Arkady Averchenko: "The King of Laughter" in Exile

Arkady Timofeevich Averchenko, born on March 15, 1880, and died on March 12, 1925, was a renowned Russian writer, satirist, playwright, and theater critic. His work was appreciated by both Nicholas II and Lenin.

By 1917, Averchenko moved away from purely humorous works and focused on satire, denouncing the contemporary government and politicians. In his works from that period, the world is divided into two parts: before and after the revolution. Averchenko saw the revolution as a deception of the working man, who sooner or later must realize this and restore order in the country. He drives the situation to absurdity: in the story "A Lesson in a Soviet School," children study from a book about what food used to be, and in the work "Kings at Home," he depicts Trotsky and Lenin as a wayward husband and a nagging wife. The second world of Russia in his works is the world of refugees, those who found themselves in exile, represented by the image of Constantinople.

In 1921, in Paris, Averchenko published a collection of pamphlets titled "A Dozen Knives in the Back of the Revolution," which provoked sharp criticism in the Soviet press. N. Meshcheryakov called it "the humor of a hanged man." In the same year, Lenin, in an article titled "A Talented Book," referred to Averchenko as "a white guard embittered to madness," but acknowledged his book as "highly talented." In response, Averchenko wrote the story "A Friendly Letter to Lenin from Arkady Averchenko," where he summarized his emigration journey "from St. Petersburg 'Varangians' to Constantinople 'Greeks,'" starting with the Bolsheviks' ban on "New Satiricon" and mass arrests.

Averchenko's last work was the novel "The Patron's Joke," written in 1923 in Sopot and published in 1925 in Prague, after his death. He is buried at the Olšany Cemetery in Prague.