PODYACHEV Semyon Pavlovich [1865–1934] - writer. R. in a poor peasant family. Like many other writers of the poor, he went through a harsh school of life: he changed many professions - from a laborer to a person of “intelligent” labor (see his autobiographical story “My Life”). Member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) since 1918. After October, he was the head of the Department of Public Education, an orphanage, a library, and was the secretary of a party cell (in his native village of Obolyanov-Nikolskoye, Moscow province). P.’s first story “Misfire” appeared in 1888 in the magazine. "Russia". P. gained literary fame in 1902, when V. Korolenko wrote in the journal. “Russian Wealth” published his first major work, “Ordeals,” which evoked a number of responses and served as the reason for a revision of the “workhouse” depicted by the author. This work revealed in the author a representative of the hopes and aspirations of the pauperizing peasant masses - the future reserve army of workers. In contrast to the idyllic, sugar-coated image of the “passion-bearing people” in the works of the liberal populists, P., with merciless realism, reveals to the reader the true face of the pre-revolutionary village, the terrible truth about the life of the rural poor, the endlessly exploited rural proletariat, driven to the “bottom”, into the world of tramps and "golden miners". In the story “Ordeal” and the accompanying essays “By Stage” [1903], the figure of an unemployed man from the village is given, forced, along with the poverty of the Khitrov market, to seek salvation from starvation in the “workhouse” of the book. Yusupov, sent in a “stage-by-stage” order to the village of his homeland, etc.