Grigori Machtet

The Machtet family originally came from England.

Grigori Alexandrovich Machtet was born in Lutsk, a city in Western Ukraine. In 1865, he was allegedly expelled from fourth grade at the Nemirov Gymnasium for showing sympathy towards the participants in the Polish uprising of 1863.

In 1870, he received permission to take an exam to become a teacher of history and geography in the district schools. He taught for two years at the schools in Mogilev and Kamianets-Podilskyi.[1]

In 1872 Machtet left Russia for the United States with the intention of organizing agricultural communes there.

Machtet returned to Russia in 1875 and settled in Saint Petersburg. In 1876 Machtet was imprisoned to the Peter and Paul Fortress where he spent a year in solitary confinement. He was then exiled to Siberia.

In 1900 he received permission to return to Saint Petersburg.

In 1880, machtet married fellow political exile Yelena Petrovna Medvedeva, a participant in the infamous "Trial of the Fifty". Their son, Taras Machtet (1891-1938) became a poet and a member of the Luminist literary movement.

The family settled in Zaraysk and lived there until 1900. On December 3, 1961, a marble memorial plaque was installed on a house in Zaraysk with the inscription: “From 1891-1895 writer Grigory Aleksandrovich Machtet lived and worked in this house."

One Warrior In The Field (1886)

"The Prodigal Son" (1887)

At Dawn (1893)