From a Collegiate Secretary to a Soviet Emigrant: The Fate of the Writer Arkady Press and His Novel The Border

The article is devoted to the description of the life path and characteristics of the creative work of the forgotten writer, Arkady Germanovich Press (1870-1952), who actively appeared in the St. Petersburg-Petrograd press with stories, novellas, translations, popular science essays, and reviews. He contributed to the journals Niva, Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye, Zaduschevnoye Slovo, and others, compiled textbooks on literature and law, and a series of small collections, Public Philosophy as Presented by Arkady Press, published by Soikin (Hobbes, Descartes, Hegel, Kand, and others). Press finished his pre-revolutionary career in the Senate’s legal department with the rank of court councilor. After 1917, Press served for a short time in the People’s Commissariat of Education, including as head of the Public Library. In 1923, he and his family emigrated to Lithuania (and his surname was given the vocalization Presas), and in 1925 he moved to Finland, where he lived the rest of his life. Press described his post-revolutionary ordeals in Petrograd in the “novel” The Border (1931–1942), which is conditionally autobiographical in nature, like a number of his previous works. The appendix to the article contains fragments from this unpublished work by the writer.