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tions, arrested in 1940, and after a five-minute
trial in 1941, where he was accused of spying for
England, he disappeared into the concentration
camps. Many of his staff members suffered a
similar fate. He is said to have died, in a cruel
irony, of starvation in a labor camp near Saratov
on January 26, 1943. News of his election as a
foreign member of the Royal Society probably
never reached him. His reputation was rehabili-
tated after
STALIN
's death.
decadent, bourgeois ways of the Czarist regime.
Wary of public criticism Verbitskaia retreated
behind a male pseudonym and turned to chil-
dren's literature until her death in 1928.
Vereshchagin, Vasilii Vasilievich
(1842-1904)
artist
Vereshchagin became known as a painter of his-
torical scenes and an ardent antiwar spokesman.
He became a member of the Russian Academy of
Arts but was stripped of his membership because
of the harsh approach he took in depicting some
of the victories won by Czarist troops. His well-
known canvas,
Apotheosis of War
(1872), depict-
ing the brutality of the Russian conquest of
Turkestan, was particularly censured in Russia
for its vivid portrayal of that campaign. It fea-
tures a pyramid of skulls and is dedicated to “all
great conquerors, past, present and future.”
Among his paintings devoted to the Russo-Turk-
ish War of 1877-78, which was the occasion for
great patriotic feeling among Russians, is
All
Quiet on the Shipka,
featuring a soldier freezing to
death. Vereshchagin visited Europe and the
United States and arranged exhibitions in those
countries, contributing several of his works to
the Brooklyn Museum. During the early years of
the 20th century, he completed his most ambi-
tious paintings, depicting scenes from the
Napoleonic campaign in Russia of 1812. During
the
RUSSO
-
JAPANESE WAR
, he traveled to the east
to gain subjects for paintings of the battles fought
in that conflict. Aboard the Czarist battleship
Petropavlovsk,
when the Japanese attacked and
sank it, Vereshchagin was killed along with most
of its crew.
Verbitskaia, Anastasia Alekseevna
(1861-1928)
writer
One of the most popular and controversial
women writers of her time, Verbitskaia was born
Anastasia Ziablova into a gentry family, and
began studies at the Moscow Conservatory. The
economic position of gentry women in particu-
larly deteriorated considerably after the emanci-
pation of the serfs in 1861 and, like others of her
background, in 1879 Ziablova was forced to sus-
pend her studies and seek employment at the
age of 18. For the next two decades, even after
her marriage in 1882, she taught music. With
the growth of a commercial book market, she
found an outlet for her prolific writing and in
time developed a large and devoted readership,
although critics routinely dismissed her work as
vulgar “boulevard” literature. Her best-known
works, such as
Dreams of Life
(
Sny zhizni,
1899)
and
The Keys to Happiness
(
Kliuchi schastia,
1909-13), centered on some basic themes: love
and marriage, relationships, and the sexual
emancipation of the “new woman.” She also
published a long novel about the 1905 Revolu-
tion,
The Spirit of the Time
(
Dukh vremeni,
1907-8).
Her three-volume autobiography,
To My Reader!
(1908-11), told the story of her female ancestors
in the romantic style that gained her a wide
readership. Her final novel,
The Yoke of Love
(
Igo
liubvi
) (1914-1920), also in three volumes, recy-
cled much of the autobiographical material
about her mother's and grandmother's romances
but now presented them in fictional form. Early
Soviet critics used her work to epitomize the
Vertov, Dziga
(1896-1954)
film director and theoretician
One of the great innovators of early Soviet doc-
umentary film, Vertov was born Denis Arka-
dievich Kaufman in the town of Bialystok, now
in Poland. Originally an experimental poet, Ver-
tov had his first contact with the cinema in May
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