The directory «Plots»

Seifullina (Сейфуллина) Lydia Nikolayevna
(1889—1954)

The Russian author Lydia Seifullina made important contributions to the proletarian literature of the early Soviet era. Her short stories and novellas portray women seeking freedom and peasants adjusting to life in the new Soviet order.

They printed her short story "Offenders" in 1922 to be followed soon with the stories "Humus" and "Virineia". All books by Seifullina were devoted to dismantling the old world and to a new life and a new man evolving.

Lydia Seifullina was born in Troitsk uyezd, Orenburg Guberniya, now Chebarkul District, Chelyabinsk Oblast. Having graduated from the gymnasium she worked as a teacher, then as a professional actress in Orenburg and Vilna (currently Vilnius), and Tashkent.

The village of Samarskoye, where Lydia Seifullina worked as a librarian between 1915 and 1917, is now located in Khaibullinski District of Bashkortostan. Most of the rural dwellers were illiterate at that time. They even did not understand the word "library".

In addition to her responsibilities as a librarian Lydia Seifullina decided to teach children. "Mothers brought their kids along and stayed there at the library out of curiosity. The library, the entrance, my room - all of them were crowded with people", the writer remembered. "I did my job in earnest with all those people around. I was not always successful: many children were just bored, some burst out crying being afraid of the crowd and the noise. But the mothers and grown-up kids left very much pleased. Everyone present was sitting right there on the floor ".

It was in the village of Samarskoye that Seifullina tried her hand in writing. She wrote a story about the life of actors and actresses. "I sent it to "The Vestnik Yevropy" in November or December 1916", she later wrote in her autobiography. "They never accepted it, but that did not discourage me from writing".

In 1917 Lydia Seifullina got a transfer and she had to leave Samarskoye for Orsk.

Lydia Seifullina later worked in Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk and finally moved to Moscow in 1923. Nevertheless she never severed her literary ties with the Urals and Siberia.

USSR, 1989, Lydia Seifullina