Dmitry Girs

Dmitry Konstantinovich Girs Template:Lang-ru; b. 1836, Taganrog, (Russia)- December 15 [O.S. December 2] 1886, Saint Petersburg, Russia) was a Russian writer.

Dmitry Girs was born in Taganrog, where his father occupied the position of the chief of quarantine. Dmitry Girs’s ancestors were of Swedish origin. The most notable relative of Dmitry Girs was his cousin Nikolai Karlovich Girs, Russian Foreign minister in 1882-1894.

In 1843, the family of Dmitri Girs moved to Saint Petersburg, where he studied in a military school, graduated from the engineer college, and then served as a field engineer.

In 1868 he had to leave St. Petersburg since he was punished for the speech at the funeral ceremony of Dmitri Pisarev.

Girs’s first writings were published in 1862 at the The Russian Messenger under the pen-name Konstantinov. In 1868 he published the beginning of his novel “Staraia i Novaia Rossia” (The Old and New Russia”) in the “Otechestvennye Zapiski” (“Homeland Notes”) , vol. 3,4. Even if the novel stirred great expectations of the impressed public, it never was finished. Other works by Dmitry Girs are (“Na krayu propasti” (“On the Edge of an Abyss”) / “Delo” (“Deed”), 1870; “Kaliforniiskiy rudnik” (“The California Mine”) / “Otechestvennye Zapiski”, 1872; “Dnevnik notarialnogo pistsa” (“The Diary of a Notary Scribe”) / Ibid., 1883; “Avdotya-dvumuzhnitsa” (“Avdotya the Bigamist”) / “Russkaya Mysl” (“The Russian Thought”), 1884.

In 1876 Girs worked in Serbia as a military reporter for “Sankt-Peterburgskiye Vedomosti” (“The St. Petersburg Gazette”), and for “Severnyi Vestnik” (“The Northern Bulletin”) in 1877.

In 1878-1880 Girs published his own newspaper called “Russkaya Pravda” (“The Russian Truth”) where he wrote feuilletons under the pen-name Dobro-Glagol. The paper never enjoyed a great success but was respected in the world of periodicals. It incurred administrative penalty and was suspended from publishing many times.

Girs’s two works (“Zapiski voiennogo” (“Notes of a Military Man”) and “Kaliforniiskiy rudnik”) were published in a single volume (St. Petersburg, 1872)).

References

• This article includes content derived from the Russian Biographical Dictionary, 1896–1918.

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