tales, Fyodor Sologub penned his final poem, then passed away. His literary career had begun four decades before with the publication of a children's poem called "The Fox and the Hedgehog" in 1884. During his long life as a writer and teacher, Sologub authored poems, plays, novels, short stories, and collections of fairy tales. Shortly before they were to escape Russia and its revolution, Sologub's wife threw herself into the Zhdanovka River. He remained, grieving over the loss of her and living next to the river where she had drowned. That's where his life came to its end. Although his story "The White Dog" was printed in Weird Tales before he died, I suspect that he would not have been aware of the fact.

Leonid Andreyeff (Andreyev)

Born August 21 (August 9, old style), 1871, Oryol Province, Russia

Died September 12, 1919, Kuokkala, Finland

For Weird Tales

"Lazarus" (Mar. 1927)

Playwright, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories Leonid Andreyev, though younger than Sologub, died before him in exile. Andreyev's early works--from 1901--were a sensational best sellers. Less than two decades later, he was living in poverty in Finland, having fled the Russian Revolution. Andreyev wrote about the supernatural and extraterrestrial in his stories and plays, which were, according to a contemporary, Barrett Harper Clark, "of a morbid and pessimistic turn." Andreyev's play He Who Gets Slapped (produced in the United States in 1922) made it to the silver screen in an MGM picture from 1924. Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, John Gilbert, and an uncredited Béla Lugosi were in the cast. By the way, Andreyev was married to the Countess Anna Wielhorska, niece of the Ukrainian artist and writer Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861). Their son was Daniil Andreyev (1906-1959), poet, mystic, and one of the innumerable victims of the totalitarian state.

Note: As a bit of trivia, H.P. Lovecraft possessed copies of Andreyev's works The Seven Who Were Hanged and The Red Laugh.

An illustration for Pushkin's "The Fairytale of the Tsar Saltan" by the Russian illustrator and cartoonist Ivan Bilibin (1876-1942), from 1905.

And another for the same work and by the same artist. It's interesting that artists in a time of death and destruction, poverty and oppression, created works of such beauty, while we in our age of peace and prosperity create so much ugliness and depravity.

A more recent illustration for "The Petty Demon" by Feodor Sologub. Despite the title, this is not a weird tale. I don't know the artist's name.

A striking portait of Leonid Andreyev by the Ukrainian painter and sculptor Ilya Repin (1844-1930).

Finally, a movie poster for He Who Gets Slapped (1924), the first film by MGM to go into production and based on a story by Leonid Andreyev.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley