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Ars moriendi

The Ars moriendi ("The Art of Dying") are two related Latin texts dating from about 1415 and 1450 which offer advice on the protocols and procedures of a good death, explaining how to "die well" according to Christian precepts of the late Middle Ages. It was written within the historical context of the effects of the macabre horrors of the Black Death 60 years earlier and consequent social upheavals of the 15th century. The earliest versions were most likely composed in southern Germany. It was very popular, translated into most West European languages, and was the first in a western literary tradition of guides to death and dying. About 50,000 copies were printed in the incunabula period before 1501 and further editions were printed after 1501. Its popularity reduced as Erasmus's treatise on preparing for death (de praeparatione ad mortem, 1533) became more popular.

There was originally a "long version" and a later "short version" containing eleven woodcut pictures as instructive images which could be easily explained and memorized. These woodcut images were circulated in both print and individual engravings. They could then easily be pinned to a wall for viewing.

The authors of the two texts are unknown, but assumed to be Dominican churchmen, as they echo Jean de Gerson's publication, the Opusculum Tripartitu, containing a section named De arte Moriendi. Gerson may have been influenced by earlier references in 'compendia of faith' dating back to the thirteenth century, but the content was uniquely his own.

Long version
The original "long version", called Tactatus (or Speculum) artis bene moriendi, was composed in 1415 by an anonymous Dominican friar, probably at the request of the Council of Constance (1414–1418, Germany). This was widely read and translated into most West European languages, and was very popular in England, where a tradition of consolatory death literature survived until the 17th century. Works in the English tradition include The Way of Dying Well and The Sick Mannes Salve. In 1650, Holy Living and Holy Dying became the "artistic climax" of the tradition that had begun with Ars moriendi.

Ars Moriendi was also among the first books printed with movable type and was widely circulated in nearly 100 editions before 1500, in particular in Germany. The long version survives in about 300 manuscript versions, only one illustrated.

Ars moriendi consists of six chapters:

 * 1) The first chapter explains that dying has a good side, and serves to console the dying man that death is not something to be afraid of.
 * 2) The second chapter outlines the five temptations that beset a dying man, and how to avoid them. These are lack of faith, despair, impatience, spiritual pride and avarice.
 * 3) The third chapter lists the seven questions to ask a dying man, along with consolation available to him through the redemptive powers of Christ's love.
 * 4) The fourth chapter expresses the need to imitate Christ's life.
 * 5) The fifth chapter addresses the friends and family, outlining the general rules of behavior at the deathbed.
 * 6) The sixth chapter includes appropriate prayers to be said for a dying man.

Short version
The "short version", whose appearance shortly precedes the introduction in the 1460s of block books (books printed from carved blocks of wood, both text and images on the same block), first dates to around 1450, from the Netherlands. It is mostly an adaptation of the second chapter of the "long version", and contains eleven woodcut pictures. The first ten woodcuts are divided into 5 pairs, with each set showing a picture of the devil presenting one of the 5 temptations, and the second picture showing the proper remedy for that temptation. The last woodcut shows the dying man, presumably having successfully navigated the maze of temptations, being accepted into heaven, and the devils going back to hell in confusion.

The "short version" was as popular as the "long version", but there was no English translation, perhaps because educated English people at the time were expected to understand several European languages. There are six extant manuscripts of the short version, most not illustrated, and over twenty extant blockbook illustrated editions, using 13 different sets of blocks.

Images

As well as the eleven different sets of blockbook woodcuts, there is a set by Master E. S. in engraving. The lengthy controversy over their respective dating and priority is now resolved by the discovery by Fritz Saxl of an earlier illuminated manuscript, of well before 1450, from whose tradition all the images in the printed versions clearly derive. Studies of the watermarks of the blockbooks by Allen Stevenson at the British Museum in the 1960s confirmed that none of them predated the 1460s, so Master E. S.' engravings are the earliest printed versions, dating from around 1450. The images remain largely the same in all media for the rest of the century.

There is the exceptional number of about seventy incunabulum editions, in a variety of languages, from Catalan to Dutch, the earliest from about 1474 from Cologne.

Allegorically the images depicted the contest between angels and demons over the fate of the dying man. In his dying agony his soul emerges from his mouth to be received by one of a band of angels. The soul was often depicted as a miniature person who would either be escorted to heaven by the angels or sent to the fires of hell or years in Purgatory. Common themes portrayed by illustrators include skeletons, the Last Judgement, corpses, and the forces of good and evil battling over souls.

Extended tradition
The popularity of the Ars moriendi texts developed into a broader tradition of writing on the good death. Jeremy Taylor's books Holy Living and Holy Dying, published in 1650 and 1651, exemplify that tradition. It developed in both Protestant and Catholic veins and continued in various forms through the nineteenth century.

London
In England during the 15th century, the Ars Moriendi was popular among laymen. Beginning when clerical scholars formulated the Ars Moriendi into a book, The Book of the Craft of Dying, easily spread the concept of the good death throughout England. More specifically, the Book and the good death concept heavily influenced common Londoners' perceptions and understandings of death. Inspired to achieve and strive for perfection in their everyday life, 15th century common Londoners flocked to the Book to know how one could achieve a good death. In doing so, the Londoners seemed to latch on to a specific characteristic that stuck heavily out from the previously mentioned Ars Moriendi chapters that then again composed the popular Book of the Craft of Dying.

Legality
Throughout the six chapters, there is a common theme that resembles a quasi-legal sentiment shining through in good death tradition. Inspired by the Ars Moriendi and the popular, The Book of the Craft of Dying during the 15th century, Londoners and western Europe at large gravitated towards a quasi-legal relationship with death and God that ensured the rightful passing of not only one's physical belonging but, also one's spiritual soul. This gravitation can be explained when looking at certain chapters of The Book of the Craft of Dying that extremely highlight this development. The Book's instruction that one should find peace with God before dying resembles a concept of settling one's soul within the good death tradition as the discourse the author uses is very legal-sounding. Especially striking is the use of the word, "will," when describing one's relationship with God upon dying. The notion of a will in the good death tradition resembles a physical and metaphysical legal confirmation of the rightful passing of one's physical and spiritual belongings. Though the word is used more often as a synonym for power in this source, its inclusion must not be overlooked as certain phrases hint towards a quasi-contractual relationship between the dying human and the divine. For instance, the phrase "but he should take his (the dying person) death gladly and willingly… conforming and submitting his belief to God's will alone." In this instance, the mention of wills between the dying person and God resembles both a power relationship and also a contractual relationship that imagines the dying person surrendering his spirit in a legal fashion to God in effort to help quell the worries of their soul and thus, "die well… gladly and willingly." In this fashion, the dying person is essentially signing their soul and spirit over to God, thus partaking in this quasi-legal practice and understanding of death.

Also, The Book's instruction to question the dying person is striking material that resembles a quasi-legal practice and understanding of death. Continuing in the same source, a few chapters later, the author instructs the audience to ask certain questions such as, "Do you acknowledge that you have not done as well as you might have done?" and "Do you repent of that?" These questions ring of legal terminology that again help sign the soul over to God in effort to accomplish the soul's peace before death. If the person is asked and does answer these questions truthfully, then "he shall truly be saved." Though, if none were asked upon their death, then "without no doubt no man may be saved everlastingly."[3] Thus, the questioning and response of the dying person is so vital to the accomplishment of the good death that it takes on the importance of a legal matter. Therefore, in a similar vein as the explained double meaning use of the word, "will" in the earlier phrases, it seems again that Ars Moriendi and thus, The Book as well, are reaffirming and popularizing the legal-like attributes that then construct the good death tradition.

Class distinctions
Though the Ars Moriendi and works that pushed the good death concept such as The Book of the Craft of Dying remained the dominant understanding of death throughout the 14th and 15th centuries in western Europe, class distinctions continued to add variety to this conclusion. Laymen and commoners in western Europe heavily understood death through the good death concept and tradition, but at the clerical and noble level of society, there were distinctions that did not totally agree with Ars Moriendi and the good death tradition. At the clerical level, the emerging rise of scholasticism inspired a review of past Christian theology and traditions touching all parts of Christian life - death, was one of these battlegrounds between scholasticism and traditional Christian thought. Here, clerical officials and students hotly debated the importance of sin in relation to one's death. For the traditionalists, one's personal sin determined their coming death, thus explaining that when striving to achieve the good death, one must be right with God. This concept is founded back to old Church law Canon 22 of Lateran IV (1215). Canon 22 states, "so that after spiritual health (through practices of the good death) has been restored to them (the dying person), the application of bodily medicine may be of greater benefit, for the cause being removed the effect will pass away." For those who embraced the scholasticism approach, one's personal sin mattered little. Rather, because of Adam and Eve's original sin, we were all destined to die thus, naturalizing death and somewhat shattered the established narrative that the good death tradition promoted. One scholar who embraced scholasticism writes of death, "On the causes of disease, that is, why people become ill, I reply, there are three [sic] reasons: the first is spiritual, that is, sin [...] The reason for all this is that the first man was created by God, was placed in terrestrial paradise in a state of innocence […] so that he [God] took care of the active and passive qualities of the elements that were in the human body lest they act against each other […] But because Adam was disobedient to God […] God permitted the elemental qualities to act against each other and consequently the body becomes ill and dies." Though this division in thought would challenge the previously established Ars Moriendi and good death tradition, the popularity of such works as The Book of the Craft of Dying indicate that this concept continued to thrive under pressure. [1] Liber de introduction loquendi in Ziegler, "Fourteenth-Century Instructions for Bedside Pastoral Care," in Medieval Practice, 103-104. [1] The Book of the Craft of Dying, Swanson, Catholic England, 134.

