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casts, Pirogov was born in Moscow into a mili-
tary family. His father's sudden death in 1824
disrupted a cultured, comfortable early life. After
graduation from the Medical Faculty of Moscow
University at age 18, with a specialization in
surgery, Pirogov began teaching at Dorpat (now
Tartu) University. Two years of observation in
Germany (1833-35) convinced him of the need
to raise surgery to the level of a science through
special study of anatomy and physiology. As
head of the surgical clinic of the St. Petersburg
Medico-Surgical Academy (1841-56), Pirogov
lectured in anatomical pathology, pioneering
the use of frozen cadavers for research, which
he developed in over 12,000 dissections. During
these years his accomplishments were many,
first using chloroform in Russia, developing the
theory and use of anesthesia (which he first
tested on himself), originating the intravenous
administration of anesthetic ether, and intro-
ducing mass use of anesthesia for military
surgery during the siege of
SEVASTOPOL
during
the
CRIMEAN WAR
. Frustrated by conditions at the
Medico-Surgical Academy, he retired from
teaching and hospital work in 1856. After three
stormy years as curator of the Odessa and Kiev
educational districts, he retired to his estate in
southern Ukraine in 1861, which he rarely left
in the following 20 years. In 1862, while travel-
ing in Europe as a mentor for young Russian sci-
entists in training, he performed successful leg
surgery on Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had been
severely wounded at the Battle of Aspromonte,
near Calabria in southern Italy. In 1870, he
served as a representative of the Russian Red
Cross during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71),
and in 1878 he served as a surgeon during the
RUSSO
-
TURKISH WAR
. Pirogov was the author of a
classic four-volume work on surgical anatomy,
Anatomia topographica
(1851-59), and the stan-
dard reference work on field surgery,
Foundations
of General Military Field Surgery,
first published in
German in 1864, which was based on his expe-
riences during the siege of Sevastopol. Pirogov
was also a renowned educator and liberal publi-
cist who spoke out against restrictions on edu-
cating women and the poor. After his death,
the Pirogov Society was founded in his honor
in 1883. Until its final suppression in 1922, it
was the main Russian medical society, and
through its renowned “Pirogov congresses,” a
public forum for liberal views in late imperial
Russia.
Platonov, Andrei
(1899-1951)
(Klimentov, Andrei Platonovich)
writer
A novelist, journalist, and poet who attained
cult status decades after his death, Platonov
was born Andrei Platonovich Klimentov in the
town of Voronezh in the Black Earth region of
southern Russia. After graduating from the
Voronezh Polytechnical Institute, he began to
work as a journalist. In 1927 he moved to
Moscow. Two years later he published the first
of two important short story collections,
Makar
the Doubtful,
which was followed by the novels
on which his reputation as a major writer
rests:
Chevengur
(1929) and
The Foundation Pit
(1930). Platonov warned about the dangers
that industrialization posed to human values
and about the overall direction of the revolu-
tion, especially what he saw as its bureaucrati-
zation. In the overheated ideological climate
leading up to the enshrinement of socialist
realism as official Soviet literary dogma at the
1934 congress of the Union of Soviet Writers,
Platonov came under attack from literary offi-
cials and critics. He published very little after
1934. In a second collection of short stories,
The River Potudan
(1937), he attempted to work
within the literary formulas of socialist realism
while preserving the worldview of his earlier
work. During World War II he returned to the
journalism of his early years and worked as a
war correspondent. In 1947 the government
denounced his work as slanderous, and Pla-
tonov was essentially silenced and his work
suppressed until his death. The Russian reading
public first rediscovered Platonov in the 1960s,
when his works began to appear through the
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