Author Description

Veselitskaya (1857-1936) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, memoirist, and translator who used the pseudonyms V. Mikulich and L. Chernavina. Her first novel Mimi's Marriage was published in the journal The Herald of Europe in 1883 and she attained the height of her popularity in 1891 with the publication of its sequel Mimi (Mimotchka) at the Springs, set in the Caucasus. The last novel in the trilogy, Mimi Poisons Herself, appeared in 1893, also published in The Herald of Europe. In the first two decades of the 20th century she occasionally published short stories and novellas but after 1917 she withdrew from literary work and turned increasingly to making translations, notably of the works of Daudet and Victor Hugo. Veselitskaya visited Tolstoy at his home in Moscow which was close to her own and was friendly with his daughters and his personal friends, drawing on these associations in her autobiogrpahical work Meetings with Writers (1929). This English translation published in 1915 contains the first two Mimi stories.