[2] The Book of the Craft of Dying, Swanson, Catholic England, 136.

[3] The Book of the Craft of Dying, Swanson, Catholic England, 136. [1] Binski, Medieval Death, 33-35.

[2] The Book of the Craft of Dying, Swanson, Catholic England, 127.

[3] The Book of the Craft of Dying, Swanson, Catholic England, 127.

title: Ars moriendi


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User:Roybalcr

eeprom 05_29_05

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User:Roybalcr


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Army general (East Germany)

Army general (Armeegeneral), was the highest peacetime general officer rank in the so-called armed organs of the GDR (Bewaffnete Organe der DDR), that is, the Ministry of National Defence,  the Stasi, and the Ministry of the Interior. It is comparable to the four-star rank in many NATO armed forces. It was aligned with Soviet military doctrine and other armed forces of the Warsaw Pact. The rank was reserved to minister level exclusively. Consequently, in the National People's Army service branches, Landstreitkräfte, Luftstreitkräfte/Luftverteidigung, Border troops, and Volksmarine there was no equivalent. However, if a Navy flag officer was designated or appointed Minister of National Defence he would be promoted to Flottenadmiral. When the armed organs of the GDR were disbanded in October 1990, the rank was abolished.

Rankholders
East German officers who achieved the rank were:

Army general in other countries
The four-star rank OF-9 was widely used in other armed forces of socialist countries, such as:
 * Bulgaria: Армейски генерал (Armeyski general)
 * Czechoslovakia: Armádní generál / Armádny Generál
 * Hungary: Hadseregtábornok
 * Poland: Generał armii
 * Romania: General de armată
 * Soviet Union: Генерал армии (General armii)
 * Yugoslavia: Генерал армије

title: Army general (East Germany)


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Jaara baby

The Jaara baby was an Aboriginal Australian child who died at some stage during the 1840s to 1860s. The child's remains were discovered in 1904, and kept in storage by Museum Victoria for ninety-nine years, until in 2003 they were repatriated to the Dja Dja Wurrung community. The remains were of particular significance because they were found traditionally wrapped in possum skins along with about 130 other artifacts of both European and Aboriginal origin.

Discovery
The Jaara baby was first discovered by Europeans on 10 September 1904, near the town of Charlton, Victoria, by a woodcutter. He was felling a hollow tree when he discovered the remains wrapped in a possum skin bundle hidden within the tree's trunk. The remains were referred to the Victorian Coroner at the time, who determined that they had been buried in accordance with Aboriginal custom. He suggested that the remains be given to the National Museum of Victoria.

Identity
Although it had been buried in accordance with Aboriginal custom, there was some doubt as to the identity of the Jaara baby, primarily because it was buried with both Aboriginal and European artifacts. These included Aboriginal necklaces, an apron and a tool belt, along with European items such as a button, an axe head and a baby's bootie. The items were sprinkled with ochre before they were tied up in a bundle of dried possum skins.

At one point, Gary Foley, who at the time was the curator of the Bunjilaka exhibition at the Melbourne Museum, was approached by a white man from Canberra who claimed that the Jaara baby was an ancestor of his. He claimed that the baby was actually a European child, who had been abducted by Aboriginal tribesmen during the period of frontier violence which decimated Aboriginal populations in Victoria's west during the mid-nineteenth century. Although tests on the Jaara remains were not conclusive, they did reveal that the child was no more than eighteen months old, whereas the abducted white child was three years old.

However, the question of why the baby was buried along with European artifacts is still unanswered. Gary Murray, chairman of the Northwest Region Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Board (and a member of the Dja Dja Wurrung nation), has suggested that the Jaara baby was probably the child of an elder or tribal chief, due to the sheer number and richness of the grave goods. The European items were probably included as a record of the tribe's history at the time, a memorial of conflict with European settlers.

Repatriation
The baby remained in storage at Museum Victoria until 1994, when researchers from an Aboriginal cultural protection cooperative came across it in the museum catalogue, and were given permission to examine the remains. Later, anthropologist Alan West commenced a study to catalogue all remains in storage at the museum, including the Jaara baby.

In 2002, Gary Murray was negotiating the return of a number of artifacts from the Museum Victoria collection, under the museum's repatriation program, begun in the 1980s. He was given a list of the Dja Dja Wurrung artifacts that the museum had in their possession. However, one Museum employee noticed that the Jaara baby was not on the list. Murray approached Gary Foley, who in turn approached the museum, and, after some dispute, it was agreed that the Jaara baby was to be repatriated.

Alan West did not want the bundle to be returned, since he had nearly finished his cataloguing project, and had wanted to separate the remains from the grave goods. This proposal was rejected outright by Murray and other members of the Northwest Region Board. Eventually, West resigned from the museum in late August 2003.

On 10 September 2003, the Jaara baby was finally returned to its home in Dja Dja Wurrung country, and was reburied, ninety-nine years after it was removed. A handover ceremony, which included ceremonial dances by both Dja Dja Wurrung and Wurundjeri people, was conducted by Lord Mayor of Melbourne John So.

title: Jaara baby


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Byers Canyon

Byers Canyon is a short gorge on the upper Colorado River in Grand County, Colorado in the United States. The canyon is approximately 8 miles (13 km) long and is located in the headwaters region of the Colorado between Hot Sulphur Springs and Kremmling. U.S. Highway 40 passes through the canyon between Hot Sulphur Springs and Kremmling. The Union Pacific Railroad's Moffat Route also travels through the short canyon. The Byers Canyon Shooting Range is part of the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Hot Sulphur Springs State Wildlife Area within the canyon providing a winter foraging area for big game animals.

title: Byers Canyon


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Sergeant major general

Sergeant major general is a now mostly-unused military rank. A prominent example was Philip Skippon in the English New Model Army as organized by Oliver Cromwell.

Over the course of the 17th century, the increasing professionalisation of armies saw sergeant major general become the most junior of the general ranks. At the same time, the sergeant portion of the title was more and more commonly dropped; by the early 18th century, the rank's name had been permanently shortened to major general.

Since sergeant major general had ranked below lieutenant general, the newly named rank of major general appeared to create a precedence issue, in that a major outranks a lieutenant but a lieutenant general outranks a major general. This continues to cause confusion to those unfamiliar with the history of the rank, particularly in those armies using insignia similar to the British Army. The rank is sometimes used by paramilitary organizations such as militias.

title: Sergeant major general


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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/"Charles Jurney"

 This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record. The result of the debate was DELETE. Eugene van der Pijll 18:02, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

"Charles Jurney"
Apparent vanity/advertisement, limited notability. You decide. Fawcett5 04:49, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

 * Keep. Affrodyetee 01:30, 30 May 2005 (EST)
 * Affrodyetee's only edit is this one, FYI. K1Bond007 05:08, May 30, 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete, appears to lack notability. K1Bond007 05:08, May 30, 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete as vanity.   — J I P | Talk 05:14, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Speedy vanity/ad --Xcali 06:06, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete, not notable, vanity. Megan1967 09:24, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Delete nn vanity. Plus there's the quotes... - Etacar11 23:55, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
 * This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.


text: User talk:69.160.63.140

title: User talk:69.160.63.140


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Talk:Halo: Custom Edition

Man, this is such a great game, all Halo PC players should join the CE community. Well... Maybe not ALL PC players. Just the cool ones =D. Dreams. -xTerohx

I have a question: I've been on the internet for hours looking for a tutorial or how-to for making Halo CE maps. All I know now is that you need some sort of 3d tool(duh), but you need a converter to use Gmax, and I don't even know if you can use blender, which I am familiar with. Long story short(er), I want to know: Does anyone have a tutorial for complete newbies at modding for Halo CE? Can you use Blender? What are the programs needed to make a map and put it in CE? I know this is probobly second nature to 99.99% of the people veiwing this, but if you could link to an article or a how-to or something more than saying "go to x website", that would be very much appreciated. Thanx

Cleanup and a question.
The links really need to be cleaned up imo. Too many fansites and some unrelated ones too. And do you need Halo PC to get CE? Wizrdwarts (T|C|E) 22:06, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, you do. Not sure if it relies on the game being installed, but it does ask for your Halo PC product key. --CCFreak2K 10:25, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I pruned a good chunk of the article, which consisted of spam, how-tos, and extensive descriptions of non-notable software. This is about Halo: Custom Edition, not Halo: Custom Edition fan software. — TKD::Talk 09:22, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Just been wondering. Is there a version of CE for the macintosh? If so, it should be mentioned here. Lord of Light 01:26, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Just wondering, do you think the list of maps is cluttering the article slightly? Samx 23:27, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Also, I am pretty certain that Halo: CE is only multiplayer, which should absolutely be added to the article if true. (Darkskul 01:29, 21 March 2007 (UTC))

I have Halo CE, and yes, it is multiplayer only. adding that now... --Darthkillyou 01:29, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Halo CE mite have bin inteded for multiplayer only but, there are fan made UIs that enable Singerplayer and that should be stated. Bluestrawbrerrys 1:36, 29 may 2007 (UTC)

Remake article
I know it was merged into the Combat Evolved artice, but in the current version, it only gets a short mention. Maybe this article should be remade? tonyf12 ( talk) 09:55, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I think a mention is most appropriate there because as we all know this is a fan-made mod. If it was written about in some magazines or newspapers or other official online sources then it probably could pass as an article on its own. For any further comments, please see: WP:RS, WP:FAN, and WP:Notability. If you know of these policies then you can just ignore my request. 71.190.246.97 (talk) 22:47, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Halo Custom Edition is NOT A FAN MADE MOD. It is an officially released extension (including map-making tools) to the Halo Combat Evolved PC engine. It deserves its own article. JehovasFitness (talk) 13:27, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

title: Talk:Halo: Custom Edition


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User:SIMPS!

