Kókoreff

I. T. KÓKOREFF (1826–1853), who died very young, after having written a few tales from the life of the petty artisans in towns, had not freed himself from the sentimentalism of a benevolent outsider; but he knew this life from the inside: he was born and brought up in great poverty among these very people; consequently, the artisans in his novels are real beings, described, as Dobrolúboff said, “with warmth and yet with tender restraint, as if they were his nearest kin.” However, “No shriek of despair, no mighty wrath, no mordant irony came out of this tender, patiently suffering heart.” There is even a note of reconciliation with the social inequalities.