Gleb Uspensky

Gleb Uspensky ( _ru. Глеб Иванович Успенский) (October 25, 1843, Tula - April 6, 1902, Petersburg) was a Russian intellectual and writer whose realistic portrayals of peasant life did much to correct the prevalent romantic view of the Russian agricultural worker. His first important work, "The Customs of Rasteryayev Street (1866)", is a series of narrative essays about poverty and drunkenness in the suburbs of Tula. For a time he was a follower of the Narodniks, but unlike them he refused to idealize the Russian peasant, whose primitive life became the main subject of his writing, as in The Power of the Soil (1882). After spending most of his last years as a patient in mental home, he committed suicide.