Student at Boston University, reader of DC Comics, Michael Chabon and Charles Schultz's Peanuts.

Thanks for loading those covers for the article. Those two were impossible to find. -ultimatebatman

title: User:SIMPS!


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Colonel commandant

Colonel commandant is a military title used in the armed forces of some English-speaking countries. The title, not a substantive military rank, could denote a senior colonel with authority over fellow colonels. Today, the holder often has an honorary role outside the executive military structure, such as advocacy for the troops.

United Kingdom
In the British Army, the term colonel-commandant goes back at least to the American War of Independence, when it denoted an officer in command of a regiment.

In 1921, the Army abolished the appointment of brigadier-general and replaced it with the new appointments of colonel-commandant and colonel on the staff: Colonels-commandant commanded brigades, depots or training establishments, while colonels on the staff held administrative appointments. Like brigadier-general, both of the new appointments were temporary, the holder reverting to his substantive rank (usually colonel) at the end of his appointment. They were both abolished from 1 June 1928, replaced by the appointment of brigadier (though the rank insignia – a crown over three "pips" or stars – remained the same). The Indian Army used the same appointments.

In the Royal Marines, the appointments of colonel commandant and colonel & 2nd commandant dated back to 1755, when fifty companies of marines were raised in three divisions: each division had a colonel commandant and a colonel & 2nd commandant. From 1755 until the end of the Napoleonic era, the appointment of colonel & 2nd commandant was usually held by a lieutenant-colonel, colonel, or major-general, while the appointment of colonel commandant was held by a colonel or above, but only very rarely by a full general. The Royal Marines adopted the appointment of brigadier-general to be held by its colonels commandant (then five in number) in 1913, and dispensed with it again in 1921. Like the Army, the Royal Marines adopted the appointment of brigadier in 1928, but the ranks of colonel commandant and colonel 2nd commandant persisted at least as far as World War II. By 1957, however, they had been abolished and replaced with brigadier (now a rank instead of an appointment, as in the Army) and colonel.

The title of colonel-commandant is now used as an honorary or ceremonial title relating to a military corps. For example, General Sir Richard Dannatt was Colonel-Commandant of the Army Air Corps as well as his full-time role as Chief of the General Staff while Brigadier Jane Arigho, a retired Director of Army Nursing Services and Lieutenant-Colonel Carol Kefford, also a retired QARANC officer, are the Colonel-Commandants of Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps.

Canada
The Canadian Armed Forces widely uses colonels commandant as honorary appointments to act as advocates for members and to advise on relevant policy matters. In reserve regiments there has usually been an honorary colonel and an honorary lieutenant-colonel, while in the Regular Force, the title used is colonel commandant or colonel of the regiment. Many units also have a colonel-in-chief who is often a member of the Royal Family, frequently with a name connection to the regiment. Example: The Queen's York Rangers (First American Regiment) having the Queen and later the Duke of York, as Colonel-in-Chief. In the artillery, the monarch holds this role with the appellation "Captain-General". All of these "honoraries" are in head-of-family roles, approachable in varying degrees by anyone in the "regimental family".

The colonel commandant of the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps, is an appointment given by the Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of Canada to a distinguished retired armoured forces officer. The appointment is for three years, during which the incumbent is on the Canadian Forces' reserve list as the senior officer of the corps. He is responsible for advising the army commander on matters pertaining to the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps. A colonel commandant travels widely to canvass the views of all ranks in the corps and frequently attends military policy conferences, ceremonies and unit celebrations. He is an ex officio member of the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps Association's executive committee.

In 2001, the Canadian Forces Medical Branch canvassed past and present members for nominations to the role of colonel commandant. The role is ceremonial but the colonel commandant acts as a link between the Canadian Forces Medical Branch and the wider civilian medical community. The position is not restricted to former senior medical officers; consideration is given to medical practitioners who are "particularly prominent and well respected within the world of civilian medicine."

Australia
Until 1882, William Acland Douglas, who served in the 50th Regiment, was colonel-commandant of the military forces in Victoria.

Australian formations, such as the Royal Australian Corps of Military Police and the Royal Australian Regiment (RAR), have a colonel commandant, a retired soldier whose role is to act as advocate for the troops' interests. This requires visits to wherever the corps or regiment is deployed.

Pakistan
In the Pakistan Army the post of colonel commandant is an honorary post held by the most senior serving member of a corps or regiments. They are usually general officers in the rank of major general or lieutenant general. The post is found is all corps and regiments of the army.

Bangladesh
In the Bangladesh Army, the post of colonel commandant is an honorary post held by the most senior serving member of a corps or regiment. He is usually a general officer in the rank of lieutenant general or major general. The post is found in all corps and regiments of the army.

India
In India colonel commandant is a 'non-substantive' post, and is usually held by general officers mostly major generals or lieutenant generals. They are elected through secret ballot. Usually the officer would have been once part of the regiment, and in this role he represents the regiment and its men at the higher level of military hierarchy. This is especially in matters related to troop welfare. In photographs where the officer is portrayed as the 'colonel commandant', the rank insignia of a brigadier affixed on a maroon/vine red background is used.

In the National Cadet Corps, which is closely connected to Indian universities the vice chancellor of the university is given the honorary rank of 'colonel commandant'. Vice chancellors are eligible to wear the NCC khakhi uniform and wear the insignia, even though they would not have any military experience. In NCC this appointment is purely ceremonial.

Sri Lanka
In the Sri Lankan Army the post of colonel commandant is an honorary post held by the most senior serving member of a corps, he/she is usually a general officer or a brigadier. The post is found in all corps of the army as well as the Mechanized Infantry Regiment and the Sri Lanka National Guard. It is similar in function to that of colonel of the regiment found in multi-battalion infantry regiments.

United States
In 1779, Hungarian-born Colonel Commandant Michael Kovats died leading the Continental Army cavalry against British troops at Charleston.

The highest-ranking officer of the United States Marine Corps was formerly titled Colonel Commandant: the title now is simply Commandant. Colonel-Commandant was also used for Lloyd J. Beall, the commanding officer of the short-lived Confederate States Marine Corps during the American Civil War.

At the Alamo, William B. Travis was given the position of lieutenant colonel commandant.

title: Colonel commandant


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User:Ourboldhero

A native of Minnesota with some professional experience in the fields of copy editing and web accessibility.

title: User:Ourboldhero


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Acrotomophilia

Acrotomophilia (from the Greek ἀκρότομος "having the top cut off"; from ἄκρον akron "extremity" and --τομος -tomos from τέμνω temno "I cut" and φιλία philia "love") is a paraphilia in which an individual expresses strong sexual interest in amputees. It is a counterpart to apotemnophilia, the desire (not necessarily sexual) to be an amputee.

Overview
Acrotomophiles may be attracted to amputees because they like the way they look or they may view the amputee's stump as a phallic object which can be used for sexual pleasure. Acrotomophiles may enjoy the idea of dominating the amputee during couples play and they may also become aroused with the thought of having to take care of an amputee.

Interests and behaviours
In a survey of acrotomophiles, leg amputations were preferred over arm amputations, amputations of a single limb over double amputations, and amputations that left a stump over amputations that left no stump. According to Per Solvang (2007), "Devotees adhere to standard conceptions of attractiveness in all other matters outside of amputations."

Ethical issues
Some people question whether amputating one's own body parts or operating on a partner for the sake of sexual pleasure is ethical. For some, modifying the body is a private ritual of self-ownership and freedom of choice. Psychiatrists may make a diagnosis of body integrity identity disorder.

