Black chicken, or Underground inhabitants

Antony Pogorelsky (1787-1836) is the pseudonym of the Russian romantic writer of the first half of the 19th century, Alexei Alekseevich Perovsky. He was the illegitimate son of Count Alexei Kirillovich Razumovsky, but Emperor Alexander I, at the request of the Count, granted all his illegitimate children the title of nobility. All of them received the surname Perovsky - after the name of the Razumovsky Perovo estate near Moscow. The future writer received a good education at home, was admitted to Moscow University, and already in 1807 he received the highest academic degree - Doctor of Philosophy and Literary Sciences. In the same year A.A. Perovsky translates Karamzin's "Poor Liza" into German; this was his first serious literary experience. From 1808 to 1812 he was in the public service; with the outbreak of the Patriotic War in 1812, he left the post of Secretary of the Minister of Finance for the Department of Foreign Trade and went into the army. In 1816, the future writer returned to St. Petersburg, where he continued to perform civil service. In 1822, Count Razumovsky died, and A.A. Perovsky inherited the village of Pogoreltsy in the Chernigov province, from the name of which the writer’s pseudonym comes. Together with A.A. Perovsky and his sister, Anna Alekseevna Razumovskaya, lived in Pogoreltsy with their son Alyosha, the future writer Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy. One day, little Alyosha told Pogorelsky how, during a walk in the boarding house yard, he made friends with a chicken and saved it from the cook. This true story of A.A. Perovsky turned it into a kind and wise fairy tale in 1829, “The Black Hen, or the Underground Inhabitants.”