Ivan Barkov

Biography
Ivan Barkov was born in 1732 in the family of an Orthodox priest. As a child he attended an Orthodox school, but at the age of 16 he won an admission to Moscow State University and scholarship. He liked language and poetry, which were his major fields of study. Still, he was notorious wild lifestyle, that lead to his expulsion from the University for fighting with police in 1751.

After expulsion, Ivan Barkov worked as a clerk and technical editor in one of the first Russian publishing houses. Although menial, this work gave him a lot of practice to perfect his language. After years of distinctive service he was promoted to an interpreter and translated some Greek poetry into Russian. Unfortunately, he died shortly afterwards under unclear circumstances. A widespread legend tells that he died in a fist fight in a brothel and managed to put the résumé of his life Жил грешно и умер смешно (lived sinfully and died absurdly). Another legend states that he, being dead-drunk has fallen into a privy hole and died there, and the known résumé is an epitaph he has written for a protagonist of one of his own poems.


Poetry
Barkov was highly regarded as an able interpreter and a poet. Since poetry was his hobby more than his job, he could afford to use simpler language in his work. Most of his poems are outrightly obscene or even pornographic, although very funny. Written copies of his work circulated Russia since their creation.

Most works commonly ascribed to Barkov actually date from the 1840s. A major work from this corpus is Luka Mudischev (Лука Мудищев), a story of a low-life Russian dvoryanin from an old family which was given nobility due to the size of their penises (his last name Mudischev is derived from a highly obscene word муда́ meaning testicles). He is paid to have sex with a bored widow and kills her with his eight-vershok-long phallus in process. In the end, he and madame kill each other. However mundane the plot is, the poem manages to tell a lot about daily life of that time and place and is partially a satire directed towards odd nobility politics and social practices of that time.


Legacy
Ivan Barkov had a major impact on Russian language and later literati. His name is being brought up in any dispute on introduction of slang words into language, and, although his verses were unpublished for a very long time for being immoral, written copies of his work could always be found in student environment.