Terminology
The term amelotatism has also been used to describe acrotomophilia. The sexual interest in being an amputee is apotemnophilia. John Money (1977) used the terms autoapotemnophilia and alloapotemnophilia to describe the erotic interest of wanting to be or appear as an amputee versus wanting amputees as sexual partners; neither term has been widely used since. The term teratophilia is used to describe arousal from deformed or monstrous people.

title: Acrotomophilia


text: User talk:67.183.79.187

title: User talk:67.183.79.187


text:
Aleksey Pisemsky

Aleksey Feofilaktovich Pisemsky (Алексе́й Феофила́ктович Пи́семский) (23 March 1821 – 2 February 1881) was a Russian novelist and dramatist who was regarded as an equal of Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the late 1850s, but whose reputation suffered a spectacular decline after his fall-out with Sovremennik magazine in the early 1860s. A realistic playwright, along with Aleksandr Ostrovsky he was responsible for the first dramatization of ordinary people in the history of Russian theatre. "Pisemsky's great narrative gift and exceptionally strong grip on reality make him one of the best Russian novelists" according to D.S. Mirsky.

Pisemsky's first novel Boyarschina (1847, published 1858) was originally forbidden for its unflattering description of the Russian nobility. His principal novels are The Simpleton (1850), One Thousand Souls (1858), which is considered his best work of the kind, and Troubled Seas, which gives a picture of the excited state of Russian society around the year 1862. He also wrote plays, including A Bitter Fate (1859; also translated as "A Hard Lot"), which depicts the dark side of the Russian peasantry. The play has been called the first Russian realistic tragedy; it won the Uvarov Prize of the Russian Academy.

Early life
Aleksey Pisemsky was born at his father's Ramenye estate in the Chukhloma province of Kostroma. His parents were retired colonel Feofilakt Gavrilovich Pisemsky and his wife Yevdokiya Shipova. In his autobiography, Pisemsky described his family as belonging to the ancient Russian nobility, although his more immediate progenitors were all very poor and unable to read or write: "I come from an ancient noble family. One of my ancestors, a diak named Pisemsky, had been sent by Tsar Ivan the Terrible to London with a view of coming to an understanding with Princess Elisabeth whose niece the Tsar was planning to marry. Another predecessor of mine, Makary Pisemsky, became a monk and has been canonized as a saint, his remains still lying at rest in the Makarievsky monastery on the Unzha River. That's about all there is to my family's historical glory... The Pisemskys, from what I've heard of them, were rich, but the particular branch that I belong to has become desolate. My grandfather was illiterate, walked in lapti, and ploughed the land himself. One of his affluent relatives, a landowner from Malorossia, took it upon himself to "arrange the future" of Feofilakt Gavrilovich Pisemsky, my father, then fourteen. This "arranging" process was reduced to the following: my father was washed up, given some clothes, taught to read, and then sent as a soldier to conquer Crimea. After having spent 30 years in the regular army there, he, now an army Major, took an opportunity to re-visit Kostroma Province... and there married my mother, who came from the wealthy Shipov family. My father was 45 at the time, my mother 37."

Aleksey remained the only child in the family, four infants dying before his birth and five after. Years later he described himself (to which other people attested) as a weak, capricious and whimsical boy who for some reason loved to mock clergymen and suffered from sleepwalking at one time. Pisemsky remembered his father as a military service man in every sense of the word, strict and duty-bound, a man of honesty in terms of money, severe and strict. "Some of our serfs were horrified by him, not all of them, though, only those who were foolish and lazy; those who were smart and industrious were favoured by him," he remarked.

Pisemsky remembered his mother a nervous, dreamy, astute, eloquent (even if not well educated) and rather sociable woman. "Except for those clever eyes of hers, she wasn't good-looking, and once, when I was a student, my father asked me: 'Tell me Aleksey, why do you think your mother becomes more attractive with age?' – 'Because she has a lot of inner beauty which, as years go by, becomes more and more evident', I answered, and he had to agree with me," Pisemsky later wrote. His mother's cousins were Yury Bartenev, one of the most prominent Russian Freemasons (colonel Marfin in the novel Masons) and Vsevolod Bartenev (Esper Ivanovich in People of the Forties), a Navy officer; both exerted considerable influence upon the boy.

Pisemsky spent the first ten years of his life in the small regional town of Vetluga where his father served as Mayor. Later he moved with his parents to the countryside. Pisemsky described the years he spent there in Chapter 2 of People of the Forties, an autobiographical novel in which he figured under the name of Pasha. Fond of hunting and horseback riding, the boy received scant education: his tutors were a local deacon, a defrocked drunkard, and a strange old man who was known to have toured the area for decades, giving lessons. Aleksey learned reading, writing, arithmetics, Russian and Latin from them. In his autobiography Pisemsky wrote: "Nobody had ever forced me to learn, and I wasn't an avid learner, but I read a lot and that was my passion: by 14 I consumed, in translation, of course, most of Walter Scott's novels, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Faublas, Le Diable boiteux, The Serapion Brethren, a Persian novel called Haggi Baba... As for children's books, I couldn't stand them and, as far as I remember now, considering them very silly." Pisemsky wrote scornfully of his primary education and regretted failing to learn any languages besides Latin. He found in himself, however, a natural predisposition to mathematics, logic and aesthetics.

Formal education
In 1834, at the age of 14, Alexey's father took him to Kostroma, to enroll him in the local gymnasium. Memories of his school life found their way into the short story "The Old Man" and the novel Men of the Forties. "I started well, was perceptive and hard-working, but gained most of my popularity as an amateur actor," he later remembered. Inspired by The Dnieper Mermaid (an opera by Ferdinand Kauer), performed by a wandering troupe of actors, Pisemsky, along with his roommate, organized a home theater and had great success with his first role, that of Prudius in The Cossack Poet by Prince Alexander Shakhovskoy. This first triumph had a dramatic effect upon the boy who adopted what he called an "aesthetic way of life", much under the influence of Vsevolod Nikitovich Bartenev, his uncle. Bartenev supplied his nephew with the newest novels and journals and prompted him to begin studying music and playing the piano, which the boy did, according to one of his friends, "with the expressiveness yet unheard of".

It was while in school that Pisemsky started writing. "My 5th form teacher of literature credited me with having talent; in the 6th form I wrote a novella called The Circassian Girl, and in the 7th a still longer one entitled The Iron Ring, both worthy of mention, apparently, only as stylistic exercises, dealing as they did with things I was totally ignorant of at the time," Pisemsky remembered. He sent The Iron Ring (a novel telling of his first romantic passion) to several Saint Petersburg journals and met with all-round rejection. Several months later, already a university student, he gave the novel to Stepan Shevyryov. The professor's reaction was negative and he made a point to discourage the young man from writing about things he knew nothing about.

In 1840, upon graduation from the gymnasium, Pisemsky joined the Faculty of Mathematics at Moscow State University, having overcome resistance from his father who insisted upon his son enrolling in the Demidov Lyceum, for it was closer to home and his education there would have been free. Pisemsky later regarded his choice of faculty as a very fortunate one, even while admitting he drew little practical value out of university lectures. Attending assorted lectures by professors from other faculties, he became acquainted with Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Corneille, Racine, Rousseau, Voltaire, Hugo and George Sand and started to form an educated view on the history of Russian literature. Contemporaries pointed at Pisemsky's two major influences of the time: Belinsky and Gogol. Besides, as Pisemsky's friend Boris Almazov remembered, Pavel Katenin, the follower of French classicism and Russian translator of Racine and Cornel, whom Pisemsky knew through being a neighbour, exerted some influence upon him as well. According to Almazov, Pisemsky had a considerable dramatic talent, and it was Katenin who helped him to develop it.

Acting
By 1844 Pisemsky was known as a gifted reciter, his repertoire consisting mostly of works by Gogol. According to Almazov, his solo concerts in his flat on Dolgoruky Lane were immensely popular among both students and visiting schoolboys. A real hit was Pisemsky's performance as Podkolyosin in Gogol's Marriage featured by one of Moscow's small private theaters. "Those were the times when Podkolyosin was being portrayed by our great comedian Schepkin, the Imperial Theatre star. Some of those who saw Pisemsky's performance were of the opinion that he presented this character better than Schepkin did," wrote Almazov. Having earned a word-of-mouth reputation as a master of recitals, Pisemsky started to get invitations to perform all over Saint Petersburg and its provinces.

Pavel Annenkov later remembered: "He performed his own works masterfully, and was able to find exceptionally expressive intonations for every character he was bringing to the stage, which gave a strong effect in his dramatic plays. Equally brilliant was Pisemsky's rendering of his collection of anecdotes concerning his earlier life experiences. He had loads of such anecdotes and each contained a more or less complete character type. Many found their way into his books in a revised form."

State official career
After graduating from the University in 1844, Pisemsky joined the Office of State Properties in Kostroma and was soon transferred to the corresponding department in Moscow. In 1846 he retired and spent two years living in Moscow Province. In 1848 he married Ekaterina, Pavel Svinyin's daughter, and returned to the state office, again in Kostroma, as a special envoy for Prince Suvorov, then the Kostroma governor. After a stint as an assessor in the local government (1849–1853) Pisemsky joined the Ministry of Imperial Lands in Saint Petersburg where he stayed until 1859. In 1866 he joined the Moscow government as a councilor, soon becoming Chief councilor. He finally quit the civil service (as Court Councilor) in 1872. Pisemsky's state official career in the provinces had a profound effect upon him and his major works.

