Author. One of the most original voices in Soviet Literature. He blended fact, folklore, and fiction in his leisurely-paced tales of nature, which rate with the finest in any language. Author Maxim Gorky said of him, "I do not know any other Russian writer in whom the knowledge and the love of the earth are so harmoniously united". Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin was born near Elets, Oryol Province, the son of a wealthy merchant. In his student days he was arrested for Marxist activities and had to complete his education in Germany. An agronomist by profession, he wandered all over Russia, gathering material and experiences he later used for his writing. The informal essay was his preferred form of expression, though he also wrote short stories, fairy tales, and novels. His first important books were "In the Land of Unfrightened Birds" (1907) and "The Bun" (1908), but he did not win popularity until after the 1917 Revolution, thanks in part to the support of Gorky. Fame and financial success did little to alter his itinerant lifestyle; he continued to live in remote villages until his frail final years, when he settled in Moscow. His other important works are "The Springs of Berendey" (1925), "The Chain of Kashchei" (1930), "The Root of Life" and "Crane's Birthplace" (both 1932), "Forest Drip-Drop" (1940), and "The Larder of the Sun" (1943). Prishvin was the rarest of Soviet authors, able to live as he pleased and write what he pleased, keeping himself aloof from the ideological demands of his country's cultural commissars. His clear-headed optimism, almost scientific attention to detail and faith in productivity were all vaguely in sync with the tenets of "Socialist Realism" in literature. But at heart he was a pantheist and a philosopher-poet. He implicitly rejected political solutions and believed the path to wisdom lay in working with nature rather than against it. In Prishvin's universe all things good and bad have their place in an organic continuum, of which mankind is but one (and not necessarily dominant) part. His diaries, first published in the USSR in the late 1980s, debunked his reputation as a naive "nature-lover" by revealing a supremely conscious artist determined to preserve his independence at all costs.