Vyacheslav Shishkov

Vyacheslav Yakovlevich Shishkov (Russian: Вячесла́в Я́ковлевич Шишко́в) was and Russian and Soviet writer known for his descriptions of Siberia. He was awarded the Stalin State Prize posthumously in 1946.

Shishkov was born in Bezhetsk in the Tver Governorate of the Russian Empire into a merchant family. In 1891 he graduated from the Vyshny Volochyok Civil Engineering College (Vyshnevolotskoe uchilishche konduktorov putei soobshcheniya). After working for short periods in Novgorod and Vologda Governorates, in 1894 he came to work for the Tomsk District department of waterways. He participated in geodetic expeditions and from 1903 was a supervisor of many of them, studying the Ob, Yenisei, Chulym, Charysh, Lena, Vitim, and other Siberian rivers; of particular importance for him, both as an engineer and as a writer, was his work on the Biya River and on the route of the future Chuya highway. His first publication was the story "Cedar" (1908) in Siberian Life (Tomsk); following this, he published a number of travel essays and short stories. He began an active literary career in 1913 and moved to Petrograd in 1915, where he became friends with Maxim Gorky. In 1916 with Gorky's assistance he published his first collection of short stories, Sibirskii skaz ("Siberian skaz").