Later Boris Almazov made an important observation in a commemorative speech: "Most of our writers who describe the lives of Russian state officials and people from governmental spheres have only fleeting experiences of this kind... More often than not they've served only formally, hardly noticing the faces of their chiefs, let alone those of their colleagues. Pisemsky treated working for the State differently. He gave himself to serving the Russian state wholeheartedly and, whatever post he occupied, had one single objective in mind: fighting the dark forces which our government and the best part of our society try to fight..." This, according to the speaker, enabled the author not only to fathom the depths of Russian life but to delve down "to the very core of the Russian soul."

Biographer and critic Alexander Skabichevsky found some similarities in the development of Pisemsky and Saltykov-Schedrin, another author who examined the provincial bureaucracy in the times of "total corruption, embezzlement, no laws for landowners, wild atrocities, and a total lack of real state power"; times when "provincial life was mostly uncultured and lacked even basic morality," and "the life of the intelligent classes had the character of one wanton, never ending orgy." Both writers, according to the biographer, "have lost all motivation not just for the idealization of Russian life, but also of highlighting its lighter, positive sides". Yet, while Saltykov-Schedrin, a forward-looking stalwart of the Saint Petersburg circles, had every opportunity to be imbued with the high ideals which were making their way into Russian cities from Europe, and to make these ideals the foundation to build his outward negativity upon, Pisemsky, once he found himself in the Russian provinces, became disillusioned in whatever ideas he'd gotten at the University, seeing them as idealistic with no roots in Russian reality, Skabichevsky noted. The biographer wrote: "Following Gogol, Pisemsky depicted [provincial Russia] as being exactly as ugly as he saw it, seeing everywhere around him the most rigid resistance to those new ideals he'd pick up at the University, realizing how incongruous those ideals were with reality... and becoming greatly skeptical towards those ideals as such. The idea of implementing them in such places now looked like an absurdity to him... Thus, adopting a 'rejection for rejection's sake' attitude, he entered tunnels of utter pessimism without any light at the end of them, with pictures of outrage, dirt and amorality working to convince the reader: no other, better life here would be possible anyway, for man – a scoundrel by nature, worshipping only the needs of his own flesh – is always ready to betray all things sacred for his egotistic schemes and lowly instincts."

Literary career
Pisemsky's early works exhibited profound disbelief in the higher qualities of humanity, and a disdain for the opposite sex. Reflecting upon possible reasons for this, Skabichevsky pointed at those first years spent in Kostroma when the young Pisemsky had lost sight of whatever lofty ideals he might have been exposed to while studying in the capital. "With my [stage] success as Podkolesin my scientific and aesthetic life ended. What lie ahead was only grief and the need to find work. My father was dead already, my mother, shocked by his death, was paralyzed and lost her speech, my means were meagre. With this in mind I returned to the country and gave myself to melancholy and hypochondria," Pisemsky wrote in his autobiography. On the other hand, it was his continuous official errand trips throughout the Kostroma governorate that provided Pisemsky with the priceless material he used in his future literary work.

His first novella Is She to Blame? Pisemsky wrote while still a university student. He gave it to professor Stepan Shevyryov and the latter, being an opponent of the "natural school", recommended to the author "to soften up everything and make it more gentlemanly." Pisemsky agreed to do so, but didn't hurry to follow this advice. What he did instead was send the professor Nina, a naive story about a fresh-looking, beautiful girl who turns into a dull matron. Shevyryov made some editorial cuts and then published the story in the July 1848 issue of the Syn Otechestva magazine. So curtailed and disfigured was this version, that the author never even thought of re-issuing it. The story made its way into the posthumous Wolf's Publishing House 1884 collection of Pisemsky's works (Volume 4). Even in this curtailed form it bore, according to Skabichevsky, every mark of misanthropy and pessimism, seeds of which were sown in Boyarschina.

Pisemsky's first novel Boyarschina was written in 1845. Sent to Otechestvennye Zapiski in 1847, it was banned by the censors – allegedly for "promoting the idea of 'George Sandean' [free] love." When finally published in 1858, the novel failed to make any impact. Still, according to biographer A. Gornfeld, it featured all the elements of Pisemsky's style: expressive naturalism, vitality, many comical details, the lack of positivity and powerful language.

Moskvityanin
In the early 1840s the Russian Slavophile movement divided into two branches. The old school followers led by the brothers Aksakov, Ivan Kireyevsky and Aleksey Khomyakov, grouped first around Moskovsky Sbornik, then Russkaya Beseda. Mikhail Pogodin's Moskvityanin became the center of the younger Slavophiles who were later labeled potchvenniky ('the soil-bound'), Apollon Grigoriev, Boris Almazov, and Alexander Ostrovsky among them. In 1850 Moskvityanin invited Pisemsky to join in and the latter promptly sent Ostrovsky his second novel The Simpleton he'd been working on throughout 1848. In November of that year the story of a young idealist who dies after his illusions have been destroyed, was published in Moskvityanin, to a critical and public acclaim. A year later Marriage of Passion (Брак по страсти) appeared in the same magazine, again praised by the reviewers. Now raised to the ranks of "the best writers of our times", Pisemsky found his works compared to those of Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov and Alexander Ostrovsky. Pavel Annenkov remembered:"I recall the impression Pisemsky's first two novels made upon me... How hilarious they seemed, what an abundance of comic situations there were and how the author made these characters funny without trying to impose any moral judgement upon them. The Russian provincial philistine community was shown at its most self-celebrational, it was brought under the light and made to look almost proud of its own wildness, its unique outrageousness. The comical nature of these sketches had nothing to do with the author's juxtaposing them with one kind of doctrine or another. The effect was achieved by showing the complacency with which all those ridiculous characters were leading their lives full of absurdity and moral looseness. The laughter that Pisemsky's stories provoked was different from that of Gogol, although, as it follows from our author's autobiography, his initial efforts reflected much of Gogol and his work. Pisemsky's laughter stripped its subject down to the vulgar core, and to expect anything like "hidden tears" in it would be impossible. His was the joviality of, as it were, physiological nature, which is extremely rare with modern writers and more typical to the ancient Roman comedy, Middle Age farce or our common man's re-telling of some low-brow joke.""

Pisemsky's debut play The Hypochondriac (1852) was followed by the Sketches of Peasant life, a three-part short stories cycle. In Pisemsky's second play, The Divide (Раздел, 1853), a typical natural school piece, parallels have been found with Turgenev's comedy Breakfast at the Chief's. Speaking about Pisemsky's early works, Skabichevsky wrote: "Dig deeper into the pessimism which has gone into full swing in The Muff and Marriage by Passion, put it next to the mindset of an ordinary provincial man for examination and you'll be struck by the identical nature of the two. At the bottom of this outlook lies the conviction that man deep in his soul is a scoundrel, moved only by practical interests and egotistical, mostly dirty impulses, and for this reason one has to be on one's guard with one's neighbour and always keep 'a stone by one's bosom'."

Influenced for many years by this provincial philosophy, Pisemsky to a large extent made it his own, according to the biographer. "Long before Troubled Seas, people of high education, embracing progressive ideas and a new outlook were being shown invariably as outrageous, vulgar rogues, worse than even the ugliest freaks of the uneducated community," Skabichevsky argued.

According to Annenkov, some of the 'thinking men of the time' simply refused to put up with this peculiar kind of "delight, drawn from the naked comic nature of situations," seeing this as akin to "the rapture a street mob enjoys when shown a hunch-backed Petrushka or other physical deformities." Annenkov quoted Vasily Botkin, a "terse and far-seeing critic" as saying that he "could not sympathize with the author who, although unquestionably gifted, apparently has neither principles of his own nor ideas to base his stories upon."

Sovremennik
Encouraged by his early success, Pisemsky became very active and in 1850–1854 several of his novels, novellas, comedies, and sketches appeared in different journals, among them The Comic Actor, The Petersburg Man and Mr. Batmanov. In 1854 Pisemsky decided to leave his post as a local government assessor in Kostroma and moved to Saint Petersburg where he made quite an impression upon the literary community with his provincial originality, but also some ideas which the Russian capital's cultural elite found shocking. He had no time for the idea of women's emancipation and confessed to experiencing a "kind of organic revolt" towards all foreigners which he couldn't overcome by any means." The notion of human development in general was totally foreign to him, according to Skabichevsky. Some saw all this as affectation, but, the biographer wrote, "dig deeper into the well of Pisemsky's most outrageous opinions and ideas and you'll discover bits and pieces of our ancient, now almost extinct culture, only fragments of which remain in our people.' His very appearance made one think of "an ancient Russian peasant man who'd come through the University, learnt something about the civilization but still retained in himself most of the characteristics he had before," the biographer noted. Being regarded by the St. Petersburg literary society a "coarse peasant with few social graces and a provincial accent" didn't prevent Pisemsky from achieving a solid career in literature, and by the end of the 1850s his reputation was at its peak.

