SHISHKOV Vyacheslav Yakovlevich (1873-1945), writer. In 1891 he graduated from Vyshny Volochek technical school. He started to publish his works from 1908, although he personally considered his literary debut to have occurred in 1912, when Zavety journal published his story They Have Prayed; that was also the time when he first visited St. Petersburg and met Ivanov-Razumnik, A.M. Remizov and other writers. In the winter of 1914 he met M. Gorky in St. Petersburg. A year later he moved to Petrograd to serve at the Ministry of Transport Communications. In 1916 he published his first major work Taiga in Letopis journal. From 1917 he had devoted himself exclusively to literary activity. He used to travel much; in 1927-41 he lived in Detskoe Selo (Pushkin), where he worked on his narrative The Wanderers (Leningrad, 1932), novel Ugryum-River (came out in a separate edition in Leningrad, 1933), the first part of the novel Emelyan Pugachev ( Leningrad, 1941 separate edition; the Stalin Prize of 1946, for all three volumes). The latter novel, in particular, vividly portrays the life of St. Petersburg in the second half of the 18th century. Shishkov's Fridays were attended by A.N. Tolstoy, A. Bely, K.A. Fedin, P.P. Soykin, K.S. Petrov-Vodkin, O.D. Forsh, A.A. Prokofiev, V.A. Kaverin, N.S. Tikhonov, M.L. Slonimsky et al. During the siege he appeared in press and on the air. In 1942 Shishkov was evacuated. While in Detskoe Selo, he lived at 14 Malaya Street (the building was not preserved) in 1927-29, at 9 Moskovskaya Street (memorial plaque) in 1929-41; in Leningrad, in 1941-42 he resided at 9 Griboedova Canal Embankment (memorial plaque). The name Shishkov was given to a Street in Pushkin (Vyacheslava Shishkova Street).
References: Раковский Л. Вячеслав Шишков // Белые ночи: О тех, кто прославил город на Неве. Л., 1971. [Вып. 1]. С. 247-255; Воспоминания о В. Шишкове. М., 1979; Бунатян Г. Г. Город муз: Лит. памят. места г. Пушкина. СПб., 2001. С. 290-308.
D. N. Cherdakov.
