Author, Editor. He was one of Russia's most popular satirists in the years before the 1917 Revolution. In his hundreds of short stories, he used farcical situations and grotesque characters to make pungent observations about urban middle-class life of his era. Born Arkady Timofeevich Averchenko on the peninsula of Crimea, he was the son of an impoverished merchant. He was educated mostly at home because of poor eyesight from a childhood accident, and his teen years were spent working menial jobs. In 1900 he moved to Kharkov, where he launched his writing career, and arrived in St. Petersburg in 1908. That year he joined the staff of the fading journal "The Dragonfly" and helped reorganize the magazine as "The Satiricon," becoming its editor-in-chief in 1913; under his leadership the magazine became one of Russia's leading humor periodicals. His first collection of "Satiricon" stories, "Cheerful Oysters" in 1910, went through 23 editions and earned Averchenko the sobriquet "The King of Laughter." Among his other books are "Stories Humorous" in 1910, "The Bunny On the Wall" in 1911, "Circles in the Water" in 1912, "Stories for the Convalescent" in 1913, and "The Gold-Plated Pill" in 1916. Many of his tales were adapted into one-act plays, which extended his fame into less literate areas of the country. He also wrote theatre and art criticism. Frequently under fire from the Czar's censors, he welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 but was appalled when Lenin seized power in October. In August 1918 "The Satiricon" was banned as seditious and Averchenko returned to Sevastapol, where he wrote propaganda pieces for the opposing White Guard. By November of 1920, the advance of the Red Army had forced him to flee to safety with a host of other Russian refugees to Turkey, settling in Constantinople, and finally settling in Prague in 1922. In his later writings, humor took a back seat to his hectoring rage at what the Communists had done to his homeland, particularly in the book "A Dozen Knives in the Back of the Revolution" in 1921. The Soviet newspaper "Pravda" conceded he was "highly talented." With a decline in health at a young age with heart and kidney disease, he died from post-operative complications following enucleation of his diseased eye. The faux-rhetorical style of Averchenko's best work influenced such later Russian satirists as Mikhail Zoshchenko and the team of Ilf and Petrov. His last novel, "The Joke of Maecenas," was published posthumously in 1925. Many of his pieces have been translated to English.