In Saint Petersburg Pisemsky made friends with Ivan Panaev, one of the editors of Sovremennik, and sent him his novel The Rich Fiancé, written in 1851 and satirizing characters like Rudin and Pechorin. Skabichevsky thought it was ridiculous the way the magazine which pretended to be the guiding light of the Russian intelligentsia had fallen for the Rich Fiancé where this very same intelligentsia (in the Shamilov character) was dragged through the mud. For Pisemsky, the alliance with Sovremennik felt natural, for he was indifferent towards all political parties and the Slavophile movement appealed to him as little as the ideas of the Westernizers. Annenkov wrote: "For all of his spiritual closeness to the common people, Pisemsky was not a Slavophile. He... did love Moscow, but not for its sacred places, historical memories, or its world-famous name, but because in Moscow people never took 'down-to-earth passions' and manifestations of natural energy for 'looseness', or regarded a deviation from the police-driven order a crime. Equally important for him was the fact that thousands of raznochintsy and muzhiks were coming to the city from all over Russia, making it harder for the authorities to keep social hierarchies intact. Petersburg for Pisemsky looked like living proof of how a state-run order could bring about total lifelessness and what a well of outrageousness could be concealed in a seemingly honest and harmonious state of things."

From 1853 Pisemsky's life started to change. Despite his popularity he, according to Annenkov, "was still a literary proletarian who had to count money. His house was kept in perfect order by his wife but the simplicity of it showed that the economy was forced. To improve his situation he resumed working as a governmental clerk but soon stopped." Pisemsky started to write less. 1854 saw the publication of Fanfaron in Sovremennik, and a patriotic drama The Veteran and the Newcomer in Otechestvennye Zapiski. In 1855, the latter published "Carpenters' Cartel" and Is She To Blame?. Both enjoyed success and in his 1855 end of the year review Nikolai Chernyshevsky picked the latter as his book of the year. All of this still failed to translate into financial stability and the author openly criticized editors and publishers for exploiting their employees. He remained relatively poor up until 1861 when the publisher and entrepreneur Fyodor Stellovsky bought the rights to all of his works for 8 thousand rubles.

In 1856 Pisemsky, along with several other writers, was commissioned by the Russian Navy ministry to report on the ethnographical and commercial conditions of the Russian interior, his particular field of inquiry being Astrakhan and the region of the Caspian Sea. Critics later opined that the author hadn't been prepared for such a task and what little material he produced was "insufferably dull and filled not with his own impressions but with fragments of other works concerning the lands he visited" (Skabichevsky). Four of his stories appeared in 1857 in Morskoi Sbornik, and Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya published three more in 1857–1860. Later they were all gathered in a book called Traveller's Sketches (Путевые очерки). 1857 saw just one short story, "The Old Lady", which appeared in Biblioteka Dlya Chtenia, but by this time he was working on his novel One Thousand Souls.

Pisemsky's short stories of the late 1850s and early 1860s, which dealt primarily with rural life ("The Carpenters' Cartel", "Leshy", "The Old Man") again demonstrated the author's utter pessimism and skepticism towards all the most fashionable ideas of his time. Neither idealizing the Russian peasantry, nor mourning its faults (both tendencies were common in Russian literature of the time), the author was critical of the Emancipation reform of 1861 which gave freedom to serfs. "Pisemsky thought that without strong moral authority in the lead, the Russians wouldn't be able to get rid of the vices they'd acquired through centuries of slavery and state oppression; that they'd easily adapt to the new institutions and that the worst side of their national character would flourish with still greater fervency. His own life experience led him to believe that the well-being would father more vice than the misery that had initially been at the root of it," Annenkov wrote. According to Skabichevsky, in Pisemky's peasant stories, showing as they do a deep knowledge of common rural life, the protest against oppression was conspicuously absent which made them look as impassively objective as Émile Zola's novel La Terre. "Pisemsky's peasants, like those of Zola, are wild men driven by basic animal instincts; as all primitive men do, they combine high spiritual aspirations with beastly cruelty, often veering between these two extremes with ease," the biographer argued.

Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya
In the mid-1850s Pisemsky's relationship with Sovremennik started to deteriorate. On the one hand, he was uninterested in the magazine's social stance; on the other, Sovremennik, although greatly respecting his talent and always ready to publish any strong piece of Pisemsky's work that came their way, were keeping their distance. One exception was Alexander Druzhinin, described as a man of "eclectic views, a snobbish Anglophile and a follower of the 'art for art's sake' doctrine" who was on friendly terms with the 'soil-bound' Moskvityanin. To Sovremennik this was unacceptable. After the Crimean War the new Sovremennik radicals' clique removed Druzhinin from the magazine staff and he moved to Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya. Upset by this, Pisemsky sent his novel One Thousand Souls (the title refers to the number of serfs a landowner had to have in order to be considered wealthy) to Otechestvennye Zapiski where it was published in 1858. In his previous works the author had dealt with local aspects of provincial life; he now endeavoured upon creating a full and damning picture of it "highlighting atrocities which were common at the time." "The history of governor Kalinovich was no worse than Saltykov-Schedrin's Provincial Sketches and easily as important," Skabichevsky said. The figure of Kalinovich, a man full of contradictions and conflicts, caused much controversy. Nikolay Dobrolyubov barely mentioned Pisemsky's novel in Sovremennik, alleging only that "the social side of the novel was artificially sewn to a made-up idea." As editor of Biblioteka Dlya Chtenya, which was in decline, Druzhinin (now terminally ill with consumption) invited Pisemsky to be co-editor. From 1858–1864 the latter was the actual leader of the magazine.

The 1859 play A Bitter Fate marked another peak moment in Pisemsky's career. It was based on a real-life story which the author encountered when, as a Governor's special envoy in Kostroma, he took part in investigating a similar case. Until the emergence of Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness it remained the only drama about Russian peasant life staged in Russia. A Bitter Fate was awarded the Uvarov Prize, was staged at Alexandrinsky Theatre in 1863, and later gained the reputation of a classic of 19th century Russian drama. In 1861 his short novel An Old Man's Sin was published, arguably "one of his gentlest and most emotional works, full of sympathy for the lead character."

In the mid-1850s Pisemsky was widely praised as one of the leading authors of the time, alongside Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky who as late as 1864, in one of his letters, referred to "the colossal name that is Pisemsky." Then came his dramatic fall from grace, for which there were several reasons. One was that, as Skabichevsky noted, Pisemsky had never repudiated his 'troglodyte' mindset of a 'provincial obscurantist'; exotic in the early 1850s, it became scandalous at the end of the decade. Another had to do with the fact that people he regarded as "crooks, whores and demagogues" had suddenly reinvented themselves as the "progressives". Gradually Biblioteka Dlya Chtenya, the journal he was now leading, came into a direct opposition with Sovremennik. First, as Pyotr Boborykin remembered, this opposition was of a moderate character, "at home, in his cabinet, Pisemsky spoke about this with sorrow and regret, rather than aggression". Later biographers conceded that there had been some logic to his chagrin. "People who came to herald such radical principles, in his eyes, should have been impeccable in every respect, which wasn't the case," Skabichevsky remarked.

Following the common trend, Biblioteka started its own section for humorous sketches and feuilletons, and in 1861 Pisemsky debuted there – first as "State councilor Salatushka", then as Nikita Bezrylov. The latter's first feuilleton, published in the December issue and making fun of liberal trends and views, made quite a stir. In May 1862 Iskra magazine came up with a scathing retort, calling the unknown author 'dumb and ignorant', 'having by nature a very limited mind' and accusing the editor of Biblioteka of providing space for 'reactionaries'. Pisemsky, in a rather reserved way, blamed Iskra for trying to "soil his honest name", but then Nikita Bezrylov came up with a reply of his own which was quite a match for the Iskra article in terms of outright rudeness. Iskra editors Viktor Kurochkin and N.A. Stepanov went so far as to challenge Pisemsky to a duel, but the latter refused. The Russky Mir newspaper defended Pisemsky and published a letter of protest, signed by 30 authors. This, in its own turn, provoked Sovremennik to come up with a letter denouncing Pisemsky and signed, among others, by its leaders Nikolay Nekrasov, Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Ivan Panaev.

Move to Moscow
The scandal had a devastating effect upon Pisemsky, who "has fallen into a state of total apathy, as he used to do in difficult times," according to Lev Anninsky. Retired from his position at Biblioteka Dlya Chtenya, he severed all ties with literary Saint Petersburg and at the end of 1862 moved to Moscow, where he spent the rest of his life. Pisemsky worked in a hectic manner, devoting the whole of 1862 to Troubled Seas. Of this book's background Pyotr Boborykin wrote: "A journey abroad, to the London exhibition, meeting Russian émigrés there, and hearing many curious stories and anecdotes concerning the propagandists of those times confirmed Pisemsky in his decision to paint a broader picture of Russian society, and I don't doubt the sincerity with which he embarked upon this task." Indeed, in April 1862 Pisemsky went abroad and in June visited Alexander Herzen in London so as to explain his position towards the revolutionary democratic press. He failed to get any support, though.

