THE BLIND MUSICIAN..... n this sketch, called by Korolenko “a psychological study,” the author has attempted to analyze the inner life of the blind. He has undertaken to lay before the reader not only the psychological processes in the mind of the blind, but their suffering from the lack of sight as well, uncomplicated by any untoward circumstances. To accomplish this he has placed his hero in most favorable, nay, almost exceptional conditions. The subjects for this study are a blind girl, whom the author had known as a child; a boy, a pupil of his, who was gradually losing his sight; and a professional musician, blind from his birth, intellectually gifted, scholarly, and refined. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY..... Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (July 27, 1853 – December 25, 1921) was a Ukrainian-born Russian writer, journalist, human rights activist and humanitarian of Ukrainian and Polish origin. His best-known work includes the short novel The Blind Musician (1886), as well as numerous short stories based upon his experience of exile in Siberia. Korolenko was a strong critic of the Tsarist regime and in his final years of the Bolsheviks. Vladimir Korolenko was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine then part of the Russian Empire. His Ukrainian Cossack father, Poltava-born Galaktion Afanasyevich Korolenko (1810-1868), was a district judge who, "amongst the people of his profession looked like a Don Quixote with his defiant honesty and refusal to take bribes", as his son later remembered. His mother Evelina Skórewicz (1833-1903) was of Polish origin. In his early childhood Korolenko "did not very well know to which nationality he belonged and learned to read Polish before he did Russian," according to D.S. Mirsky. It was only after the 1863 January Uprising that the family did have to 'choose' its nationality and decided to 'become' Russians. After the sudden death of her husband in Rovno in 1866, Evelina Iosifovna, suffering enormous hardships, somehow managed to raise her five children, three sons and two daughters, on a meagre income. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------