The first two parts of it, Boborykin opined, might as well have been published by Sovremennik; in fact, the latter's envoys visited Pisemsky, with this in mind. "These two parts I've heard recited by the author himself and by them nobody could have guessed that the novel would turn out to be so unpleasant for the younger generation," Boborykin wrote. Skabichevsky doubted the chronology, though, reminding that in the end of 1862 Pisemsky was already in Moscow. According to his theory, the novel's first two parts might have been ready by the late 1861 when, despite strained relations between the journal and the author the latter still wasn't known as 'an irreconcilable reactionary', the label it given him in early 1862. The second part, written after the break, was extraordinarily vicious in tone. In general, the novel showed Russian society in the most miserable light, as a "sea of grief", harbouring beneath the surface "vile monsters and anemic fishes amongst stinking sea-weed." The novel, where the ugliest characters turned out to be political radicals, naturally received negative reviews, not only in the democratic press (Maxim Antonovich in Sovremennik, Varfolomey Zaitsev in Russkoye Slovo) but also in the centrist magazines like Otechestvennye Zapiski which denounced Troubled Seas as a rude caricature of the new generation.

Later life
After moving to Moscow, Pisemsky joined The Russian Messenger as the head of the literary department. In 1866, on the recommendation of Interior minister Pyotr Valuyev, he became a local government councilor, the job providing him the financial independence he was craving for. Being now a well-paid author and a thrifty man, Pisemsky was able to build his fortune enough to enable him to leave work both at the magazine and the government office. In the late 1860s he bought a small piece of land on Borisoglebsky Lane in Moscow and built himself a house there. All seemed well, but only on the face of it. Troubled Seas (1863) and Russian Liars (1864) were his last critically acclaimed works. Then came the political drama The Warriors and Those Who Wait (1864) and the dramatic dilogy Old Birds (1864), and Birds of the Latest Gathering (1865), followed by the tragedy Men Above the Law, as well as two historical plays, full of melodramatic turns and naturalistic elements, Lieutenant Gladkov and Miloslavskys and Naryshkins (both 1867).

In 1869 Zarya published his semi-autobiographical novel People of the Forties. Its main character Vikhrov who the author associated himself with, has been found seriously wanting by critics. In 1871 Beseda published his novel In the Vortex, driven by the same leitmotif: the new 'high ideals' had nothing in common with Russian practical life and were therefore worthless. According to Skabichevsky, all the post-1864 works of Pisemsky were much weaker than everything he'd written before, demonstrating "the decline of a talent so dramatic it was unprecedented in Russian literature."

Then followed a series of pamphlet-type dramas (Baal, The Enlightened Times, and The Financial Genius) in which Pisemsky took it upon himself to fight the "blight of the time", all manner of financial misdoings. "In the earlier years I exposed stupidity, prejudices and ignorance, ridiculed childish romanticism and empty rhetoric, fought serfdom and denounced abuses of power, documented the emergence of the first flowers of our nihilism, which has now had their fruits, and finally have taken on human kind's worst enemy, Baal, the golden calf of worship... I've also brought light to things for everybody to see: the wrong-doings of entrepreneurs and purveyors are colossal, all trade [in Russia] is based upon the most vile deceit, theft in banks is business as usual and beyond all this scum, like angels, our military men stand shining," he explained in a private letter.

One of his comedies, Saps (Подкопы), was so outright in its critique of higher spheres it was banned by censors. Others were staged, but enjoyed only short-lived success, having to do mostly with the sensationalist aspect, for the public could recognize in certain characters real life officials and financiers. Artistically they were flawed, and even The Russian Messenger, which traditionally had supported the author, refused to publish The Financial Genius. After the stage production of the play flopped, Pisemsky returned to the form of the novel and in his last 4 years produced two of them: The Philistines, and Masons, the later being notable for its picturesque historical background created with the help of Vladimir Solovyov. Skabichevsky described both as "anemic and dull", and even Ivan Turgenev, who made great efforts to cheer Pisemsky up, still noted a streak of "tiredness" in the author's latest prose. "You were absolutely right: I am really tired of writing, and even more – of living. Of course old age is no fun for anybody, but for me it's especially bad and full of dark torment I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy," Pisemsky wrote back in a letter.

Losing popularity was one of the reasons for such misery. He scolded his critics, calling them "vipers", but was aware that his golden days were over. Vasily Avseenko, describing Pisemsky's visit to Saint Petersburg in 1869 after the publication of People of the Forties, recalled how old and tired he looked. "I am beginning to feel like a victim of my own spleen," Pisemsky confessed in an August 1875 letter to Annenkov. "I am all right physically, but cannot say the same of my mental and moral state; hypochondria torments me. I am unable to write and any mental effort makes me feel sick. Thank God the religious feeling, which is now blossoming in me, gives some respite to my suffering soul," Pisemsky wrote to Turgenev in the early 1870s.

In these difficult times the one person who continuously provided moral support to Pisemsky was Ivan Turgenev. In 1869 he informed Pisemsky that his One Thousand Souls had been translated into German and enjoyed "great success in Berlin". "So now the time has come for you to step outside the borders of your motherland and for Aleksey Pisemsky to become a European name," Turgenev wrote on 9 October 1869. "The best Berlin critic, Frenzel, in National Zeitung devoted a whole article to you where he calls your novel 'a rare phenomenon', and I tell you, now you are well known in Germany," wrote Turgenev in another letter, enclosing clips from other papers, too. "The success of One Thousand Souls encourages [the translator] to start upon the novel Troubled Seas and I am so happy both for you and for Russian literature in general… Critical reviews of One Thousand Souls here in Germany are most favourable, your characters are being compared to those of Dickens, Thackeray, etc, etc", he continued. Julian Schmidt’s large article in Zeitgenossensche Bilder, part of the series devoted to first class European authors, provided for Pisemsky another cause to celebrate, and following Turgenev's advice, in 1875 he visited Schmidt to thank him personally.

Another joyful event of these final years of Pisemsky's life was the commemoration, on 19 January 1875, of the 25th anniversary of his literary career. One of the speakers, the Beseda editor Sergey Yuryev, said:"Among the brightest of our writers who have played a great role in the development of our national consciousness, A. F. Pisemsky stands on his own. His works, and his dramas in particular, reflected the spirit of our ailing times, the symptoms of which make every honest heart ache. On the one hand, there's this horrid disease that's taken over our society: greed and cupidity, the worship of material wealth, on the other, the monstrous decline of moral values in our society, the tendency to reject the most sacred foundations of human existence, looseness in relationships, both private and social. Baal and Saps are the works that document the advent of this Egyptian leprosy most eloquently... It is true that Pisemsky tends to show only anomalies, depicting the most sick and outrageous things. From this, though, it doesn't follow that he's got no ideals. Its just that the brighter the writer's ideal shines, the more ugly all deviations from it seem to him, the more ardently he comes to attack them. Only the bright light of a true idealist can reveal life's monstrosities with such intensity."

"My 25 years in literature have not been easy. While fully aware of how weak and inadequate my efforts have been, I still feel like I've every reason to continue: I never came under somebody else's flag, and my writing, good or bad, it's not for me to judge, contained only what I myself felt and thought. I remained true to my own understanding of things, never violating for any fleeting reason the modest talent nature gave me. One of my guiding lights has always been my desire to tell my country the truth about itself. Whether or not I succeeded, is not for me to tell," Pisemsky said in reply.

In the late 1870s Pisemsky's beloved younger son Nikolai, a talented mathematician, committed suicide for reasons which were unexplained. This was a heavy blow for his father who sunk into a deep depression. In 1880 his second son Pavel, the Moscow University Law faculty docent, became fatally ill, and this finished Pisemsky off. As Annenkov remembered, he "became bed-ridden, crushed by the weight of fits of pessimism and hypochondria which became more frequent after his family's catastrophe. His widow said later she never suspected that the end was near and thought the bout would pass, dissolving as it used to into physical weakness and melancholy. But this one proved to be the last for the tormented Pisemsky, who lost all willingness to resist."

On 21 January 1881 Pisemsky died, only a week before the death of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Whereas the latter's funeral in Saint Petersburg became a grandiose event, Pisemsky's burial went unnoticed. Of well-known authors only Alexander Ostrovsky was present. In 1885 the Wolf Publishing House issued an edition of the Complete Pisemsky in 24 volumes. Pisemsky's personal archive was destroyed by fire. His house was later demolished. Borisoglebsky Lane, where he spent his last years, was renamed Pisemsky Street in the Soviet times.

Private life
Pisemsky's first romantic affairs, according to his autobiography, concerned various cousins. After the University, he developed an interest in what he termed "George Sandean free love" but soon became disillusioned and decided to marry, "selecting for this purpose a girl not of a coquettish type, coming from a good, even if not wealthy family," namely Yekaterina Pavlovna Svinyina, daughter of Pavel Svinyin, the founder of Otechestvennye Zapiski magazine. They married on 11 October 1848. "My wife is portrayed partially in Troubled Seas, as Evpraxia, who's also nicknamed Ledeshka (Piece of Ice)," he wrote. This was a practical marriage without any romantic passion involved, yet a fortunate one for Pisemsky, for, according to many people who knew her, Svinyina was a woman of rare virtues. "This exceptional woman proved able to calm down his sick hypochondria, and free him not only from all the domestic obligations involved in bringing up children, but also from her own meddling into his private affairs, which were full of whims and rush impulses. Besides, she re-wrote by her own hand no less than two thirds of his original manuscripts which invariably looked like crooked, indecipherable scribbling furnished with ink-blots," wrote Pavel Annenkov.

Biographer Semyon Vengerov quoted a source who knew Pisemsky closely as having called Yekaterina Pavlovna "a perfect literary wife who took very close to her heart all the literary anxieties and troubles of her husband, all the jigsaws of his creative career, cherishing his talent and doing whatever was possible to keep him in conditions favourable to the development of his talent. Add to all this a rare leniency, of which she had to have a great deal of, to put up with Aleksey, who occasionally demonstrated qualities not congenial with being a family man." Ivan Turgenev, in one of his letters, imploring Pisemsky to get rid of this spleen of his, wrote: "I think I've told you this once, but I might as well repeat it. Do not forget that in the lottery of life you've won a major prize: you have an excellent wife and nice children..."

Personality
According to Lev Anninsky, Pisemsky's personal mythology "revolved around one word: fear." Biographers reproduced numerous anecdotes about him being scared of sailing and other things, and how he was often 'stuck on the front porch of his house, uncertain whether he should enter: thinking that robbers were there, or somebody had died, or a fire had started'. Quite striking were his extraordinary collection of phobias and fears, along with general hypochondria." In an 1880 letter to photographer Konstantin Shapiro who had recently published his gallery of Russian writers he confessed: "My portrait repeats the one flaw which all of my photographic portraits have, my not knowing how to pose. In all of my photographs my eyes come out goggled and frightened and even somewhat mad, maybe because as they put me facing the camera obscura, I do experience – if not fear, then strong anxiety."

People who knew Pisemsky personally remembered him warmly, as a man whose weaknesses were outweighed by virtues, of which a keen sense of justice, good humour, honesty, and modesty were the most obvious. According to Arkady Gornfeld, "His whole character, from the inability to understand foreign cultures to ingenuousness, humour, keenness of remarks and common sense – was that of a simple, if very clever, Russian muzhik. His main personal feature became a major literary asset: truthfulness, sincerity, total lack of the faults of pre-Gogol literature, like over-intensity and eagerness to say something that was beyond the author's understanding," he remarked in his essay on Gogol. Pavel Annenkov wrote of Pisemsky:"He was an extraordinary artist and at the same time an ordinary man – in the noblest sense of this word... In our age of making huge fortunes and big reputations he remained indifferent to anything that might have incited vanity or pride... Any kind of jealousy was totally foreign to him, as well as any drive to make himself publicly noticeable… The sharpness of his prose notwithstanding, Pisemsky was the most good-natured person. And there was another distinctive quality in him. The worst catastrophy for him was injustice, of which he considered not the suffering but the guilty side to be the major victim."

Legacy
Contemporary critics differed greatly in trying to classify Pisemsky's prose or assess his position in Russian literature. In retrospect, this position altered dramatically with the times and, as critic and biographer Lev Anninsky noted, while Melnikov-Pechersky or Nikolai Leskov have always been far from the literary mainstream, Pisemsky spent some time as a 'first rank' author and was praised as an 'heir to Gogol' in the course of the 1850s, then dropped from the elite to slide into almost total oblivion which lasted for decades. According to Anninsky, "more daring critics drew a parallel with Gogol... whose final years sort of pre-dated the future drama of Pisemsky: breaking away from the 'progressive Russia', the 'betrayal' and the ostracism that followed. But Russia's forgiven Gogol everything: the pose of an angry prophet, the second volume of Dead Souls, those 'reactionary' passages from The Chosen Fragments of Correspondence with Friends. As for Pisemsky, Russia refused to forgive him a single thing," the critic argued.

Having entered the Russian literary scene when it was dominated by the Natural School, Pisemsky has been regarded as arguably its most notable proponent. This wasn't obvious to many of his contemporaries, though; both Pavel Annenkov and Alexander Druzhinin (critics of different camps) argued that Pisemsky's earlier works were not only foreign to the Natural School, but stood in direct opposition to it. Apollon Grigoriev (who in 1852 wrote: "The Muff is the... artistic antidote to the sickly rubbish the 'Natural School' authors produce") went even further ten years later, stating in Grazhdanin that Pisemsky with his "low-brow wholesomeness" was far more important to Russian literature than Goncharov (with his "affected nods to narrow-minded pragmatism"), Turgenev (who "surrendered to all false values") and even Leo Tolstoy (who had "made his way to artlessness in the most artful manner").

In the 1850s, concentrating on the everyday life of the small-scale provincial Russian, Pisemsky recreated this world as totally devoid of romantic features. "He mercilessly destroyed the poetic aura of 'noblemen’s nests' that was created by Tolstoy and Turgenev," recreating the life of the community where all relations looked ugly and "real love was always losing to cool flirting or open deceit," biographer Viduetskaya wrote. On the other hand, in "picturing the Russian muzhik, and being the master of reproducing the language of the lower classes, Pisemsky had no equals; after him a return to the type of peasant novel created by Grigorovich became unthinkable", critic A. Gornfeld argued. As D. S. Mirsky put it in his 1926 History of Russian Literature, "Like others among the Russian realists, Pisemsky is gloomy rather than otherwise but again in a different way – his gloom is nothing like Turgenev's hopeless surrender to the mysterious forces of the universe, but a hearty and virile disgust at the vileness of the majority of mankind and at the futility in particular of the Russian educated classes."

The inability of contemporary critics to sum up Pisemsky in a more or less congruous manner, according to Anninsky, might be explained by the fact that the world of Pisemsky (for whom "artistic intuition was the instrument of logic") was "rough and soft, unprepossessing and vulnerable", open to all manner of interpretations. The ground that Pisemsky stood on, as Anninsky saw it, was doomed from the start: stronger authors (Tolstoy and Turgenev, in particular) entered the scene, created new, more interesting characters, re-worked this soil and made it their own.

According to Viduetskaya, Pisemsky's original driving force was negativism which had been played out by the early 1860s. Seeing as the peak of his post-reform legacy the cycle Russian Liars (1865), the critic considers Pisemsky the novelist a marginal force in Russian literature, admitting, though, that writers like Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak and Alexander Sheller were among his followers. But as a short story writer he might be considered as a predecessor to such masters of the form as Leskov and Chekhov, Viduetskaya suggested. According to D. S. Mirsky, "Pisemsky, who kept himself uncontaminated by idealism, was in his own time regarded as much more characteristically Russian than his more cultured contemporaries. And this is true, Pisemsky was in much closer touch with Russian life, in particular, with the life of the uneducated middle and lower classes than were the more genteel novelists. He was, together with Ostrovsky and before Leskov, the first to open that wonderful gallery of Russian characters of non-noble birth... Pisemsky's great narrative gift and exceptionally strong grip on reality make him one of the best Russian novelists and if this is not sufficiently realized, it is because of his regrettable lack of culture. It was lack of culture that made Pisemsky too weak to hold out against the ravages of the age and permitted him to degenerate so sadly in his later work."

Novels and novellas

 * The Simpleton (Тюфяк, 1850)
 * The Comic Actor (Комик, 1851)
 * The Rich Fiancé (Богатый жених, 1854)
 * The Old Proprietress (Старая барыня, 1857)
 * Boyarschina (Боярщина, 1858)
 * One Thousand Souls (Тысяча душ, 1858)
 * An Old Man's Sin (Старческий грех, 1861)
 * Troubled Seas (Взбаламученнео море, 1863)
 * Men of the Forties (Люди сороковых годов, 1869)
 * In the Vortex (В водовороте, 1871)
 * The Philistines (Мещане, 1877)
 * Masons (Масоны, 1880)

Plays

 * The Hypochondriac (Ипохондрик, 1852)
 * The Allotment (Раздел, 1852)
 * A Bitter Fate (Горькая судьбина, 1859)
 * Lieutenant Gladkov (Поручик Гладков, 1864)
 * The Warriors and Those Who Wait (Бойцы и выжидатели, 1867)
 * Miloslavsky and the Naryshkins (Милославский и Нарышкины, 1967)
 * Men Above the Law (Самоуправцы, 1867)
 * Predators (Хищники, 1872)
 * Baal (Ваал, 1873)
 * The Enlightened Times (Просвещённое время, 1875)
 * The Financial Genius (Финансовый гений, 1876)

English translations

 * The Old Proprietress, (story), from Anthology of Russian Literature, Vol 2, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1903.
 * One Thousand Souls, (novel), Grove Press, NY, 1959 (translated by Ivy Litvinov).
 * A Bitter Fate, (play), from Masterpieces of the Russian Drama, Vol 1, Dover Publications, NY, 1961.
 * Nina, The Comic Actor, and An Old Man's Sin, (short novels), Ardis Publishers, 1988. ISBN 0-88233-986-9
 * The Simpleton, (novel), Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow.

title: Aleksey Pisemsky